Discord Abbreviation Expander

before the plugin was applied
after the plugin was applied

Inspiration

Almost everyone uses social media daily, especially to chat with their friends and family. One problem with these social media platforms however, is that a large amount of them encourage abbreviations of supposedly common phrases, in order to save time typing them all out, but not everyone knows what each abbreviation stands for. That's where our program comes into play. We hope that our program can help its users have a better time understanding the messages that other people send on Discord!

What it does

The program scans the text on the screen in Discord and changes any abbreviations it detects into its expanded form.

How we built it

We started off by building the Discord plugin for the BetterDiscord plugin loader, so we based the formatting off of what the website suggested. Then we made a way to scan the text within Discord, so that we could basically find and replace the text with a pre-made list of popular abbreviations.

Challenges we ran into

Since it was our first hackathon, we weren't very experienced with coding for long bouts of time and had trouble coming up with an idea. When we followed through with the discord plugin idea, we found out that BetterDiscord only accepts plugins made in JavaScript, so we had to try and learn functionalities related to JavaScript to learn how to make something. Later on we also encountered the challenge of figuring out how discord handles their data and learning how to scrape the text and change it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually submitted a project that works (albeit a bit dubiously). We coded something in JavaScript, a programming language that everyone on our team didn't know at first.