SmartPing Discord

Sup, it sure has been a minute! With fully operational v1 of the bot, here’s what you need to know:

The SpartPing discord bot is a bot designed to call your friends for you, literally!

Mentioning users to attract their attention quickly becomes annoying, and when it’s time to assemble the crew, the message quickly becomes very long and mainly consists of “@ user1, @ user2, etc.”.

Discord solved this problem by adding roles that can be pinged, but that introduces new problems, that SmartPing is designed to solve:

• Discord enforces a strict limit of 250 roles per server, and a large community might have better uses for those than organizing 15 people to play minecraft once a week. SmartPing solves this by organizing and mentioning users via its own system, independent of roles
• You need a relatively high access level within a discord server to be able to create and manage, so the amount of people capable of that is limited, especially on a large server. Solution: since SmartPing is independent of the role system, call groups can be created and managed by regular users, with server admins always being able to intervene and take control if needed
• Should you create a role, it is either only mentionable by administrators or everyone. Former is only viable for announcements, and cannot be used by users to organize themselves. Latter introduces the ability for users to spam the role. This is once again solved by SmartPing by enforcing a once-per-five-minutes ping policy that can only be circumvented by server admins

Development of this bot touched, among other things on asynchronous python code and event listeners/handlers, the latter of which is not implemented in hikari, so the handlers for the commands, autocomplete (did i mention the bot features autocomplete for group names?) and callback actions were written by me manually! I also had to touch up on my database knowledge, which, while is kind of annoying, was a lot of fun. I deployed to my dad’s (thanks, dad!) heroku server, where it is to stay for the foreseeable future

You can try the bot out yourself, today! After adding it to your server, start by using /group create to create your first call group and then go from there! All commands are available and documented through discord’s in-built slash command system

Peace!