MapleStory 2 Discord News Bot

This Discord bot scrapes the MapleStory 2 news page and posts new entries to a channel.

Method A: Adding the bot simply to your Discord server

Click here to add it to your Discord Server.

Run

To get the news, the bot requires a channel to post in. I configurated it that way, that it will look for a channel called news. So create that channel, and the news will be posted there.

The bot will look for new posts every hour automatically. If you just add the bot to the server it posts nothing, because the bot is up to date with current news, wait until a new post is available.

Commands

• !news Manually crawl the news page once and post if new entries were found (if you don't want to wait an hour).

Additional

This is currently still in some sort of test mode, if you have any issues please let me know. I do host it on my own server which costs money of course. If you appreciate the work I do, think about donating a coffee with PayPal, thanks! :)

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Method B: Manual Installation

This bot is written to run with node.js.

After it's installed, use npm install in the bot project to install all dependencies.

You have to add your own discord user-id (enable developer mode in discord, right click your profile and select "Copy ID") and a bot token to the settings.json, you can read more on how to generate a token here.

Never share your token with other people

Run

You can start the bot with node bot.js command or using the run.sh (linux) so your bot automatically reconnects if it loses the connection.

Options

Inside the settings.json you can define the most basic options:

• token Required to run the bot, see installation above
• prefix Defines the symbol which initializes commands, default is "!"
• owner The required ID of the owner, see installation above
• channelName The channel where the news should be posted to, default is "news"
• autoCrawlTime Definies in which interval news are going to be checked/posted, default is 1 (hour)
• autoStartCrawl If set to true (default) you don't need to use commands to run the news update, helpful if your bot restarts a lot. Set to false if you want to manually control the crawling.

Features

If you disabled autoStartCrawl then you need to start the crawling manually with commands. You can either crawl just one time whenever you want, or use a command to let it auto crawl in a specific interval. I prohibited the use of commands to others to avoid abusing it, if you want others to use the commands, you might should add specific conditions and roles manually.

• !news Manually crawl the news page once and post if new entries were found
• !news auto Auto crawls the news page in an interval and post once a new entry is found (default: autoCrawlTime (1))
• !news auto <number> Same as above, but you can define the interval in which it should check for news (does not override the settings)

When you run the crawler for the first time it will post the latest news entry to the news channel because the initial news.json is empty. At the next crawling it won't post it again. Sometimes the staff edits news entries, if this happens the crawler identifies them as a new post and will post it again.

Dependencies

• discord.js: Core package to write nodejs based Discord bots
• simplecrawler: Simple yet mighty package to scrape websites
• cheerio: Used to work with the crawler response (jQuery like syntax)
• enmap: Offers data structure with additional utility methods, especially useful if you want to use mongodb and so on instead of JSON
• FileSystem "fs": A preinstalled nodejs package to write and read files. It's actually okay for this bot, but if you want to write a big one you should consider using a database/enmap or whatever instead.

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I've written this bot with expanding in mind, you don't actually need to use enmap to store the commands (because we have only one command) or the events, all could essentially be in one file. You could use this as a boilerplate for your own bot and throw the news function away essentially.

Any questions? Drop me a message in Discord @ Zanktus#1052