Groupee

Group management bot for Mattermost based chats.

How it works and how to use it

Groupee manages chats by making them into groups, which means you can "invite one channel into another". Once groupee has been added to a channel by it's creator, that channel becomes a group which can be added or given permissions on other groups.

There are 3 ways to create a group:

1. Create an ordinary private channel and then invite groupee to the channel (remember, you can't invite groupee unless you're the actual creator of the channel)
2. Private message the !chan command to groupee to create a new group with you as the sole owner
3. Message the !chan command in an existing group to create a subgroup whose membership includes the parent group.

The !chan command

The !chan command takes one argument which is the name of the to-be-group, that name must consist only of capital and lower case letters and the underscore. All other characters will be replaced with underscores.

If you send a !chan command in a private message to groupee, then groupee will create a new group and you will be the sole owner and member. For example, if you send a private message to groupee saying !chan group_testing_123 then groupee will create a new group called #group_testing_123.

If you send the !chan command in a group, then groupee will create a new group with the name of the old group plus a dash and the name you gave in the chan command. For example, if you are in a group called #hr and you type !chan recruiting then groupee will create a new group called #hr-recruiting. Following the example, the group #hr will become a member of the group #hr-recruiting and the pseudo-group #hr/owners will become an owner of #hr-recruiting. Importantly, you will also become an owner of #hr-recruiting, so even if you are not an owner of #hr, you can still spawn a sub-group and have control over it.

!add, !op, !remove and !deop

The !add and !op commands allow you to add people and groups to groups, and likewise the !remove and !deop commands allow you to remove them. All of the commands accept a list of groups and/or users and must be made in the group where you are to perform the operation.

Once a room has been converted to a managed group, you are nolonger allowed to add a person to the room directly, instead you must use the !add command, furthermore, you must be an owner of a group in order to invoke any of these commands.

The !remove command will only allow you to manipulate the members who are directly added to a group, users who exist in a group due to transitive inclusion must be removed from the group where they were originally added. For example, if you Alan is a member of #hr but you do not want them to see what goes on inside of #hr-recruiting, then you must either remove them from #hr or you must make a recruiting chat which does not specify that members of #hr are included. In this case you might use !chan in a private message and then use !add with only the people who you trust to discuss recruiting.

If you use the !remove command but you find that the person you attempted to remove does not go away, this is probably because they have justifications for membership in your group through multiple group memberships. You can use the !info command to see which memberships are causing them to be present.

The !deop command is also somewhat complex because it can allow two potential bad situations. Firstly it is possible to make yourself nolonger an owner of the group where you are invoking it and secondly it can potentially lead to a group with no owners at all. In the first scenario, you will be warned and the !deop command will only do the job if you pass the -yes flag as one of the arguments. In the second scenario, groupee will simply reduce to perform the operation and advise you that if you wish to remove the channel entirely, you should use the !del command.

!info and !allusers

These two commands are used for getting information about what's going on. The !info command gives the members and owners of a group, while the !allusers lists all of the actual people who are authorized to be in the group, as well as the group membership which justifies their presence.

Both the !info and !allusers commands require you to be a member of the channel which is being queried about. However, the !allusers command, sent in a private message to groupee, with no arguments, displays a simple list of all of the users known to the system. In this context it is available to everyone.

The /owners pseudo-group

Every group has a pseudo-group called <channel_name>/owners, this pseudo-group is the set of every user and group which has been added to said group using the !op command. While the owners group is not an actual chat channel and cannot be joined in the traditional sense, it can be treated as a group for the purposes of adding and removing from other groups. For example, if you wanted to create a group with all of the owners of the #hr group, you could invoke !add #hr/owners and only the owners of the #hr group would be added. Likewise, by invoking !op #hr, you can make all members of the #hr group into owners of your newly created group. A very common use case is to make the owners of one group (e.g. #hr) also be the owners of another group (e.g. #hr-recruiting), while the !chan command does this for you, you can also do it manually by invoking !add #hr and then !op #hr/owners.

!evict and !del

The !evict command is just for checking that anyone who doesn't have authorization to be in a given room isn't there. It is possible that a person is manually added to a room while groupee is down for maintainence so !evict will check that there are no unauthorized participants in a given room. The !evict command must be used from the room where you mean to evict.

The !del command is a bit more important, it is necessary in order to be able to remove a channel both from the database and to delete it in mattermost. Like !deop it is a risky command to invoke because if you are an owner of the channel, then it will destroy the channel without confirming. There is one case when !del will not work, that is if there are other groups which include the current group in their membership, in which case those rooms must be deleted first.

