Considering the lacking features of current messaging apps, and the continued growth of the gaming industry, the market was ripe for a new ‘Gamer’ focused messaging app. Other online stores have tried to add on social media features, but those connection are locked into their platform, and are usually disconnected from the game’s own social ecosystem.

In comes Discord, with the ease of ability to jump in and out of voice chats when compared to Skype or Ventrilo, but still allows for tight moderation like Slack, without the corporate dogma. Allowing scattered online communities to coalesce in one place. And for me and my friends, it’s been a great way to keep in touch. Then as friends invited other friends, it was a matter of time till others would be invited that I wouldn’t know. To keep things lively, and help a bit with moderation, I looked for add-ons that’d help.

I’ve seen what other other severs had, and it helps me decide on the main things I wanted:

  1. Automated posting
  2. Interaction
  3. Role assignment

For #1, MEE6 covered Twitch streamers pretty well. There are a few big name we all liked, but mostly to advertise when any of us or our friends were live then everyone could know.

Another thing is we wanted to automatically post from various subreddits, specifically r/buildapcsales and r/GameDeals. Though MEE6 has a subreddit follow feature, it mentions all new posts. Looking around, I found a web-hook write up for IFTTT that only reposts what’s hot for a given subreddit which worked well.

For #2, I saw a few cool bots that could do some stuff. Some had jokes, Pokecord allows you to play Pokemon via messaging. But overall most seemed like a bit too much for just the few of us, so I just settled on a bot to reply with copypastas for keywords in messages. Trying out some other bots in a test sever, I settled on ‘Yet Another General Purpose Discord Bot’ (YAGPDB). As a bonus, my friend also added Groovy which is a DJ for voice chats. So we can put on music while playing another game, chatting, or bomb another chat with some audio clips.

As for #3, I initially tried MEE6’s built in bot commands that allow for adding and removing roles, then made a channel specifically for giving it commands to avoid filling up other channels. Though most liked it, setting it up for each role was rough since you had to make an add and remove command for each role. Looking into YAGPDB more, it has the ability to make role-menus which allows users to self assign roles by reacting to a ‘menu’ message which was a lot easier.

Overall we’re all satisfied with how the server is running. It does feel a bit odd to have the bots ‘make noise’ to make it seem more active than it really is. But it does give us a reason to check in every now and then, which has us ‘bumping’ into each other and make staying in touch easy. Which is always a good thing.