Welcome Bio-IT bot and Bio-IT-announce channel
Initially proposed as an EMBL’s coding club collaborative programming project, the EMBL Bio-IT chat bot, avidly named BIT
, took off in 2020
and is already diligently announcing courses and workshops in the Bio-IT-announce channel.
Introducing BIT
With a modular design, allowing for anyone to contribute new behavior with very little code,
BIT
, EMBL’s Bio-IT chat bot,
is slowly gaining new abilities and showing its usefulness.
As of 2021 it already
assists EMBL’s Git admin team on specific administrative tasks and
monitors EMBL and Bio-IT services keeping us up to date with changes.
As it picks up momentum, new features are being added regularly and more are on the way. If you are interested or would like to contribute with ideas or code, let us know in the Bio-IT channel or email Bio-IT.
Announcements in Bio-IT-announce channel
As mentioned above, the Bio-IT-announce channel has been created to increase the visibility of courses and workshops offered at EMBL and by different external groups and communities. On its way to 50 members in little over a month and combining the advantages of a mailing list and a discussion forum, is already delightfully fulfilling its purpose.
But we said mailing list so how do you go about using it as such?
Mailing lists typically have one of two options, daily email digests or individual emails for every message sent. Unfortunately Mattermost doesn’t yet support the daily digest option but it’s possible to receive a notification every time a new message is posted. As the channel is currently relatively low traffic, you can enable this option by navigating to notification preferences.
and setting the notification level to For all activity
which will ensure you receive an email when you are not active in the chat and as soon as announcements are made.
If in the future you find that notifications are too frequent or that you are sufficiently active in the chat that you don’t need those extra emails, you can always set it back to Global default or Never.
Let us know if you are finding BIT
’s services useful and feel free to send suggestions for new features our way.
Disclaimer
Chat logo by unDraw.