!tree

The !tree command can be used in a private message to groupee, it will generate a graph to show the people and groups and their relationships. People are shown as blue ovals while groups are shown as green squares. The membership and permissions are as follows:

The color of the connecting line indicates the type of permission which a user or group has in a group.

!tree example

We'll consider the example of the ACME Company. In the ACME company, there are two teams, HR and Tech. Alice and Bob are founders, Catherine is the manager of HR and Dave is Catherine's assistant. Eleanor works in the technical team but is not a manager. The technical team has two projects, a website and a mobile app. Fred is an outside contractor who is working on the mobile app while Gloria is a contractor working on the website. The !tree as seen by Alice or Bob appears like this:

• Alice and Bob are owners of the ~founders group.
• Catherine being a manager of the HR team, is an owner of the ~hr group, but because owners of the ~founders group are also owners of the ~hr group, Alice and Bob also have ownership over the ~hr group.
• The owners and members of the ~hr and ~tech groups are also owners and members of the ~team group, so the ~team group has Alice, Bob and Catherine as owners and has everyone except Fred and Gloria as members.
• Fred and Gloria have membership in ~tech-mobile_app and ~tech-website respectively, these are the only channels they are authorized to join, or even know about.
• The chat ~team-managers_only has as special status, all owners of ~team (Alice, Bob and Catherine) are owners of ~team-managers_only but members of ~team are not allowed to join.
• ~hr-for_managers is a special type of group owned by the owners of ~hr. The owners of ~team (i.e. managers) are allowed to join ~hr-for_managers but in the channel ~hr-for_managers they do not have owner status.
  • Note: Because the line between ~hr and ~hr-for_managers is pink, Catherine's assistant Dave does not see what happens in ~hr-for_managers.
  • Note 2: Because owners of ~founders are also owners of ~hr (green connecting line), Alice and Bob also have ownership of ~hr-for_managers.
• The ~fun channel is a sort of free-for-all, with all members of ~team being owners of ~fun.
• The last type if connection used in the ~golf_with_bob channel. Bob is the owner of the ~golf_with_bob channel and uses it to coordinate with members of the team who like to go golfing, every member of the ~team channel are welcome to join but the owners of ~team do not automatically become owners of ~golf_with_bob.

!mychans and !join

The default behavior of groupee is not to automatically add everyone to channels just because they're authorized to be there. It is thought that the person who added you to the channel should invite you manually if they want your attention. However, if you want to see all of the channels which you can join, and potentially join them, you can use the !mychans and !join commands.

The !mychans command will show a list of all channels which you are authorized to be in, it will also show the reason why you are authorized to be there. If, to take our earlier example, Catherine were to use the !mychans command, she would see:

• ~hr/owners via direct membership
• ~team/owners via ~hr/owners
• ~hr-for_managers/owners via ~hr/owners
• ~team-managers_only/owners via ~team/owners
• ~fun/owners via ~team
• ~golf_with_bob via ~team

This means she is an owner of ~hr, ~team, ~hr-for_managers, ~team-managers_only and ~fun, and she is a member of ~golf_with_bob. She can then use the !join command to join any one of those channels if she is not currently in them. For example: !join golf_with_bob, note that the tilde (~) is optional in any command for interacting with a channel.

Caviats

You can't create a group which includes itself. While this might seem obvious, the potential for long chains of inclusions into groups makes it rather likely to end up wanting to include a group into another group which transitively includes the first. Groupee will refuse to let you do that and the only solution is to use !info and !allusers to understand and then untangle the mess you have made.

Admin

Groupee does not need to run on the same server as the mattermost instance, but it does need a full account, it doesn't work with a simple bot token. To set it up:

1. Install graphviz - this tool uses the dot executable to render !tree graphs.
2. Install the dependencies: npm install
3. Create a user for the bot
4. Edit copy config.example.js to config.js and edit the config appropriately
5. Run node groupee.js
6. Send a private message with !help to groupee to see if it's up and running properly.

Groupee can run fine as an ordinary user, but if a user removes groupee from a channel, it will not be able to get back in unless you make groupee a system administrator in your mattermost system admin control panel.

Groupee stores their database as a simple json file which is written every update, however it also uses append-only-logs to log every database update that occurs so you can recreate the database at a specific time in the past by playing the logs through tools/log2db.js. However, you must start from the first logs that were ever created.

cat ./eventlog-2020-06-16.ndjson ./eventlog-2020-06-17.ndjson | node ./tools/log2db.js > ./newdb.json

You can also convert a db file into a simple log which would result in the same db using tools/db2log.js. This script reads the file db.json and outputs a log which if played through tools/log2db.js would result in the same db.json file. This can be useful for compacting large history of logs but still having the ability to rollback time in case of damage to the bot's database (e.g. !del rampage).