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

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

#21

Post by ldehaan »

this is cool, but I just wrote something like this at work using hubot and some node libs, and there are a couple extra options you can setup.

if they let me I'll release it OSS, but it was super easy to write, and it pulls diffs from the github project when sees a change.

I was actually working on a reverse of that, so if it sees a repo get pushed to it will let you know if the site changed or if it didn't.

hubot is so cool, but coffee script is just gross. meh.

other than that, it's been incredibly useful.

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

#22

Post by 1123581321 »

jmtulloss wrote: post #20
1123581321 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Oh, yes, if that's all then I support typing in my name myself after account creation. :) Funny how such things have to go with APIs sometimes.

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

#23

Post by ihuman »

reustle wrote: 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?

Right now, it's starting to look like Slack is becoming the new email.

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

#24

Post by giovannibajo1 »

jmtulloss wrote: post #16
dkopi wrote: 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 s…

My app is a social network. A social network means that the two most important pages (global stream and user stream) continuously mutate because there is always new user-generated content.

Now, humans are very good at catching bugs there; if a the name of the user goes above the avatar picture next to it, humans will see it immediately.

But how can a tool like Spotbot not to be confused by all the normal changes in user-generated content, and to just spot structural differences?

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

#25

Post by AznHisoka »

ihuman wrote: post #23
reustle wrote: 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?

Right now, it's starting to look like Slack is becoming the new email.

I used to suffer from having 100 emails to shift through everyday. Now I just have to shift through 100 Slack channels!

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

#27

Post by jmtulloss »

alecdibble wrote: post #26

How will this work with a split testing tool like Optimizely?

Great question.

If you're willing to do a little work on your side, you can craft a URL that will guarantee that the user ends up in a particular bucket.

One of the features that we're thinking about is doing visual diffing on A/B test variations. Then you can page through your variations and quickly see how they're different from the control, or if they're broken on any browsers.

To do that we would need a deeper integration, either with the user or with the A/B service. I think it'd be pretty cool though!

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

#29

Post by jmtulloss »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #24
jmtulloss wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

My app is a social network. A social network means that the two most important pages (global stream and user stream) continuously mutate because there is always new user-generated content. Now, humans are very good at catching bugs there; if a the name of the user goes above the avatar picture next to it, humans will see it immediately. But how can a tool like Spotbot not to be confused by all the normal changes in u…

Right now we're not great at it. However, the way Spotbot works means that we will be decent at it soon.

We do a hash of the structure, so we know exactly what kind of changes there are. For something like your page, the image sources, the text, the names, the votes, and other content change all the time. Soon we'll have a way to ignore those changes while still recognizing that other changes need to be vetted.

So, for instance, if the padding between the avatar and the user's status changes, we'll still catch that even though we're ignoring the avatar source and the text content.

Soon!

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

#30

Post by manyxcxi »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #24
jmtulloss wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

My app is a social network. A social network means that the two most important pages (global stream and user stream) continuously mutate because there is always new user-generated content. Now, humans are very good at catching bugs there; if a the name of the user goes above the avatar picture next to it, humans will see it immediately. But how can a tool like Spotbot not to be confused by all the normal changes in u…

Couldn't you point it at a test environment that would be loaded up with non-changing content so that UI only changes could be tested against the same data always?
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