Discord bot functions

[gbowne1]

This bot will replace the MEE6 bot in our Discord server.

So, what functionality should it have?

MEE6 has a web dashboard to set features, etc.

• Reaction Roles
• Leaderboard
• Moderation
• announce when users join/leave server
• Event creation/notifications
• Music (Spotify)
• Announce when server members go live on Twitch

Any thoughts?

[hitblast]

Except for the last two points (Spotify-native music system and Twitch announcements), all the other mentioned points can be easily done using the discord.py library's default feature set.

• Since Spotify's SDK is officially not available for Python, a method of getting only the metadata of the song from Spotify and later fetching it using youtube-dl can be done. I might search a bit more to check if there's any potential third-party library that can be used to directly get the song from within Spotify.

• When it comes to making/using an event handler for Twitch, I think you could potentially use TwitchIO.

• A web dashboard can be made using Flask coupled with a very basic static tech stack. I don't think a lot more is needed.

[gbowne1]

@hitblast

The current plan is to make a much more useable Discord bot than MEE6.

MEE6 is great for getting a bot going quickly in a new Discord server. It however has a lot of things that are either behind the paywall, or just not really needed. Our server has been aound a while and after using Discord and MEE6, I think a better bot could be made with Discord.py.

I like the fact that it has a web dashboard.. while not the greatest it allows the bot user(s) able to control a number of the settings.

I haven't looked at what Discord.py is able to do and provide yet. But I have heard that its as good as its .js alternative.

[hitblast]

@gbowne1

If you want to make a web dashboard then you'd like to implement some sort of backend for it. The basics could be done with all the existing knowledge about web dev you have, basically by using plain HTML, CSS and JS. For the backend, you could use something like Flask that runs alongside your bot on a separate thread. This would also mean that you'd have to implement multithreading.

I have also edited the original answer after your reply :)

[gbowne1]

That sure is an interesting thought.

I have heard of Flask and saw some tooling for it.

I don't know a lot about Python (yet). I definitely would be working on the dashboard side while I learn Python.

[gbowne1]

@hitblast

From a little bit of exploration on GitHub, I think this is what is needed to get access to commands:

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

[hitblast]

Yeah, this is the code for implementing discord.py's commands extension into your bot. This module is mostly used to define commands and decorate functions to make them work as one. Other stuffs include the commands.Bot class which is a superset of discord.Client and so on.

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

bot = commands.Bot() # calling Bot

@bot.command(name='hello', help='Greets members')
async def _hello(ctx: commands.Context): # some type hinting to make clear which class is actually handling the context (ctx in this case)
    await ctx.send('Hello!')
    
bot.run('your token here')

[gbowne1]

@hitblast

Alright. Thanks. Thats pretty much what I have seen across the bots I looked at.

So, just thinking about next steps with the bot and more imports.

import aiohttp
import datetime
import time
import logging
import os
import sys
import asyncpg
import asyncio
import json
import traceback
import logging
import config
import Cogs

Create folder Cogs
Create folder utils
Create folder test or tests

Create file .gitignore
Create file pyproj.toml
Create file init.py
Create file main.py

[gbowne1]

Can we work on getting Notifications soon?

Also notify in #general channel or #bot chatter members go live on Twitch or YouTube.

Minimum of 12 spots.

Also new Discord server join notifications. Also from YouTube or Twitch.

@gbowne1 @hitblast @furtidev @Ba3a-G @BenCos17

[Ba3a-G]

I will get the server join/leave notification system done by tomorrow.

[gbowne1]

Great!