Even though I have pretty much given up streaming, I am still active in promotion of our group’s participants and in the administration of our streaming community Discord, the Wombattery.

I’ve written about our server before in terms of what we had to do in order to lock it down. Because we advertise the server to stream viewers in the hope that they’ll stop by and add to our community we want to make sure that we don’t get spammers in there who just gum up the works. I’ve seen all kinds of cool mechanisms for creating “lobbies” that require visitors to type in an answer or (even cooler) click a reaction emoji in order to gain the role that allows them to see other channels. We also have the required Twitch announcement channel for when people go live, and a system which allows people to earn roles based on their participation on the server itself. The problem is that all of this is spread out amongst three different bots because no one bot does everything that we need it to do.

So I’m writing a custom bot: the Watching Wombat.

Basically we have three requirements.

• Secure the server
• Participation-based perks like roles and access
• Twitch announcement functionality

I think that is the order in which I’m going to tackle this because I feel that dealing with roles and members is going to be easiest on account of the fact that the facilities for working with that data is built into then libraries I am using for the bot. Twitch integration will probably come last since it will require integration with a third party system, and there will be a whole new world of learning when that comes into play.We’ll also be looking into “quality of life” features such as an expanded profile which will allow members to set their social media handles, in-game names, etc. Building a bot can be a hell of a rabbit hole when you realize how many cool features you can add in, so I’ve asked the admins of the server to throw in any suggestions that they feel would benefit the community.

As of right now the status of the project is still in the planning and learning stages. I also need to find a proper environment for hosting that will allow for the necessary systems to support the bot, like file system access or a supported database. I’ll try and keep a log of the progress here at Scopique.com, since gawd knows I haven’t been filling this space with regular posts these days!