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How Does This Work?

You create a free account and set a Gmail filter to forward your Ingress email damage reports.

The damage reports are processed in realtime into the Outgress analytics and alerting engine.

That's the short version.

Is This Allowed?

We believe so, but you decide.

But My Secret Data!

No one on the opposing faction cares who on their team is attacking you. Do you care who on your team is attacking opposing portals?

More Slack Integration

Discussion in 'Feature Requests' started by digitalpoint, Mar 15, 2016.

  1. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    Have been thinking about what sort of useful things that Outgress could do for Slack teams. What do people think about it helping with very basic administration functions?

    Outgress knows the faction, level and play area of users forwarding email damage reports. So what about a function that allows an Outgress user to add themselves to a Slack team? For example maybe your Outgress team just requires you to be the right faction for the public area of a team, but the more secure channels still require manual/human verification? Could basically be an option to add yourself to a Slack team and not have to wait for Slack admin to add you.

    Stupid idea?
     
  2. I like that idea, that's how we use slack. We have trusted private channels as well as public features. Anyone can sign up, if it were tied into outgress, at least we know they _are_ our faction.

    I think these would also be good for slack:
    1. If an alert group is set to `highest`, append @channel to the message so that it actually notifies people with a beep.
    2. Use the slack buttons function (https://api.slack.com/docs/message-buttons) to let users quickly mark that they are jumping on recharging. Extra points for this feature if clicking it could fire off a command to open the ingress app if on mobile. I understand there are no hooks to open to a particular key, but at least opening/focusing the app saves a bit of time.
    3. /active-agents <km> (would require somehow sending location, which I don't think you can do in a slack webhook, but perhaps the last known location on outgress?)
    4. Use the same slack buttons function to show active agents within X km from a portal that just sent an alert. Frequently, you want to know who's around the neighborhood to see if the attack is part of a bigger op. You already have the alert location so this is easier than #3 above.
    Thanks for all your hard work on this.

    M.
     
  3. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    I still like the overall idea of using Outgress as a mechanism to at least get people into Slack in an automated way based on faction and play area. At least to the general use/unsecure channels on the Slack team. I just never went down that road because no one said anything so seemed kind of pointless to spend the time developing it if zero people were interested in it. lol

    As far as the rest, let's see here...
    1. Probably not going to happen to be honest, I'm a pretty big believer of adhering to people's notification settings. The @channel mechanism in Slack can be annoying as it simply overrides every user's *wanting* notification settings. If you have a recharging channel or something, users can (and probably should) just set their account to always get notifications from that channel. On a side note, I suppose it would be technically possible to add an extra setting for the alert groups... like, "include annoying @channel tag". At least then being that annoying is on the user who wanted it that way, not on me forcing it to be that way. :)
    2. Interesting idea... honestly with all the Slack development I've done, I've never noticed the message buttons. Will look into it and see what I can come up with. I tried to figure out how to open the app to a particular portal, but it was a no go because the underlying URL schema would need to be supported within the app (built-in by Niantic), which they don't have. Not sure if they have a custom URL scheme registered for the app itself, but I'll Google around to see if I can find one. If you know of a way to open Ingress from an external app (usually via a special URL), let me know.
    3. There isn't any geolocation info at all that Slack passes to the webhook. I sort of got around this a bit with how the system adjusts dates and times of activity (like if you do an /agent command it shows in your local time, not the server time on our end). It's a little kludgey how it's done and really wouldn't work for any sort of granularity beyond time zone. If you were to use the last known location, you might be pretty limited because you might be in an area where just your faction uses Outgress, so it would get weird for a lot of people where it's no where close to where they actually are or normally play. There's the other issue that Slack doesn't have a way to tell us who the agent actually is making the request (which is probably the biggest issue... we don't know who you are or if you even play Ingress technically). I do think it would be a neat thing, but would require some sort of (easy) way for the user to specify the location they want to use as the center point of the search (which is the tricky part.
    4. Yeah... let me dig into the slack button functionality and see what sort of interesting uses we can come up for it.
     
  4. When Outgress sends a slack alert, it doesn't always include the name of the alerts group that triggers the portal. It would be nice to have either:

    • Option for a group so the Alert's title is the Attack Alerts group name, not the portal name. This way if your alerts are geo-grouped, you know the area being attacked without having to know what region each portal maps to. Often in notifications, the text is too long to see the group at the end, so you have to open up Slack to see what group it is.
    • Display the group down the bottom like "Priority" and "Type" do.
    I also have one group that doesn't show the group name behind the portal, just the portal name. I'm guessing that's a bug though.
     
  5. @Perringaiden, that's a good idea. I got around it by building the geo-areas as separate #channels in our slack, so that slack users could only subscribe to the channels that interest them, and set their notifications accordingly.
     
  6. @mogmiso While I like that idea, I have people already complaining that we have too many channels in slack :p