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Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

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11–20 of 60 posts

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#11
post #4

I understand slack integration for some tools, but is this slackbot-as-a-product thing going to become the new fad? What if I want to use your tool without using slack?

We plan on supporting other workflows soon, we just started with Slack cause that's what we use.

Next stop is probably email. Any other integration you'd like to see?

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#12
post #4

I understand slack integration for some tools, but is this slackbot-as-a-product thing going to become the new fad? What if I want to use your tool without using slack?

I was thinking the same thing. I'm interested in trying it out, but do I really feel like setting up slack for a side project when I'm the only one that works on it?

You can have it just post to you in Slack if you don't want to bother other people.

What's your preferred notification system?

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#13
post #5
post #4

I understand slack integration for some tools, but is this slackbot-as-a-product thing going to become the new fad? What if I want to use your tool without using slack?

slackbot-monitoring-without-slack-as-a-product

Coming soon to Spotbot :)

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing. I'm interested in trying it out, but do I really feel like setting up slack for a side project when I'm the only one that works on it?

You can have it just post to you in Slack if you don't want to bother other people. What's your preferred notification system?

No I mean a personal side-project that I have no slack set up for because I'm literally the only person that works on it. Not just the only person on a project in a company.

Anyway, email would probably be fine for me.

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#16
post #8

I can see this working for static pages, not sure about pages that require input, user login, or display constantly changing data.

We're really excited about tackling those problems.

@mgc and I founded Spotbot with the thought that models trained with ML techniques can be immensely useful to developers (novel, I know). So much of coding, debugging, and firefighting is pattern matching, and machines are getting really good at pattern matching. That's how we're going to tackle the user login and dynamic data issues in the long term.

We have some short term solutions in the works as well.

For dynamic content, we'll have a way to ignore changes that are expected and don't mean anything significant changed.

For login, we may implement a token API that will allow us to log in with a bit of work on the developer's side. We can also script logins without too much effort if we are provided with test account credentials.

Thanks for giving me an opening to talk about all this :)

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#17

This looks very useful! I'm wondering if it's possible to see a timeline of changes, like the history of changes for the last 30 days?

It is, although it's not the best UX at the moment. In the details about any page that you're tracking, the past snapshot runs will be listed on the left side. You can go to any point in time, view it, and compare it to the previous time something actually changed.

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#18
post #4

I understand slack integration for some tools, but is this slackbot-as-a-product thing going to become the new fad? What if I want to use your tool without using slack?

I tried setting it up to post to my Slackbot but hesitated at the permissions (giving away everyone's email in particular, when I just want to notify myself right now.)

I feel like a shitty tirekicker for complaining, but I really would rather just get email alerts and then optionally integrate with Slack directly or via webhook/Zapier. The service feels a bit inaccessible.

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#19

This looks very useful! I'm wondering if it's possible to see a timeline of changes, like the history of changes for the last 30 days?

It is, although it's not the best UX at the moment. In the details about any page that you're tracking, the past snapshot runs will be listed on the left side. You can go to any point in time, view it, and compare it to the previous time something actually changed.

Got it! I can see that being helpful when looking at other site metrics.

Re: Show HN: Spotbot, a Slack bot that monitors your website for visual bugs

#20
post #4

I understand slack integration for some tools, but is this slackbot-as-a-product thing going to become the new fad? What if I want to use your tool without using slack?

I tried setting it up to post to my Slackbot but hesitated at the permissions (giving away everyone's email in particular, when I just want to notify myself right now.) I feel like a shitty tirekicker for complaining, but I really would rather just get email alerts and then optionally integrate with Slack directly or via webhook/Zapier. The service feels a bit inaccessible.

Good to know, thanks.

We would also prefer not to ask for that permission. In fact, the only reason we do it is be able to call Slack's `users.info` API on your user. Which... we're only doing in order to be able to show a profile picture and your real name. Those things are nice, but not must haves.

I'll make a note to get rid of that permission!

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