README.md

In bochocki/slackrsheets: A Hyper-Specific Package for Writing Slack Commands to a Google Sheet

slackrsheets

A hyper-specific R package for posting NYTimes Daily Mini Crossword times to a Google Spreadsheet, from Slack.

How to use this thing in Slack

To add your time for today, just enter your time: /mini 1:42

Your time can be in just about any form; 1:02, 62, and 00:01:02 all have the same effect. You can also log strings... FAIL, for example, is one string you might need to type in. Case isn't important, and special characters (other than + and -) should be fine. Be careful with spaces though; if you go too crazy they could break everything and it's best to avoid them.

To log somebody else's time, just use the for keyword: /mini 0:39 for Brad

Keep in mind that posting times are subject to ECB (East-Coast Bias), so if you're on the West Coast and you're posting a time late at night, you might need to post the time for yesterday. Which you can totally do.

You can log past or future days using a + or - tag. So, logging a time for yesterday would look like: /mini 42 -1

and logging a time for tomorrow would look like: /mini 42 +1

You can time travel any number of days in any direction, so be careful not to get lost.

You can also overwrite times by including a -ow flag. To overwrite yesterday's time for example, you can use: /mini 42 -1 -ow

You can chain all of these things together too, the only important thing is to make sure that the time (or fail). comes first, and that anytime you use for it should be between the time and the person's name.

In other words, the most complex call you can make would look more or less like this: /mini 100 for Brad +1 -ow

Printing Tables

You can print the spreadsheet tables using the /mini slash command too. All the tables are printed privately (meaning only you can see them), so you don't need to worry about flooding a channel if you want to check out some rankings.

You can check out today's ore (ahem, medals) with /mini ore

You can print the Daily Mini dashboard by calling /mini dash, /mini dashboard, or /mini scoreboard. Some of the award names have been changed slightly from the spreadsheet so they fit on narrow mobile devices.

You can print any Ranking table by using the keywords rank, ranks, or rankings followed by an abbreviation for the table. For example /mini ranks w will print the all-time wins table.

The tables and abbreviations (case insensitive) are: - Average Times: AVERAGES, AVG, or A - Personal Bests: BESTS, BEST, or B - Games Played: GAMES, GAME, or G - Monthly Leaderboard: MONTH, MO, or M - All-Time Points: POINTS, POINT, or P - All-Time Wins: WINS, WIN, or W

Privacy

Privacy is important and I tried to take it seriously for this project, so it will probably be difficult to use this package out-of-the-box. There are three files that live on the secure server: key.txt, token.txt, and unames.R. These contain the key to the spreadsheet, the Slack team token, and player usernames, respectively. As far as I know, there's no way to access any of this information though the API.

Help and reminders

You can get help anytime by typing /mini help

You can get a link to the Google spreadsheet by typing /mini link

bochocki/slackrsheets documentation built on May 8, 2019, 9:46 a.m.