Specifications

Overview

A Slackbot that fetches relevant news about any given topic. Periodically updates a channel it is subscribed to with news updates. The channel is responsible for the news topic and update frequency. News is fetched from a dynamic set of sources.

Future support will include commands the bot will accept to deliver news on-demand.

Overview
Slackbot
1. API
2. Channels
3. Commands
News Clients
1. Twitter
  1. API

Slackbot

Slack API

Channels

Requirements

slackbot must be a member

Topic

Should specify the news topic (e.g. developer news, political news, etc.), otherwise general will be assumed.

Purpose

Used to specify specific settings such as frequency of news updates.

Options

topic: can specify more than once
frequency: polling number in minutes
- default is 60
limit: maximum number of articles
- default is 2
keywords: additional keywords used to prioritize in search
exclude: keywords used to exclude articles
language: restrict articles to language specified by ISO 639-1 format
- default is en (English)

Example:

frequency: 30
limit: 5
language: english

Commands

TODO

News Clients

All clients must provide the following interface:

Implement _fetch method that accepts a topic and limit, then returns an iterable of strings (preferably a generator despite below example).
```
  def _fetch(self, topic, limit):
      return ['Article 1', 'Article 2']
```
News topic must be certain that either the API searches related topics or that synonyms are included in the search.