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Nia grabbing relevant twitch data after discord queries
query user friends data after scraping Steam data
another interaction between Nia and Steam

About My Project: NiaLink

What is NiaLink?

NiaLink is a sophisticated Discord integration designed to transform online communities into searchable knowledge bases. Think of it as a digital archivist for your server. It uses an AI engine called Nia to analyze past conversations and provide intelligent answers to your questions, saving you from scrolling through thousands of old messages.

What Inspired Us?

Discord is where most of our technical discussions and gaming plans happen, but that information disappears quickly. We were inspired by the idea of "Grounded AI"—using a large language model that actually knows your specific data. We wanted a way to query our own community's history as if we were asking a real person who remembered every detail.

How We Built It

The project was developed using Node.js and the discord.js library.

The Indexing System: We wrote scripts to "scrape" text channels and convert them into Markdown files that the AI can easily digest.
API Integrations: We connected the bot to the Steam and Twitch APIs so it could pull in gaming stats and live stream data.
The Nia Brain: This is the core logic that takes all that raw data, indexes it, and allows users to search it using natural language commands.

What We Learned

Building NiaLink taught us about data privacy and the complexity of managing large amounts of information. We had to ensure that each Discord server's data was isolated so that private conversations didn't leak between communities. We also learned how to orchestrate external command-line tools within a persistent web service.

Challenges We Faced

One of the biggest hurdles was "cleaning" the data. Discord messages are full of emojis, slang, and weird formatting, which can confuse an AI. We had to build filters to sanitize the text before indexing it. Additionally, managing the asynchronous nature of multiple APIs while keeping the bot responsive was a significant technical challenge.

NiaLink turns every Discord server into a living library, making community knowledge more accessible than ever.