Forumlancer | forum notifications on Discord

Forumlancer
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.

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.

How to use it

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.

Commands

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.

‣ watchlist

Show all saved watch terms.

‣ clear

Clear 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.

‣ excluded

List excluded forum accounts.

General

‣ help

Show a help message. Run help <command> to see help about that command.

‣ init

Configure the bot to use this channel for notifications.

‣ info

Show 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.

Known issues

Weird backslashes appear in embeds on mobile

Discord's Markdown parser on mobile is broken. I can't fix this.

How it works

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.