Namaadhu Vaguthu Bot 2021
This time with group support and notifications!!!
The only time I ever work on @namaadhuvaguthu_bot is right before each Ramadan. The project is stable and does not need any intervention unless either a whole new feature set is being added, or the data got corrupted and I need to reset the database.
@namaadhuvaguthu_bot survived 2020 from the code side, but I needed to refresh the whole database cause of a small mistake I had done while collecting the data. Other than that, it was 100% operational and worked every single time.
Now it's 2021 and it would be a shame if nothing interesting happened to the bot.
Group Support ✔
The bot was never designed to be used in groups. The bot can now be used in groups. Each group can have a set location, so that commands used in the group are scoped to the context of the group's location. This gives a more personalized experience to the group, rather than having to select the atoll and island every single time.
Group administrators can add the bot the group and /register. This would trigger a few steps and in about 15 seconds you'll have it up and running. Group members can use non admin commands as they please.
Prayer Time Reminders 🔔
This was a feature that I had wanted to implement in the first release of the bot back in 2019. But that was a time when I didn't know much about asynchronous Python and had no idea how to run a function on a schedule. A while True: loop with sleep() kept hanging the rest of the application so that was out of the question.
Well, now it works. Given that you have already set your location, you can simply send /subscribe and you'll receive notifications for each prayer about 20 minutes before each prayer call. If you ever wanted to stop receiving the notifications, then simply send /unsubscribe.
Notifications In Groups 🙌
Yup. Group admins can /subscribe inside the group and the group will start to receive notifications in the group.
Now while all these are exciting new features, there are things I expect to break. During each Ramadan there seems to be an influx of users. And if everyone subscribes to notifications, I might be hitting message sending limits quite fast. If this does happen, there could be a slight delay of about 3 or 6 seconds in receiving notifications. It's not the end of the world but it will definitely throw errors on my console.
I'm gonna keep the console to myself, but y'all should definitely use this bot. Find it on Telegram below.
Ramadan Mubarak! 🎉
