04-14-2021, 06:02 PM
![[Image: HO2pk5R.png]](https://i.imgur.com/HO2pk5R.png)
A Discord bot for DiscoveryGC
Forumlancer is a Discord bot that provides notifications for activity on the DiscoveryGC forums. Never miss a post again by adding it to your server!
Purpose
The forum is an integral part of Discovery Freelancer. Despite this, it is often difficult or frustrating for members to stay abreast of activity relevant to them. The forum search function has a minimum query length of 4 characters - useless for the many player factions that go by three-letter abbreviations.
![[Image: 3AvBBeb.png]](https://i.imgur.com/3AvBBeb.png)
Forumlancer allows you to automatically subscribe to threads whose titles contain terms you are interested in and receive notifications of their activity in your Discord server.
First, add Forumlancer#5256 to your server using this link.
Optionally, you can create a role for Forumlancer to constrain it to the channel you want to use for notifications. The bot must be able to read and send messages and embeds in this channel for it to be useful.
Run f/init in the channel you want to receive notifications in.
The bot will accept commands prefaced with f/. To get started, use f/help. Here are the commands:
Watchlist
‣ watch <term>
Get notifications for threads with titles including this term. Note that terms can include punctuation and are case-insensitive. Terms can also be partial words: for example, "pub" would match titles containing the word "Republic".
‣ unwatch <term>Stop getting notifications for threads including this term.
‣ watchlistShow all saved watch terms.
‣ clearClear the watchlist.
Ignore list
‣ exclude <profile_url>
Prevent a forum account (such as your own) from triggering notifications.
‣ include <profile_url>Stop preventing a forum account from causing notifications.
‣ excludedList excluded forum accounts.
General
‣ help
Show a help message. Run help <command> to see help about that command.
‣ initConfigure the bot to use this channel for notifications.
‣ infoShow information about the bot.
‣ preview <on/off>Configure whether notifications include a preview of post content (defaults to on).
Finally, as a bonus/Easter egg/irritation, Forumlancer will also respond to several Skype emoticon names – e.g. "(bandit)" – so you can reminisce about the good old days.
- Weird backslashes appear in embeds on mobile
Discord's Markdown parser on mobile is broken. I can't fix this.
Rather than scraping the entire contents of the site, Forumlancer periodically scans the "latest threads" sidebar on the forum homepage. I chose this method because it's quick and easy, but also out of consideration for the number of requests made to the web server. An RSS feed for the forum exists, and this would be best of all if not for its posts lagging the actual forum activity by a few hours for some reason.
Forumlancer is written in Ruby and its code is licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0. The source code is available on GitHub.