Title: Release Notes

Abbot Release Notes

We are constantly improving Abbot so they can better help you in your day.

Abbot 0.22.0-beta

Sep 23, 2024

What's New

  • Add support for new methods to manage Slack channels. These will be useful for things like creating incident management skills. The new methods can be accessed via the Bot.Rooms (C#), bot.rooms (Python and JavaScript) property. They include methods for creating, archiving, and unarchiving a room. It also supports inviting users to a room and setting the topic and purpose of a room.

Abbot 0.21.89-beta

Oct 14, 2024

What's New

  • When the skill code editor has focus, there are now keyboard shortcuts to search the code, replace text in the code, and jump to a specific line. To learn about these shortcuts, go to the edit page for a skill and hit Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (PC) to bring up the shortcut cheat sheet.

Abbot 0.21.78-beta

Oct 13, 2024

What's New

  • Added some replacement strings that can be used when writing up a skill's usage text. Since a skill can be renamed, instead of embedding the skill name in the usage examples, you can use {skill} to reflect the current skill name. The usage text also supports the {bot} replacement string. Until Abbot supports renaming the bot better, this is just hard-coded to be replaced with @abbot.

Abbot 0.21.0-beta

Sep 22, 2024

What's New

  • Add support for a new argument type, IRoomArgument. When you mention a room in slack or Discord using the # symbol (ex. .echo Anyone in the #general room?), Slack and Discord replace #general with a room mention syntax (<#room-id|room-name> on Slack, and <#room-id> on Discord). Well, we parse that for you so you don't have to. Just test to see if the argument is an IRoomArgument (the same way you would for mentions). For C# skills, the documentation on parsing arguments explains more.

Abbot 0.20.0-beta

Sep 21, 2024

What's New

  • Managing permissions on a skill is a Business Plan feature, but we've been giving it away for free. This release removes the free ride and disallows changing permissions on a skill for the Free and Teams plans. If you have existing permissions, they will continue to be enforced! You'll have to upgrade to change them though.

Abbot 0.19.4-beta

Sep 14, 2024

What's New

  • The who is used to build the story of your colleagues in chat. But if you ask @abbot who is George Washington, it fails because "George Washington" is not a mentioned user. Until now! The who skill will do its best to answer the question when asking about a person that is not a mentioned user.

Abbot 0.19.2-beta

Sep 9, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Yesterday we added the ability to send direct messages from a skill. Well those messages didn't have the formatting of regular messages. This release fixes that.

Abbot 0.19.0-beta

Sep 8, 2024

What's New

  • Adds a new argument to bot.reply for Python and JavaScript (and a new overload of Bot.ReplyAsync for C#) that enables replying with a direct message. This can be useful if your skill needs to pass private information to the caller. This is currently only supported on Slack.

Abbot 0.18.21-beta

Aug 19, 2024

What's New

  • For C# skill authors, when trying to access HttpRequestException.StatusCode, the editor reported a compiler error. This is now fixed.

Abbot 0.18.14-beta

Aug 16, 2024

Bug Fix

  • In certain situations, backspace at the beginning of a line annoyingly doesn't delete the line and move to the newline. This releases fixes that issues.

Abbot 0.18.13-beta

Aug 16, 2024

What's New

  • When entering the value of a secret for a skill, the input field now has a toggle so you can view the value that you pasted to make sure it's correct.

Abbot 0.18.2-beta

Aug 9, 2024

What's New

  • The code editor for skills now supports recovering from a browser crash or inadvertently navigating away without saving changes. When you edit a skill, if there are unsaved changes stored in the browser for that skill, the editor shows a warning that allows you to view and recover your unsaved changes.

Abbot 0.18.0-beta

Aug 5, 2024

What's New

  • Added support for calling Abbot skills with a shortcut character. The default character is .. So rather than @abbot help you can call .help. This is available immediately in Discord and MS Teams, but we are waiting on Slack to approve our updates before we can enable this feature there.

Abbot 0.17.17-beta

July 23, 2024

Bug Fix

  • The activity log for a skill displayed filter options that were nonsensical and would cause a run-time error when selected. This update removes those nonsensical options.

Abbot 0.17.16-beta

July 23, 2024

Bug Fix

  • When publishing a new version of a skill package, the version is now incremented correctly when selecting a change type that corresponds to a Major or Minor version change.

Abbot 0.18.14-beta

Aug 16, 2024

Bug Fix

  • In certain situations, backspace at the beginning of a line annoyingly doesn't delete the line and move to the newline. This releases fixes that issues.

Abbot 0.17.13-beta

July 19, 2024

What's New

Abbot 0.17.10-beta

July 13, 2024

What's New

  • Skills now have access to mentioned users email, if set via Slack profile or via the my skill. This is useful when connecting users to third party services based on their email.

Abbot 0.17.3-beta

July 7, 2024

Bug Fix

  • C# skills did not report line numbers for runtime errors. Now they do.

Abbot 0.16.3-beta

June 28, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Package and Skill search filter is now case insensitive, which it should have been all along.

