The other day I managed to do some solid work on Botopotamus.
First, I've added a new public bot: meet Currencypotamus. It takes the XML with exchange rates from the Central Bank, parses it and shows it to you. There are plenty of such bots, but this one's mine the trick is that during the window when the Central Bank usually publishes new rates, this one keeps knocking on its door. And if you subscribe, it'll notify you right away when the rates are out.
This can be useful for making decisions, for example, in the travel business. Rush to pay for bookings now or put it off till tomorrow? Currencypotamus will tell you in Telegram or in Max.
Second, I've thoroughly reworked the platform itself. I made a modular architecture — now each botopotamus is added as a separate directory with all its logic isolated inside. With access to shared features: cron, cache, queues, events, statistics and so on. A module is a bot feature, while the bots themselves are added from the admin panel: enter the Telegram and Max credentials, click the features you need — and the bot is ready.
I've added localization: the language is detected from the user's message, and if a bot has several languages, you can switch manually.
I've slightly improved the monitoring bot: now if a site goes down, the bot pings it more often for a while — to detect sooner when the site is back up.
For these changes, I've put together a new Botopotamus landing page. The old one was purely about the monitoring bot, the new one is about bot development. And the public bots each got a mini landing page. I think Claude Design did a pretty good job, personally I keep getting mesmerized by the flying elephant.
We keep working, a couple more useful bots are in the pipeline.