In short, I’m tired of lists getting lost.

The same situation repeats itself every time. A friend recommends a movie, I open the notes, write them down somewhere. And this record dissolves forever in the world space.

This happens with all lists. With ideas, acquaintances, notes from books, places where I have been. All this endless series of lists is constantly lost. You keep starting them over. Maybe it’s me that’s so strange, and others responsibly put them on the shelves.

But there is Notion and its analogues! I will create the necessary tabs and lead responsibly! Ahahaha, no. It turned out that opening a separate program, digging through the interface and finding the list you want is too high a threshold of entry when you need to record on the fly.

But there is “Selected” in the cart, a personal chat, where you can throw everything! Yeah, after a step it turns into a trash can of pictures, links to articles and some random notes. I believe it all works for someone. It just doesn’t work well for me.

The soul asked for a simple solution. To write “#movies” and a list of all the movies that were recommended to me would open. And that a new film could be added to this list by the team of Spider-Man: Through the Universe.

Easy to add, easy to find, everything is laid out on the shelves. This is how the idea to make a bot for the “Collector” cart was born. The visa is always open, it’s convenient. You can apparently sell a chip with tags there.

First of all, I tried to collect everything through the bot designer. Fig is there. This functionality cannot be done through them. I had to look for a programmer. And after a month of torment, the first version appeared. It worked exactly as I described. You write a message at work:

#games New Zelda – must see

The robot automatically creates the “Games” collection and adds the first item there. A week later you see that Diablo 4 is out and you write:

#diablo 4 games – need to take a vacation

And the bot adds a new item to the “Games” list.

Very comfortable. There is no need to search for the desired list or open a separate program. Visa is always open, and the bot carefully collects information by category. When it’s time to play, you just write to the “Games” bot. And he carefully shows everything:

#games

1. New Zelda – must see

2. Diablo 4, how long have I been waiting for you

3. Kena: Bridge of Spirits

4. GRIS – advised in the hospital

5. Celestia

I lived with the bot for a month and realized that it was the best thing that happened in my life. Notes from books, list of acquaintances, countries and cities where I have been, ideas, lists of things for traveling. Everything moved to the Collector. And my friends started using it as a simple task manager. Don’t ask how, I have no idea.

Unfortunately, the collections had to be managed through commands. That’s why we started the second version to make everything clear not only to me. To make something convenient? But the revisions dragged on for several months. I had to write my own framework, since the existing ones did not support the necessary logic.

But it was worth it. The robot has its own UI widgets, the construction of the ribbon has become ergonomic. The “Menu” button and collection management buttons appeared. In the list of all collections, you can now tap and see the contents. The lists themselves have also become more convenient due to the use of dynamic paging. As soon as you change the content of the collection, the visa message where it was displayed is automatically updated.

There are now many such seemingly small, convenient features, they are elaborated from the ui/ux point of view, and make the process of using the bot convenient.

We also implemented an anonymity system at the server level, so that it would be impossible to match collections with users. He was interested in it himself. In short, user IDs are not stored anywhere in the database. They are replaced with a “salted” md5 hash. And if ordinary md5 can be reversibly decrypted, then salt makes this activity hopeless. Simply put, we (or a hypothetical attacker) cannot impersonate a user.

He spent 100 thousand rubles on all this. It certainly sounds like madness for such a simple task. I am not saying that it should be done that way. I usually look for cheap solutions, but it didn’t work out here.

What’s in the plans:

1. Social features to maintain shared collections;

2. Ability to fill in a ready list;

3. Ability to move items between lists and combine them.

I invited friends and acquaintances to entertain the Collector. And one hundred users created two thousand notes in a couple of months. I am glad that it was not only me who needed it. In general, a cool thing. Now we’ve kind of polished everything to give a public link: https://t.me/collcoll_bot

The bot is free. There is no advertising and there will not be. If you have ideas that can be fixed, write them in the comments.