Abbot 0.16.2-beta

June 25, 2024

  • C# Skills: Added more deconstructors to the IArguments collection. Also implemented a custom Skip function which returns an IArguments collection rather than IEnumerable<IArgument>.

Abbot 0.16.1-beta

June 24, 2024

  • For C# skills, the ToInt32() method of an argument parses the argument value and either returns an integer or null. This release has a small change where if the value's first character is # such as #123, then the # is ignored and ToInt32 returns the number part. This supports a common pattern in skill arguments.

Abbot 0.16.0-beta

June 23, 2024

What's New

  • Added a new Bot.ReplyWithImageAsync method to the C# runner (support for Python and JavaScript coming soon). This allows posting an image that's base64 encoded. This is useful if you have a skill that retrieves an authenticated image (such as from a graphing API) and want to render that image in chat. Note that the URL for the rendered image is obfuscated, but shareable in chat.

Abbot 0.15.25-beta

June 22, 2024

Breaking Changes!

  • Renamed the built-in list skill to skills. This is so we could renamed the custom-list skill to list. custom-list seemed cumbersome.

Abbot 0.15.23-beta

June 18, 2024

  • Packages in the Package Directory can now be sorted by installs. Find out which packages are the most popular!

Abbot 0.15.6-beta

June 11, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Slack and Teams have different formats for rendering links. This makes it difficult for skill authors to write a skill that renders a link correctly for both platforms. In this release, Abbot translates links using the Markdown format [Link title](https://url) to the Slack format. For backwards compat, it also translates links in the Slack Format <https://url|title> into the Markdown format for Teams. At the moment, Abbot doesn't do anything for Discord because Discord doesn't support either link format in regular messages. It requires using embeds which is a whole other can of worms we might tackle later.

Abbot 0.15.4-beta

June 10, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Sometimes the submit button isn't re-enabled after a save, which is really annoying. This release addresses that issue.

Abbot 0.15.2-beta

June 8, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Fixed the page used to upgrade a skill. When a skill is installed from a package, and that package has updates, the skill page shows that updates are available. Clicking on the link to upgrade the skill from the package update resulted in a server error. This fixes that.

Abbot 0.15.0-beta

June 8, 2024

What's New

  • Sometimes people just want to click a button in response to a bot. This release adds support for including a set of buttons as part of a bot reply. Skill authors can then handle a button click. Buttons can be useful in workflows driven by chat such as an approval workflow.

Abbot 0.14.18-beta

June 4, 2024

What's New

  • When you are in a DM conversation with Abbot, there's no need to mention abbot to run a skill. You can just call the skill directly like help or list. But if you do happen to mention Abbot in a DM, Abbot can be a tad bit unhelpful. This release makes Abbot a bit less pedantic. If you happen to mention Abbot in a DM (@abbot help), Abbot will ignore the mention and just run the darn skill.

Abbot 0.14.7-beta

May 8, 2024

What's New

  • For Discord users, setting your location or timezone via the my skill only sets that information for the specific server you are in.

Abbot 0.14.0-beta

May 6, 2024

What's New

  • The who skill picked up the ability to find other users near you or a location. Users have to opt-in to having their location known by Abbot via the my command. For example, @abbot my location is 98008 lets Abbot know that you are in the 98008 zip code. This lets other users find out if you're near them by asking abbot, @abbot who is near me.

Abbot 0.13.0-beta

May 3, 2024

What's New

  • Each skill now has an activity log. This makes it easy to see all the activity specific to a skill.
  • Each skill trigger also has an activity log. Every time a skill is called via a trigger, information is recorded in the log. For HTTP triggers, this includes information about the request that triggered the skill.
  • The main activity log filters out trigger runs by default to keep it from being too busy.

Abbot 0.12.18-beta

May 3, 2024

Bug Fix

  • For C# skills, if you concatenate Bot with a string, it now properly formats a bot mention correctly in Slack. Before it did the wrong thing.

Abbot 0.12.10-beta

Apr 28, 2024

What's New

  • Moved the Activity Log into the top navigation bar.
  • Added a filter for activity type in the activity log.

Abbot 0.12.9-beta

Apr 27, 2024

What's New

  • Added a date range picker to filter the audit log to a specific date range.

Abbot 0.12.7-beta

Apr 27, 2024

What's New

  • More improvements to the Activity Log! When displaying a log item, full details are only shown to Administrators and the user that initiated the event. Everybody else sees a minimal description.

Abbot 0.12.6-beta

Apr 26, 2024

What's New

  • Abbot now logs when someone tells Abbot something that doesn't map to a skill and how Abbot responded. Abbot can respond in one of two ways. Either with a list of similar skills when it looks like a person is trying to call a skill. Or Abbot will use the default responder to try and respond with a useful answer.

Abbot 0.12.2-beta

Apr 23, 2024

Bug Fix

  • An issue where the skill name was repeated in the audit log when running a skill. The Audit log will no longer repeat itself. The audit log will no longer repeat itself.

Abbot 0.12.1-beta

Apr 23, 2024

What's New

  • Fixed the line numbers presented for diffs in the audit log details so they correspond to the line numbers of the final version of the code represented in the diff.

