Discord Bots

There are two primary bots on the Off-Nominal Discord that you’ll interact with. I’ll discuss them individually below but here I’ll let you know what they are and what they do. You’ll invoke a bot by using an exclamation mark ! followed by a context and then a command.

Here’s how to build a query for a bot:

!context command

!launch next SpaceX

The ! gets the bots attention, “launch” tells it what you want to know about and then “next SpaceX” tells it you want to know about the next SpaceX launch.

@Launch Alerts

Launch Alerts does basically what you’d think it does. It gives alerts about launches when they’re coming up. Each post by @Launchalerts has a two awesome features: The blue text with the name of the launch is a link to RocketLaunch.live where you can find any webcast if it’s available and more details about the launch and if the launch is within 24 hours the L- will actively count down.

A typical query will look something like this:

!l next

or

!l next ula

This would be the result of those queries:

@SuitsBot (Expander Cycle)

SuitsBot is a much more general purpose bot that is very helpful in a number of common and uncommon ways. Most often you’ll see it expanding things like: tweets to show multiple images at full size, Reddit links, Wikipedia entries, and the like.

For instance if you said “Excellent tweet” and had a twitter link that was a reply it would expand out the original tweet like this:

Learning a Bots Commands

You can get a lot out of both of the bots if you know how to use them. But don’t be intimidated, they’re both pretty simple to use once you learn the basics.

If you want to learn how to use a bot the best way is by sending it a DM (direct message) so you can send it as many queries as you want without spamming a public channel. The first thing to do is to use the help command with each bot. For instance here’s @launchalert’s help:

Rocket launch lookup and alert bot.
Valid prefixes: !launch , !l , !🚀 , 🚀 

​No Category:
  help    Shows this message.
  next    Get next launch with optional filtering.
  today   Get today's launches.
  config  Configure settings for this channel.
  slug    Retrieve data for a specific launch.
  acronym Try to find definition for an acronym.

Type !l help command for more info on a command.
You can also type !l help category for more info on a category.

The help command for @launchalerts:

!l help

The help command for @suitsbot:

!help

Actively Using the Bots

Here are some of the most common ways to use each of the bots with the command followed by what the bot might give in return.

For @launchalerts the most common thing to do is obviously to find the next launch but you can also specify a number, location, company or a mix of those. For example:

!l next wallops

!l next 2 wallops

!l next 3 rocketlab

!l a tle

@SuitsBot as I said above, is mostly passive but there are a few things that I’ll use it for.

!meow

!wiki hydrazine

-sb

Prepending a message with -sb will keep @SuitsBot from taking any action on a message. For instance it won’t expand a tweet’s images or a r/spacelaunchsystem Reddit summary.