Support the use of a separate dedicated stream for RSVP events

[jjst]

People are now using a dedicated RSVPs stream to reduce the noise caused by people rsvp'ing.

I was thinking we could support this workflow in RSVPBot directly by re-purposing the init command so that if it's ran outside of the RSVPs stream, then it creates a new topic in the RSVPs stream matching the original topic name, and posts a link to the RSVP thread in the original thread.

Thoughts?

(The use of a separate dedicated thread for RSVP events is pretty new, so I'm sure there's lots of kinks we still need to figure out with that new use case)

[niftynei]

This sounds like a very reasonable proposition to me!

[wtfcarlos]

@jjst @niftynei Let's remember that RSVPBot is intended to be used on any kind of Zulip instance, not just RC's.

If we can think of a more general way of doing this that doesn't depend on the existence of a certain stream that would be ideal <3

[jjst]

You could have it configurable via an environment variable named RSVP_STREAM or something similar: if defined then RSVP threads get created in there, otherwise the old behaviour applies.

[niftynei]

A config variable sounds like a very reasonable proposition to me.

@kokeshii, to allay your fears, surely you can ensure a stream exists, before we depending on it.

[porterjamesj]

my proposal for this is the following: a new command rsvp init in $STREAM. What this does is:

1. creates the event in $STREAM
2. posts a link to $STREAM in the stream where rsvp init in was run.

What I like about this is that it's explicit (so it's not confusing what's going on), hopefully not too hard to implement, and not overly restrictive. For example, we still want people to be able to create events in the Social* streams, just not in 455 Broadway, which this proposal still allows for.

Thoughts @jjst @kokeshii @niftynei ?

[wtfcarlos]

@porterjamesj That sounds wonderful. I'm all for it. My only worry is potential typos, but since error messages are private now, spam will be kept to a minimum.

Also, I don't think this is hard to implement.

[jjst]

That sounds like it checks all the boxes, I like.