Discorg

What was our inspiration?

In the middle of a pandemic, digital communication has become more important than every. Platforms such as Discord, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams are skyrocketing in popularity. Due to this, the importance of clear and easy communication through these platforms has become increasingly apparent with the explosion of usage these apps face. With Discord especially, many of the features offered in Microsoft Teams and Zoom are missing which allow for better scheduling and meeting organization. Because of this, our team decided to create a Discord bot that adds these functionalities to Discord servers.

What is it?

Our Discord bot adds the primary tools required to schedule and organize meetings with other Discord users. Using a series of different text commands, users can create, edit, and delete meetings. These meetings track a name, description, start time, duration, and participants. To join a meeting, a user can be added by the creator or "react" to the meeting's creation. Additionally, certain users can be given "admin" privileges for meetings, allowing them to edit or delete them (by default, only the meeting's creator can edit or delete their meeting). To help better manage meeting organization, our Discord bot can also list the meetings hosted in a server, or privately message the meetings that a specific user is attending. For attendance, our bot can be set to automatically remind users missing from a meeting of their absence.

For help in using our bot and organizing meetings, a fully documented help command is provided that lists the operation of each command.

How did we do it?

To build this bot, our group used the Discord.py API. Through this, we were able to create a text bot that responds to various commands through Discord. We also deployed the bot on Heroku so that it can be run remotely.

What did we accomplish and what did we struggle with?

Much of the difficulty we faced was in the attempted scale of our project. We've had dozens of ideas that we wanted to implement into this bot, however, due to the time-frame we had to scale back. Our end goal is to have a bot that can fully support all standard meeting and scheduling features but integrated into Discord. Although many of these features exist in our current version of Discorg, we hope to further develop this bot in the future. In tandem with this, there were features that we attempted to implement but could not due to technical difficulties or otherwise. For example, further support for reactions on posts being used as commands was planned, however bugs within the current library version prevented a clean solution from being reached.

What did we learn?

Through developing Discorg, our team was able to learn extensively about the Discord.py API and how bots interact with users, channels, and reactions.

What's next for Discorg?

For the future of Discorg, we aim to add more features and publicly release the bot. With continued support for further features, improved UI/UX design, and more efficient algorithms.