A database of 600+ quotations from instructors at a high school make up a student project with a community of “quoters,” an app and site, extensive databases, and a Discord server with over 20 high school students.
It’s called Teacher Quotes. Students write funny, embarrassing, inappropriate, and witty things that their teachers say. They format the quote using the designed app or site, then relay it to a custom Discord server with automatic bot parsing and processing. Teacher Quotes staff records the quotes that people send and store them into a database. With these quotes, anyone in the server can read them and enjoy.
They also use the database for data and analyses. Many custom scripts and parsers analyze the data to offer interesting and unique statistics. Profanity is one measurement. Teachers swear the most on Wednesdays, saying “shit” the most at 24.7%, but Tuesday is the most common day for quotes overall.
So how and why has a project like this come so far? What was the first stage of this project like?
It started back on December 5, 2017 as a simple Google Hangouts group chat. It’s simple; type in the quote with the correct formatting and send the quote to add it to a collection of other quotes that other people sent. And, that’s all there was.
The database was a small spreadsheet that had to be manually updated every day. The quote would be read and rewritten to follow the formatting guidelines for the database. This began to be tedious and a hassle. To solve this, they made a parser. When fed a list of quotes, the parser would separate each section of the quote (text, teacher, and date) and format it to fit the spreadsheet.
This seemed to be a good solution, but problems arose. When people were sending their quotes, they would format it incorrectly, sometimes, not even trying at all. A properly formatted quote looks like:
“Women have sex and then rinse out their vaginas with Lysol.” — Shoemaker, 02/12/2018
Yes, that’s a real quote.
Some quotes didn’t have quotation marks, they wrote the date out in words, or even the teacher’s name was missing. The parser did not understand how to process these. So, to fix this issue, the original message would have to be sent correctly.
The best solution was an app. It would allow for easy input and quick sharing to what was then a Hangouts chat. Development started in early January, and they released the first version on January 30, 2018. Only half of the users could use it though as it was only available to Android devices.
Although the app exported the quotation in the correct formatting and style every time, Apple users had no luxury available to them. Apple devices use special Unicode open and close quotes unmatched to the standard, so the parser had issues with those. To combat this, they wrote a simple website using JavaScript that would complete the same task. It would be available to any device that had a browser.
It stayed this way for a while. There was still manual insertion of quotes, but it was sped up with help of the parsers.
On April 26, 2018, a one question survey went out to the community to vote on the Teacher Quotes platform. The system used a Hangouts chat. This deemed to be ineffective. If someone sends a message to the chat that is not a quote, there was no way to remove it. Also, people who mistyped their quote would have to send another message with the correction. There was no easy way to export messages, and it was difficult to get the messages into the parser.
The proposal was Discord, a social platform where communities create their own servers and join together. This switch would allow for a lot more freedom on how the service could be run. They could use simple programs to export messages with a start and end date, roles to give people for their contributions, and bot ability.
The bot is extensive on what it can do. The bot can give quick and useful information with a simple command request. It is connected to the database, so it can pull random quotes to read, and if specified, from a certain teacher.
It has also been setup to decide if a quote is formatted correctly, and can write it to a database easy to support.
The bot went through many phases, the final version was set in July, but small features are still being added.
The third version of the app began its development in June and finished in late August. The new app has a cleaner interface, advanced quoting tools, and customizable teacher lists.
And, well, that’s the end of Round 1. Round two starts the first day of 2018–19 school year. And such, the list of quotes and the community who takes part grows.
