ServeryBot

Inspiration

We often found ourselves having to pause our conversation on our personal discord server so we could open up the dining.rice.edu website to check for a servery to eat at. We wanted to save the hassle by making a discord bot that would pull up the menu within the server.

What it does

Pulls the current menu from the front page of dining.rice.edu and notes whether or not a servery is closed.

How we built it

We utilized beautiful-soup to yield the servery and their menu items after which we implemented the menus into a discord bot (python).

Challenges we ran into

Scanning dining.rice.edu took extensive research and Baker College Kitchen caused an edge case due to the different naming convention. Then, managing time with other events like CTF was a challenge for us. Finally, as it was our first time using GitHub, we had some issues acclimating to its features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The bot is successful and we'll be using it in our personal discord server. We know going forward we can save considerable time by avoiding an extra step towards learning what is for lunch and dinner. We hope other Rice students consider using the bot to save time.

What we learned

We developed an initial understanding of the difficulty and practicality of using git and GitHub. As it was our first intro to git, we quickly realized its extensiveness and practicality. We now understand the basics of Discord's API which we can apply to future projects. In addition, learning how to webscrape is a boon we'll utilize in future events and personal projects.

What's next for ServeryBot

Extending ServeryBot's functionality to include nutrition information (soy, peanuts, dairy, etc.) is our first next step. This would be more convenient for those in the server with dietary restrictions. Introducing a polling function so server members could vote on a servery to visit will also help reduce unnecessary conversation and conflict.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• discord
• python
• requests