Abbot 0.12.0-beta

Apr 20, 2024

What's New

  • The Audit Log rolls up skill edits in a ten minute window into a single event. This keeps your audit log from being spammed when making multiple edits to the same skill.
  • Skills are the heart and soul of Abbot, so we've added more details to the audit log when someone edits or runs a skill. Try the "Details" link next to some audit log entries.

Abbot 0.11.0-beta

Apr 14, 2024

What's New

  • Abbot will do its best to answer your questions if your command is not handled by a user skill or a built-in skill. Try asking a question like @abbot what is the capital of California? or @abbot what is the meaning of life? to see it in action.

Abbot 0.10.5-beta

April 12, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Sometimes the bot console reports that a skill had no responses, when the skill did have a response. This is a timing issue that is mostly fixed by this release.

Abbot 0.10.2-beta

April 9, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Fixed an issue where the save button would sometimes get stuck in a disabled state if the save failed. Now the button should report back to duty even if the save fails.

Abbot 0.10.0-beta

Apr 6, 2024

What's New

  • Abbot now allows admins to change the avatar for the organization. This is important for two reasons. By default, Abbot tries to use the avatar from your chat platform. And most of the time, that works. But in some cases, it is unable to obtain it. Most of the time, the avatar is only visible to members of your organization. But if someone in your org publishes a package, the avatar for the organization is associated with the package. This change allows you to make sure you present your organization's best avatar to the world.

Abbot 0.9.2-beta

Mar 31, 2024

Bug Fix

  • Fixed a bug where the Bot Console breaks because someone (we're not naming names but it was me) accidentally changed an NPM dependency from our fork on GitHub to the one in the NPM directory which has some bugs we've run into. It's all good now!

Abbot 0.9.1-beta

Mar 29, 2024

What's New

  • Abbot website now has release notes and you're reading them!
  • Bot Console does not take focus on the My Bot. This makes using the keyboard shortcuts easier.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a duplicate shortcut. This feature was just released an already we found a problem. The shortcut g h was mapped to both the My Bot page and Help page. Now g h only navigates to the help page and g m goes to the My Bot page.

Abbot 0.9.0-beta

Mar 27, 2024

What's New

  • Abbot now supports a minimal set of keyboard shortcuts for the keyboard inclined. The ? shortcut brings up the shortcut cheat sheet. Esc removes focus from any input element. That comes in handy if you're in a textarea and want to try the ? shortcut.
  • Abbot also support a new Skill Jumper to quickly jump to a skill. Use the t shortcut and type in a skill name, or just part of it. The Skill Jumper will show suggestions below. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate and hit Enter to jump to a skill. It's better than jumping to conclusions!

Abbot 0.8.26-beta

Mar 26, 2024

What's New

  • Abbot now supports scheduling skills in a timezone of your choice! To schedule a skill, tell abbot @abbot schedule {skill-name} in your chat platform (replace {skill-name} with the actual name of the skill without the brackets). Abbot will set up a schedule to report back to that room or channel and supply a link to configure the schedule. Follow that link to set up the schedule you want.

Abbot 0.8.0-beta

Mar 10, 2024

What's New

  • This release introduces the ability to require permissions on skills. To see it in action, check out this YouTube video by our own Paul Nakata. To restrict a skill, go to the skill editor and scroll down to the "Permissions" section. Check "Restricted and save your changes. To set who can use the skill, use the new can skill. For example, @abbot who can {skill-name} shows the users who have permissions to the skill {skill-name} (be sure to replace {skill-name} with the name of the actual skill sans brackets). @abbot help can shows how to use the skill to set permissions.

Abbot 0.7.16-beta

Mar 5, 2024

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where the Abbot website was a bit overeager to tell you that your changes have been successfully saved. For example, after saving, if you navigated away, sometimes you'd see the success message again.

Abbot 0.7.10-beta

Mar 3, 2024

What's New

  • Added some useful extension methods to the Bot.Brain for C# skill authors: AddToListAsync and AddToHashSetAsync add an item to a List or HashSet stored in the brain. If none is there, it creates one. RemoveFromListAsync removes an item from a List stored in the brain. RemoveAtFromListAsync removes an item by index from a List stored in the brain. RemoveFromHashSetAsync removes an item from a HashSet stored in the brain. And finally, GetListAsync and GetHashSetAsync retrieves a List or HashSet from the brain, creating one if it doesn't exist.

Abbot 0.7.9-beta

Mar 3, 2024

What's New

  • Added the ToOrederedList extension method for C# skill authors to make it easy to take a collection of strings and turn it into a markdown ordered list.

Abbot 0.7.0-beta

Feb 28, 2024

What's New

  • Add support for reading and setting HTTP headers when a C# skill responds to an HTTP trigger. This makes it possible for a skill to be a webhook endpoint for more systems. For example, if a webhook implements the CNCF WebHooks 1.0.1 spec you're covered. There's even some specific properties in support of the WebHook spec such as Bot.Request.Headers.WebHookRequestOrigin. To write headers set them using the Bot.Response.Headers[name] indexed property.