Introducing Neox Bot v1.2.0 - A discord bot for Neoxian city

Git Hub: https://github.com/bala41288/neox-bot/releases/tag/v1.2.0

Introduction

Neoxian city is a virtual city in Discord owned by @neoxian in other words called as Mr. Dragon. It is one of the favorite places for many people where so many exciting things happen. These exciting things include giveaways, discordtips, knowledge sharing, token sharing, love sharing, etc. There was a user story from @neoxian to have his own bot for the city with some features to make giveaways easier.

The version of the bot that I'm going to be talking about in this article is v1.2.0 with a giveaway feature. The previous versions of the bot had functionalities to display the date and time of the Steem and Wls posts shared in the discord channels. This will make sure the post is not past the payout date. In the current version of the bot, a giveaway feature is introduced where people who have access to the #giveaway channel in Neoxian city can do a giveaway.

History behind the idea

There is already a giveaway discord bot available. Anyone who owns a discord server can invite the existing giveaway bot to their discord server. The bot is written in Java and the source code is also open to everyone.

Git Hub: https://github.com/jagrosh/GiveawayBot

The challenge in this existing bot is that the bot goes offline quite often and we will not be able to do giveaways using this bot. Another alternative to using this giveaway bot would be to take the code and do a self-hosting to use it. In our case, we wanted to implement all the functionalities of the Neoxian server in just one bot so that it can be managed easily. The future versions of this bot will have other improvised functionalities as well.

Technical details

I wanted to write the bot using NodeJs with the help of DiscordJs. I have used the following technology stack to build this discord bot.

• Node.js
• Express
• Discordjs
• Steem
• Moment Js
• Mongo DB

Till the previous version of the bot, there was no need for a database. In order to implement a giveaway feature, I introduced a mongo database to store and retrieve the giveaway information. This will also store the history of giveaways happening in Neoxian City. In the future, it will be possible to identify who won the maximum number of giveaways and who initiated lots of giveaways. After all, stats always attracts us.

Usage

$neox - Provides the current version of the bot

$neox gcreate - Interactive giveaway setup

The source code is open with an ISC license. Anyone can use the code to build their own bots or applications.

Code Snippet

The main file is the app.js file and it has most of the code. For anyone who is already into coding and is familiar with Javascript, the source code is self-explanatory. I would like to provide some more details about the Giveaway feature logic.

I first create a dummy giveaway record in the mongodb collection when the giveaway is initiated by a user.

if (msg.content.indexOf('$neox gcreate') == 0) {
                            console.log('no data');
                            var giveaway = new Giveaway({
                                initiatorID: msg.author.id,
                                initiatorUsername: msg.author.username,
                                createdTimestamp: msg.createdTimestamp,
                                startTime: "",
                                endTime: "",
                                channel: "",
                                duration: "",
                                winnerCount: "",
                                winners: "",
                                prize: "",
                                gid: "",
                                status: "started"
                            });
                            giveaway.save((err, doc) => {
                                if (!err) {
                                    msg.channel.send(`:tada: Alright! Let's set up your giveaway! First, what channel do you want the giveaway in?`);
                                    return;
                                }
                                else {
                                    console.log('Error in Saving Giveaway: ' + JSON.stringify(err, undefined, 2));
                                    msg.channel.send(`There was an error while initiating the Giveaway. Please contact Administrator.`);
                                }
                            })
                        }

After the record is created, in each interaction with the bot, I keep updating the existing record with the information by checking what is empty so far. I also used a field to control the status of the giveaway so that if a giveaway is canceled or uncompleted, it can be marked accordingly.

The replies and the messages from the bot can be sent in an attractive layout with the help of embeds feature available in the discord. I used a piece of code to send the information in the form of Embed. This will look neat and attractive.

bot.channels.get(ch).send({
                                                    "embed": {
                                                        "title": ":tada: Neoxian City Giveaway :tada:",
                                                        "description": value.prize,
                                                        "url": "",
                                                        "color": 2146335,
                                                        "footer": {
                                                            "icon_url": "https://steemitimages.com/p/4qEixipsxSf1jXvCicS49aiaKDfFxASf1eKR39suyU4qmikNaw2FMepusxFTD1TUaJ",
                                                            "text": footer
                                                        },
                                                        "fields": [
                                                            {
                                                                "name": "React with :tada: to enter the Giveaway",
                                                                "value": timeRemaining
                                                            },
                                                            {
                                                                "name": `${value.winnerCount} Winners`,
                                                                "value": gift.repeat(value.winnerCount)
                                                            }
                                                        ]
                                                    }
                                                });

The above piece of code when viewed in the discord server will look like the below.

The winner selection was a bit tricky initially for me to implement. When I first started exploring that, I had to track who clicked on the reaction and then choose the random winner from that. There was an inbuilt method available in the DiscordJs called awaitReactions.

msg.awaitReactions(filter, {
   time: data.duration * 60000
})

I provided the duration the bot should wait and collect the reactions to move to the next step. Based on the timeout, the bot will check the reactions and exclude the reaction from the bot itself and pick the random winners from the users who reacted to the giveaway.

Road map

I'm planning to add some more features in the future to the Neox-bot. As mentioned earlier, the idea is to have one powerful task that can be smart enough to manage most of the activities in the city. Some already in my list are:

• Any linked dropped by the users in the promotion channel should be converted to SteemPeak link.
• A ranking system to display the top giveaway initiators and top winners.
• A feature to pick a random number between two given numbers. Requested by @aamirijaz.
• A feature that will rank the users based on the chats.