Monty The Bot

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from the lack of networking and socializing during the pandemic. This bot hopes to provide greater networking within a server and hence help with entrepreneurship and idea generation as well as help people find other common individuals to talk to. This is extremely important to maintain good mental health and avoid lonliness.

What it does

Since so much happens online and over the last few years in quarantine, we've seen the difficulties connecting online Monty provides an intuitive networking experience on discord. Users who want to network ask the bot to make them a profile, the bot will ask questions such as classes taken, interests, and degree of match. Based on those criteria the bot will check for matches and return a list of discord users that are also looking to network.

The benefit is that large communities exist on discord, so it's more viable to integrate with discord than trying to create a standalone thing. Additionally, the user can redo the questions and update their profile. By regularly asking the bot for connections they will get an updated list (new people who added profiles to bots, others that changed their profile).

How we built it

We built the bot using the python wrapper for discord, python and using Replit for the database and hosting. Tasks were divided as follows:

The entire team worked on brainstorming, testing and ideation Sharjeel - Worked on the bot (creating matches, working with database, "quirks", and refactoring) Nouman - Worked on the bot (user interaction, form input, and setting up the bot on discord) Vivian - Tested the bot and worked on the website to demo the possible business side

Challenges we ran into

There were a few challenges along the way. Creating a bot required usage of async programming which the team was unfamiliar with, however, with some fancy googling and quick learning an end product was made. On the day of submission, the Discord API blocked our access since the bot is hosted on Replit which is in a cluster that shares IP. Fortunately, by shifting the bot to a new Replit we bypassed this problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of successfully creating a discord bot on our first attempt, additionally, we used new concepts such as async programming while making the bot.

What we learned

Technically we learned how to make bots, and use async programming. However, other skills learned were how to code as part of a team, and the importance of commenting code!

What's next for Monty The Bot

Monty will continue to grow with new functionalities such as more customized connections, and connecting with other platforms. Additionally, Monty can be given as service to other universities and even other societies at the University of Windsor

Built With

• discord.py
• python
• replit
• replit.db