Running the Club with the Bot

The bot posts to five places. Each one is a different kind of attention.

Members never see approvals, assignments, tasks or errors. Keep them private.

A flag from /report — broken, missing, count wrong, needs label — posts a card with a resolve button. Flags don't block anything; a part marked Broken still checks out. That's deliberate: a rule nobody maintains just teaches people to route around the bot.

New part in hand → serial on it → on the shelf. Under a minute if the printer is on.

1. Run /intake with a name, a count, and ideally a location, category, part number and a photo shot on the shelf. Add label:True.

   /intake name:VL53L3CX ToF sensor  qty:6  location:Cabinet shelf #2  category:Sensors  part:497-VL53L3CXV0DH/1CT-ND  label:True

2. Read the serial back. It's permanent — BURC-0137 — and it never changes or gets reused, even if the part is retired.
3. The label prints on the printer in the bunker within a few seconds. QR for phones, barcode for the scanner, serial for people.
4. Stick it on and shelve it. If you skipped the location, the part is flagged Needs label until you set one.

If /label says the printer hasn't checked in, the Pi in the bunker is off or lost Wi-Fi. Jobs wait; they print when it's back. If a label fails, the errors channel says why.

The part-number field matters more than it looks: /request and /orders paste it straight into a supplier's order box. Copy it exactly as the supplier lists it.

1. Create the meeting. /event puts it on the server calendar and in Notion, and opens check-in half an hour before. /meeting opens an ad-hoc one right now.

   /event name:General meeting  when:thursday 6pm  location:the bunker  minutes:90  code:banana

   The code is optional — write it on the whiteboard and people have to type it, so nobody checks in from their dorm.
2. Say you're recording. Before you press record: there's a sign in the bunker, and you say it out loud. That's the whole legal requirement in Massachusetts — awareness, not paperwork. Don't announce it in Discord; the people in the room are the ones being recorded.
3. Record on a phone. Voice Memos on iPhone, Settings → Voice Memos → Audio Quality → Compressed. A 90-minute meeting is about 20 MB, under the 24 MB cap.
4. Hand it in. /notes announced:True audio:<the file>. The bot confirms it's queued.
5. Wait about ten minutes. Minutes land in the minutes channel and on the meeting's Notion page: summary, decisions, action items, what was discussed, open questions, and the full transcript in a collapsed toggle. The audio is deleted the moment the transcript exists.
6. Check the assignments channel. Every piece of work the meeting created is there as a card. That's the next section.

The bot proposes; you decide. It never puts a name on anything by itself.

After every set of minutes, the assignments channel gets one card per job the meeting created — including work nobody volunteered for out loud. "Show a video on the TV" means somebody has to make the video and find a TV, and the bot says so:

📋 TSK-9
Source a TV for the demo table
Due 2026-09-11, from the transcript.

Nobody volunteered for this — it follows from showing video instead of the robot.
No owner was named.

[ Assign to…            ▾ ]
[ File under a project… ▾ ]
[ Set a due date ]  [ Not a task ]

Four things to do with each card, ideally the day after the meeting:

• Assign to… — pick a member. They get a DM with a Done button. If the transcript mentioned a name, the card says so, but it's a guess and it's never applied for you.
• File under a project — so /tasks project:ARCTOS works. Minutes never say which project; this is the moment somebody knows.
• Set a due date — friday, 9/18, tomorrow. Nothing gets chased without one. A task with an owner and no date sits in the "no date" pile forever.
• Not a task — one tap. Expect to use it; the bot would rather propose eight and have you bin three than propose two and miss the important one.

Got the wrong list? /retask bins every unassigned proposal from that meeting and reads the transcript again. Anything somebody already owns is left alone.

Blocking. When a member runs /block naming who they're waiting on, the chasing moves to that person — the daily DM goes to the blocker, not the owner, until they tap Unblock. A card in the tasks channel shows every open block; it's struck through when it clears, with how long it lasted. If the same person is blocking three things, that's your signal.

Members ask. You approve. The bot writes the order for you. You paste it.

1. A request arrives in approvals with the part, quantity, supplier, reason, and — if it's restocking something — the current stock and reorder point. Approve or Deny; the member is told either way.
2. When you're ready to order, /orders. Every approved line, grouped by supplier, as a paste-ready list:

   DigiKey — 2 lines · $14.00
   1N4148,50
   MAX11206EEE+-ND,2
   Paste straight into their bulk order box.

   DigiKey, Mouser and Amazon Business all take that format directly. McMaster doesn't have a paste box; the bot says so and you order those by hand.
3. Place the order, then press Mark DigiKey ordered. Those lines flip to Ordered with today's date. Put the supplier's order number in the Order Ref column in Notion if you want to find it later.
4. When the box arrives, mark the rows Received in Notion and /restock each part onto the shelf. Purchasing and inventory are separate on purpose — one is money, the other is stock, and conflating them means you can't answer either question.

Automatic reordering is deliberately not a feature. A bot that spends club money with nobody in the loop is a bad idea at any budget.

What the bot sends without being asked, so it isn't a surprise.

The retention messages are conservative on purpose. The failure mode of a retention system is becoming the thing people mute. The wording lives in the Nudge Templates database in Notion — change it there, no code involved. The answers to "why did you stop coming" land in Member Feedback, and they are the most useful thing the club collects.

Three places to look, in order.

1. The errors channel. Almost every failure posts there with the command that caused it and the reason. Read it before anything else.
2. /health — open https://<the worker>/health in a browser. It lists which settings are present, whether the printer has checked in, how many minutes jobs are queued, and the first error it hits.
3. Cloudflare → the Worker → Logs. Only if the first two are silent.

The bot has to outlive whoever built it. Five things have to be true before a term ends.

• The Discord application is owned by a Team, not a person's account.
• Cloudflare and Notion are on the club address, not a student address that dies at graduation.
• worker.js and this documentation are in the club GitHub.
• REGISTER_SECRET, PRINT_SECRET, the bot token, and the two model API keys (Groq, Gemini) are somewhere the next president can reach.
• The model API keys are on club accounts, not personal ones. They're free tiers, but a free tier on somebody's personal Google account is a bot that stops working the day they leave.

Whoever inherits this should read the technical reference once, end to end, before they need it. It's long because it's honest about what breaks.