Mne-python: [EASY][INFRA] Twitter bot is broken since 2019-01-31

[sappelhoff]

I have mentioned this multiple times and I agree that it's not urgent at all, but I really liked our Twitter Bot "mne_python" and would like to see it restored.

Perhaps this can be done at the sprint or so. Anyhow, this issue is just a reminder for us.

Previous investigation by @agramfort:

github says: Note: GitHub Services have been deprecated. Please contact your integrator for more information on how to migrate or replace a service with webhooks or GitHub Apps.

[agramfort]

if you know any solution please let us know

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[sappelhoff]

What solution did we previously use? Was it this one: https://github.com/github/github-services/blob/master/docs/twitter ?

There are several solutions, but most of them seem to involve signing up with some external service. I think that would be fine, because we could use the free plan. Some examples:

• automate.io
• zapier

[agramfort]

I arrived to the same conclusion

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[sappelhoff]

@agramfort it'd probably have to be you to set it up (or someone else with credentials both for mne-tools and @mne_python twitter).

I suggest to go with Zapier, because their free plan seems to be a bit more permissive:

That limit is approximately 200 attempts every 10 minutes window per zap.

whereas with Automate.io states:

Rate limited to 1 every 5 minutes.

[agramfort]

let's look at this during the sprint

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[sappelhoff]

@agramfort let me know when you have 10 minutes for this.

[sappelhoff]

I investigated a bit and apparently, FieldTrip is using a whole suite of scripts to automate this themselves, without relying on 3rd party services:

https://github.com/fieldtrip/webhook

I also asked Robert whether he can tell us some details - I'll update once I know more.

[sappelhoff]

update: Alex tried zapier, but ran into problems when selection the mne-tools ORG as the owner of mne-python (he could only select his own fork)

We need somebody to test automate.io or zapier and document what options / clicks are needed.

[sappelhoff]

another option: https://gitweet.io/

Gitweet is a convenient tool for developers and makers that wants to quickly tweet something about their last code update.
Once your repository is linked to a twitter account, every time you provide a description in a commit (completely optional obviously), a tweet will be posted with the provided content.
Only the description will be tweeted.

[sappelhoff]

@agramfort - do you remember that you tried ZAPIER during the Coding Sprint? --> It did not work, because you could not select the "mne-tools" organization.

The solution is here. We would have needed to "grant 3rd party access" to Zapier for the organization.

Perhaps you can give it another try :-)

[larsoner]

Both providers all had kind of crazy permission things (read and write all public and private repos) that would create security risks, so I created a dummy larsoner-mne user and put it in a dummy mne-twitter team on GitHub with only read access to MNE-Python, authorized it to connect to GitHub and Twitter, and have it so it should push tweets to mne_news like:

Committed MRG, DOC: categorize tutorials (#6264)

• move all tutorials and add tutorial section READMEs
• fix crossrefs [skip travis][skip appveyor][skip azp] by Daniel McCloy (https://api.github.com/users/drammock)

Pushed the test tweet:

https://twitter.com/mne_news/status/1124651146872856576

Okay? If so we just need to see if a commit to master actually submits it, too.

@agramfort if this is the wrong twitter account, send me privately the name and p/w for the one I should use.

[dengemann]

I am -1000 for using mne_news which is our human operated news account. Frankly, many people do not want to see commit notifications. Can we create a separate account for that?

[sappelhoff]

thanks for the initiative @larsoner and the neat solution with @larsoner-mne. Some questions for me to understand:

put it in a dummy mne-twitter team on GitHub with only read access to MNE-Python

Do you mean you created a new "secret" team within the mne-tools organization? Because I can't see any mne-twitter here: https://github.com/orgs/mne-tools/teams

authorized it to connect to GitHub and Twitter

With "it" you mean zapier?

---

Can we create a separate account for that?

@dengemann --> yes, we have @mne_python for that. Alex has the login data

[larsoner]

Do you mean you created a new "secret" team within the mne-tools organization?

Yes I made it private because nobody should really need to care about its existence or what it's for

With "it" you mean zapier?

Yes

Can we create a separate account for that?

@dengemann --> yes, we have @mne_python for that. Alex has the login data

Done

[massich]

@larsoner if the commit message when merging a PR is tweeted, it means that we need to curate those messages so that we don't tweet something like this:

[MRG] small ICA bug fixes for #5967 - 2nd try (#6246)

* Fix sorting in descending order in ica._detect_artifacts (was sortin in ascending order).

* Fix sfreq selection in ica._band_pass_filter (called (only) in ica.score_sources to filter sources and targets) to use the raw sfreq rather than the one used for fitting the ica.

* Incorporate missed suggestion from #5620 + summary of discussion

* fix PEP8

* fix typo in doc

* Allow both exclude and ica.exclude to be array_like by always converting to list first.

* ica.detect_artifacts: Corrected doc according to code and changed some default values to yield the same compos as before

* Added test for checking descending sorting in detect_artifacts for integer criterion

* Stylistic improvements thanks to jona-sassenhagen

* Fix test for score-sorting

* pep8 and whats_new.rst

* Remove links to privat funcs in whats_new.rst

* fix links in whats_new

* STY: No end period

* Futher improvements thanks to mmagnuski and a few further corrections in the docstrings of run_ica and detect_artifacts

* Added warning for new sorting-direction in detect_artifacts; added whats_new from #6247

* improve bug section; remove warning again; typo

If that's the case (which I'm +1000), we should add this in our contributing guide in the section of how to review (cc: @drammock)

[larsoner]

This is how it looks currently:

https://twitter.com/mne_python?lang=en

If someone wants to look at the Zapier syntax I'm happy to update the automation

[massich]

I thought that clean messages would appear nice. This is an example of clean-up message https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/commit/b2de2e9a192301e4dfb106cef3963d1283d74024 but the tweet does not look nice either https://twitter.com/mne_python/status/1084953412326825984

I'm not sure if its worth the effort.

[agramfort]

i think it's good enough

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[larsoner]

We do currently get an error for long messages:

MNE-Python commit -> mne_python Tweet
  |   | had 1 error (edit this Zap)
Error Message:Twitter: Tweet needs to be a bit shorter.

I'll see if there is a simple way to truncate on Zapier.

[larsoner]

I took a minute to tell Zapier to take just the first line of the commit message. Now looks like this:

https://twitter.com/mne_python/status/1128726165487783936

[larsoner]

Unfortunately for Zapier, having a 3-step requires an account, so I'm going to remove the line restriction. Those tweets can just fail.