
Show HN: Botlist – An App Store for Bots - iisbum
https://botlist.co
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bentossell
Hey! I'm one of the makers here

Appreciate any thoughts anyone else. WE are all ears :)

Mobile responsive isnt in place yet so apologies for that.

Trying to get bots/AI from different platforms in one central, 3rd party place
- not owned by Facebook/Slack/Kik etc.

We are looking to update more information - probably giving the bot makers the
ability to take control of their page, add more info and images so hopefully
that will help. Has been a time-consuming manual process so far.

Happy to hear feedback!

But yes, just a bare bones MVP for now

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joshbaptiste
Saw an error and a PHP call stack and relative directories, should disable
that from being visible on a production webpage.

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iisbum
Fixing that right now.

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asimuvPR
Visited the site on mobile and could not find a little explanation about what
the goal of the site is. Maybe a short introduction might work. This seems
interesting but it's not fully clear what it aims to do now and in the future.
:)

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bentossell
Gotcha! Will look into adding that :)

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jedberg
Interesting business model. It's free to submit, but if you want to show up
"quickly" you have to pay $50. Even though it hurts me as a bot owner, I think
that's really clever!

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an4rchy
This is a pretty neat idea. I know it's probably an MVP but a description of
what the bot does instead of forcing the user to click through to the bot
website.

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ajpgrealish
There are some very short descriptions of what each bot does but it's not
enough to help me decide if it is what I need. I searched for a JIRA bot to
connect to slack but clicking the bot link took me to the install page rather
than more info.

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bentossell
yeah we want to add more info on each bot detail page, then give the option
for direct 'install' or landing page.

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iisbum
Very happy to launch our MVP for Botlist.

We hope someday it will become a fully fledged store, but for now we're
working towards building a complete directory of bots available on every
platform.

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karimdag
I've seen this on Product Hunt but couldn't comment so now that I have the
chance to, Here's what I want to say: \- first, awesome idea. This would make
things way easier. \- second, say that I have built a bot, then what ? Would
it follow the same philosophy as the regular App Store? (Meaning you upload
then people download or buy) \- Third, you should add a FAQ and a roadmap so
that people can help! (Even with just an idea)

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chillydawg
Are these bots just for slack? What do you consider to be a "bot"?

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spinlock
I was thinking the same thing. I'll admit that I'm out of the loop when it
comes to slack but I've heard they don't support IRC. Seems too bad to me as
IRC would make a great platform for all bots rather than just for one
platform.

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tyrust
Slack has an IRC gateway - [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connectin...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP)

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dreeves
Beautiful collection! I'd love to convince you to reject from the collection
any smarmbot emails --
[http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot](http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot) \--
which I define as emails that pretend to be sent personally ("I noticed that
you recently...").

I realize a lot of hackers (I've argued with @patio11 about this) don't see
the problem with those. Maybe because it's inconceivable to us nerds how
anyone could be deceived by them. But some people are and I think the best of
both worlds can be achieved by either saying "we" instead of "I" \-- as in
"all of us, including the program that sends these emails!" \-- or just
appending something like "This email is obviously automated but you can reply
to it and it will go straight to me personally!".

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sourcd
Nice design & +1 for the groundwork. How will you protect your hard work from
someone who just wants to scrape and clone it ?

There's also botpages.com discussed 3 days ago here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456651)

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harry_botter
Saw botpages.com on Product Hunt last week. It looks like they're free to
submit.

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toyg
502 bad gateway. _It 's dead, Jim._

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eb0la
I think we're going to need a bot to tell us when _something_ that shows on HN
is back online :-)

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yeukhon
My first foremost suggestion: try not to ask for password as a new site. I am
not saying I'd only trust the big players (they were once a startup or a
little project to begin with), but I would enjoy more if I can reuse
Google/Twitter/FB or whatever as an option.

Next, any plan for validating bot's security and privacy? Rules for submission
(must be open source etc?) Fake feedback is always a tough war in real
monetize app store.

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amflare
My #1 question is where is the About Page? Even if it's just a small synopsis,
I'd like to know what this is, and what it is meant to do.

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arcameron
Improvement: If I navigate to
[https://botlist.co/bots/filter?platform=5](https://botlist.co/bots/filter?platform=5),
then I should be able to see what each bot claims to do, without needing to
click in to the #show page

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bentossell
yeh we are currently trying to figure out if taglines can be included in a way
that doesnt make the site look too busy/messy. possibly a 'quick-view'

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tomc1985
Ugh. Now we're gonna be hearing about chatbots for the next 5 years :(

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fiatjaf
I want to sell my bot which currently people are using for free, where can I
do if not in an App Store?

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tomc1985
Also can we call these something else? Bot is too overloaded a term. "Chatbot"
is more accurate.

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drewry
I'm getting "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." when trying to
register.

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bentossell
hmm we've had a couple of instances so I will look into it! Sorry about that.

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drewry
Looks like it's working now, thanks!

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strictnein
Getting this now: 502 Bad Gateway

nginx/1.8.0

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bentossell
should be back up in next 10 mins!

Had overwhelming response today, sorry

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prdonahue
May want to throw CloudFlare in front. (Disclaimer: I work there.)

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findjashua
getting the following error:
[http://imgur.com/Duxzl6W](http://imgur.com/Duxzl6W)

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iisbum
We didn't quite get zero downtime deploys worked out for our MVP :) If you
refresh thing should be working now.

Thanks!

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findjashua
now i'm getting 502s :-(

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swalsh
You should resubmit this as Apply HN:

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woodruffw
Any plans for an IRC category?

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studentrunnr
yikes - link doesn't work!

