Mingle

An icebreaker bot for Discourse

How it works

Specify a time period (e.g. 2 weeks), a group of users, and a customizable message.

Once per time period, we'll randomly pair up people in the group, and send them a friendly message, inviting them to get to know each other a little better.

What to do

In order to set up a Mingle, follow these four steps:

• Install the plugin by following your normal plugin installation instructions
• Then, visit the Mingle settings panel at <yoursite.com>/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=mingle. Select a group, setup a time period, and select a user to send the message.
• Visit the #staff category; you should see a new topic there, with 'Mingle' in the title. This is the template for your message! Click into it, read the instructions, and customize a message to send to your users.
• You're done! The first message will go out in the specified time period, and a new one will be scheduled once it's sent.

Other things you can do

• If you'd like to set a specific time for when the next match will happen, you can do so by clicking on the clock next to the displayed scheduled time.
• You can also change the size of the groups people are placed in (default is pairs), by changing the 'Mingle group size' option
• Note that you can specify multiple groups to mix by using the following format for mingle_group_name:

group_1|group_2|group_3

If things go weird

• If you modify either the interval type or interval number (for example, changing from 3 to 4 weeks, or 3 days to 3 weeks), Mingle will automatically reschedule the existing job for the specified time interval.
• You can always change the exact time of the next mingle by visiting the settings panel at <yoursite.com>/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=mingle and clicking on the clock button above the settings.
• To stop scheduling Mingles, simply disable the mingle_enabled setting.
• If you end up without a scheduled job there somehow, simply disable and then re-enable the Mingle plugin, and it should come back
• If you've mangled your template beyond repair, you can get the original template back by running

/var/discourse/launcher enter app
rails c
Mingle::Initializer.new.reinitialize!

Contributing

Bug reports

Check out the issues list to take a look at known issues and report ones we don't know about yet.

Code

• Fork it (https://github.com/[my-github-username]/mingle/fork)
• Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
• Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
• Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
• Create a new pull request
• Be an awesome open source contributor!