hubot-piazza

Get info about posts in your class' Piazza forum in chat!

This is simple hubot script to integrate with Piazza, an educational forum. This script makes it easy to reference posts by Piazza conventions (@##) in a typical chat. Since few rational people use numbers as their user names, this poses little (if any) problem in conversations.

See src/hubot-piazza.coffee for full documentation.

Installation

In hubot project repo, run:

npm install hubot-piazza --save

Then add hubot-piazza to your external-scripts.json:

[
  "hubot-piazza"
]

Configuration

There are 3 environment variables you must set:

• HUBOT_PIAZZA_USERNAME and
• HUBOT_PIAZZA_PASSWORD
  • Are the login credentials of a course TA.
  • NOTE: I recommend creating a separate "bot-only" TA account for this info so that you don't risk revealing a personal password to everyone. (Of course, if you generated a random, unique, and cryptographically secure password for each service, you probably wouldn't care about others having access to your Piazza account. 😛)
• HUBOT_PIAZZA_ROOMS
  • This maps a Piazza course ID to your chat rooms. There are two options here:
  • 1 ID for the chat bot:
    • This means that every room maps to the same Piazza course.
    • Simply set HUBOT_PIAZZA_ROOMS=classId and you're done!
  • A Separate Piazza course per chatroom:
    • This allows each room to map to a particular Piazza course.
    • The format is a query string:
    • HUBOT_PIAZZA_ROOMS='roomId1=courseId1&room2=course2'
    • In this format there is a special room id, DEFAULT which you can use a fallback if you don't want to specify something for every room.

Piazza course ids can be found by examining URL when looking at a particular post. It follows this format:

'https://piazza.com/class/' + courseID + '?cid=' + postNum;

Sample Interaction

user1>> Checkout @100
hubot>> Post @100
    [url]
    [time ago]
    [title]
    [short text]