SDSLabs : Discord Bot Project Proposal which I submitted in Jan‘22 in my first year for Winter of Code ‘22. I got in. I worked a bit with code and computers just after 12th and the commencement of college but this kind of officially marks the start of my tech career in college.
Author’s Note :
Looking back at it after 2 years + and having now delved to a certain good value into the world of tech, it all comes back with a tinge if nostalgia. Story Time : When I was in my first year, I along with Vansh (you might know him as Percy) and Arshita, set up an institute discord server, due to the lack of interactions between our year thanks to the monotony of the online semester.
These are some server stats.
The bot to read the bot count seems broken as we had 26+ bots. Anyways, it all started from here, we added a confession channel based on tickets and a bot already available, but we didn’t forsee the security issues we could have run into. How it worked was that first you write in a open channel your confession calling the bot and then the bot deleted that message from the channel and put its anonymously under the confession channel. It was some open source bot we found.
The issues were that the message is visible for a split second and lurkers keeping their eyes on this channel might see who was the last person to write and then match with the latest message from the confession channel. It’s vague but i hope i made sense.
But the main issue we had was that the logs of messages deleted were stored in moderator channel which you can go inside settings and see inside server logs somewhere. The format was basically -
ConfessionBot deleted the message by “username” at 3:40 from this channel
something like that. You can again match up the time from the time of a message from confessions channel.
Now we did not knew that the logs are there and did not have enough free time to randomly dig things up. What ended up happening was that one of our mods (we made some more people mods for smoother flow) basically found it and leaked it and kind of told people who wrote which confession, for a set of confessions.
We stepped on fighting the backlash and abuses and instantly responded by suspending the mod, decommissioning the bot, clearing logs, and making a brand new dm type - our own discord bot, lol that first year energy of drama curation.
So, we created a discord confession bot from scratch, made it dm type, now you dm the bot and the bot puts the message in the public channel on our server. Worked nicely till Herkou stopped it’s free hosting services. 😭
So yeah! this is how it all started, my journey of discord bots, i made a few more discord bots and found that the process was shit and wanted to make it smoother for a non-developer. I though of creating a discord bots for creating discord bots 💀
SDSLabs’ winter of code started at that time, so I instead pivoted on creating a site for the same where someone can make a customisable discord bot with 0 coding involved and the bot will be in full control by the user unlike the other bots which are just providing services.
Hence the proposal name DCode (DC for discord + code … get it ? get it ? phew ) for winter of code.
Things to note here are : I identified a problem, and even though i knew shit about how to solve it, i tried, asked my seniors, got guidance and created a proposal for a month long mentorship thing. I was gonna work on DCode regardless of my selection but it was nice getting guidance from Labs seniors.
If any first semester student from IITR is reading this planning to apply somewhere and is sort of anxious due to so many programs by so many clubs, let me boil it down to 3 points :