Email signups not being added to PauseAI chat

[joepio]

New members who join aren't appearing in our onboarding-pipeline. This problem started somewhere after august 8th.

The discord bot seems to be working properly otherwise.

[anthonybailey]

Noted. Sounds bad. Have some meetings booked but we should look with some urgency. Dump details of one particular case?

[anthonybailey]

The evidence/explanation on testing in #7 is not great! But unless there's some mistake then given it was merged Jul 5 and Joep reports a break after Aug 8 (I assume UTC, and based on some successful onboarding via this mechanism some time on the 9th?) I guess it can't be solely responsible. I will try to read the bot code better but I imagine the breaking event was a change to roles in the Discord server.

[anthonybailey]

OK. So the mechanism Maxime implemented (post refactor 5 months back) looks a little arcane, but new code always does, and he has documented it well in https://github.com/PauseAI/ProjectBot/blob/main/OnboardingConfig.md

[anthonybailey]

I assume entry to this flow is signing up via Airtable form linked on https://github.com/PauseAI/pauseai-website/blob/main/src/posts/join.md), and that on form submit this creates an entry in the relevant Airtable table which this bot project can see and act on, posting in the Discord channel and then some onboarder reaches out to the new member at the email provided. Not good at Airtable app conventions but seems logical.

[anthonybailey]

Dumping Will's notes from Discord.

Studying the codebase and Discord settings, with some help from ChatGPT. I am going to summarize my key findings here, both to keep track of it all myself and also to keep you in the loop.

• Lots of info regarding server permissions can be found by right clicking the PauseAI server icon > server settings > roles. From there, you can view various roles to see which members have the role and what permissions the role has.
• Relevant permissions include View Channels, Manage Channels, and Manage Roles.
• As a member of the Onboarding Team, I can Manage Roles.
• As a Moderator, I can View Channels.
• Only Admins and Technicians (I am neither of these) can Manage Channels.
• ProjectBot can View Channels, Manage Roles, and Send Messages. These are general permissions and should be all it needs to function properly.
• It is possible that the ProjectBot has overriding permissions specific to the onboarding-pipeline channel.
• The Manage Channels role is necessary to edit ProjectBot's permissions, or to see its permissions for a specific channel (like onboarding-pipeline).
• Conclusion: the error is probably not here, but I will need to be or get the help of an admin or technician to be sure.
• Technicians are: Joep, Maxime, Pato, and dasSpieler

[anthonybailey]

(Public access for these kind of notes seems ok to me, and issue updates in private messages is an anti-pattern across my experience.)

[anthonybailey]

(Me adding this next thought in passing here rather than making a Trello card may be one too but 🙂 we almost certainly want to get our current permissions across the stack increased!)

[joepio]

@anthonybailey do you think you can fix this issue? If not, I think it's time we deprecate the bot and find another solution

[anthonybailey]

Will, please confirm/deny whether I have this correct:

For the foreseeable, every day or two Will will check the airtable for form-based sign ups. As you've kindly done, Joep, he'll manually write messages in the Discord #onboarding-pipeline. To make the process visible, he'll also note if he checked and there was nothing to do. (Ideally with some message in the same channel, but if that can't be doine without breaking the bot then elsewhere.)

Will's rationale is that he wants to fully understand the Discord bot code, and how it relates to current and future onboarding, rather than doing s quick fix, and reckons the maintenance hit in the meantime is worth it.

If Will wasn't also the lead of the Onboarding Team, or if there was other concern that onboarding was too compromised, then this is not how I believe the software team should act. Supporting software and its users well can require mitigating first and fixing more fully later. But here where Will is both dev and customer, fair enough.

[joepio]

Makes sense. This is a fine temporary solution. However, having no maintenance and multiple major open bugs (also #2 #9) does make me believe that deprecating it might be the right call.

[anthonybailey]

Yep. I mentioned this to Will when we met, in that context of other issues, and noted that ultimately a CRM might be a better common store that would subsume onboarding Airtable data.

Your own thoughts on all this would be valuable, Will. I think I've understood your stance but don't want to put further words in your mouth.

[joepio]

@Will9371