Statsbot: Google Analytics Bot for Slack | Hacker News Reader

Statsbot: Google Analytics Bot for Slack

statsbot.co

60 pointsenzoavigo29 comments

I like tools like this, but I had a few suggestions:

"Statsbot does store basic analytics profile information for configuration and authentication information for querying your data. It never stores metrics."

Would really need to know more about this before I connected you to my company's analytics account. There's a ton of highly-confidential data in there that I could result in me being fired or worse if I gave that data to someone who misused it without doing proper due diligence.

I realize this is likely in the MVP stage, but what I'd need to see would be some sort of legal terms governing your usage of that data, something indicating you are in my legal jurisdiction so I could have recourse if the data was handled poorly (for example, if you left the data wide open for the taking during a hack, etc.). That might sound heavy-handed and extreme, and I know the HN crowd doesn't like litigiousness, but if it comes down to the security/protection of our company data vs. trying some cool new non-essential tool, I'm always going to pick the former which means I wouldn't even try the tool.

Again, not being a jerk here--would love to try this out, but currently I cannot because the information provided about it is insufficient. If I could review the source that would be even better.

Other things to include would be details about who you are and where you are located (ie. why should I trust you with my data), and some examples of what the output looks like beyond the one screenshot. You have several great examples of the input options, but those should each have screenshots of sample output as well.

Happy to discuss further if you're interested.

Hey shostack! You are absolutely right! We will do some edits in "terms of usage" to convince companies that their data are processed securely.

Chat is definitely becoming the default way of operating small to mid-sized agile teams (Slack specifically for us). It's fascinating how much more productive we have become through it.

We're already moving towards completely distributing the team, all remote. 2016/17 seems to become the year when remote-default teams become not just possible, but easier than co-located teams. The tools are almost there.

Can you please elaborate on how chat is making you more productive. To me, many Slack bots are essentially command line tools - so yes, if command line makes you more productive , that's understandable. But is there more to it?

I agree with that chat apps make me and my team more productive, and I work at a developer centric organization where we build analytics tools (and I'm also a developer). The reason I'm more productive?

Unfortunately, not everyone uses the command line. Not everyone is comfortable with it. Additionally, even if you are (like me and my team), it's not collaborative. If I run a query in my team's room, they can all see the results and we can easily discuss it. Did I mention on the go with Slack for my phone? Can't do that with CLI.

Slack also supports link embedding, images and more. All things not supported by CLI.

It's a command line that everyone can use without installing software locally or sshing to a machine.

Also everyone can see what you type and the response. Cuts down on the "did you run it with the dash k flag?" And "what was the response" back and forth.

To me that's the killer feature. It is searchable and so you can look back in time and see others that ran similar commands and what the response was.

This concept is going to be the future of Slack. It is going to be interesting to see the multitude of start-ups focused on developing bots for Slack, Facebook and other platforms. Apple could probably make Siri more useful if they opened up the platform to developers for creating bots on the Siri platform.

A friend of mine made a bot that connects to battery powered wifi sensors that have motion and sonar to detect if the restroom is occupied or not. Then he uses /gottago to see if the restroom is available.

He's also building a betting bot for in-office bets, like "how many builds do you think we will do this week" and it will pay the winner via the venmo API.

My bot was online and then became offline, got this response from support:

> We had to restart our bot server due to a lot of signups from PH and HN. Bot should be online in couple of minutes.

Looking forward to trying it out. We are already using Meekan, Hubot, Slackbot and Howdy in our Slack setup.

When I discovered slack I wrote a bunch of scripts on one of my servers. Now I wake up with: website stats, Android/iOS downloads and sales, server status, LuLu sales and backup results. This keeps me from checking in and out of stats website all day long.

Awesome! Are any of these scripts available on Github? I'd love to take a look and possibly re-use them (especially website stats).

This is pretty sweet. Our product person is pretty happy now. It has a "stack" where it remembers what you just asked it so you don't have to enter fully formed questions every time (like you would expect).

Slack is something i value highly right now, yet i would never have thought it took off like it did. IRC has been around for decades, bots that could post any kinds of info to a channel as well and for a user IRC is not that much harder to use than slack, but it's definitely more nerdy. So i kind of feel sad that open stuff like IRC didn't really ever become mainstream and now we have a closed platform that at some point will belong to one of the big tech corps and people will start to move off of it again.

This is a great idea and I can immediately see how it would be helpful to my company's workflow. Great job!

One thing I'd like to see is a way to associate a data source with a channel. We create a channel for each of our clients, and it would be handy if Statsbot would know to display analytics from Client A when I mention it from Client A's channel.

Thank you, It is the most requested feature so far. We are working to bring support for multiple GA accounts soon.

This would be great if I could share the reports, eg in a private chat saying "@statsbot status" or have the reports post to a group

Hi, you can invite statsbot to channel, just go to any channel and type /invite @statsbot. Then you can text @statsbot status and bot will post report directly to this channel. Or even more you can schedule report to be posted automatically to a channel - just text `@statsbot schedule status`.

This works as expected, a fresh way to explore daily stats. It mentions "free while in beta", what kind of pricing might we anticipate?

Hi! Founder of statsbot here. We want to start charging for advanced features around 9$ per month, while keeping basic features free.

Hello everybody! I'm Mike, Co-founder of statsbot.co. All current functionality will remain free forever! We are considering to add some new cool staff (like smart alerts, predictions, etc.), and more integrations. Then we might charge for it. Thx for question.

Worked pretty well! Please add an integration for SEOMOZ, that's as important as GA.

Thank you, I will put SEOMOZ on the integrations list.

> Free for beta users

This implies there will be a non free version... Do people pay for slack bots?

This is fantastic. Great work! How long have you guys been working on this?

Thank you! :) First demo was built in the mid November and then we did a soft launch on December 7.

Looks good! Update the screenshot (still references @brobot)

Good catch, thank you!

Is this open-sourced?

Statsbot itself is not open-sourced. But framework which powering Statsbot is open-sourced - https://github.com/keydunov/rebot.

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