Study on the Development and Implementation of Ubiquitous Bots for the Discord Interface

Abstract

Over the past few years, Discord’s popularity has grown tremendously, expanding its target user demographic. Discord, in recent times, has broken the walls that they had previously encapsulated themselves within, and are growing to be much more than an application meant exclusively for gamers. Now, colleges, schools, offices, and groups with common interests have come together to establish communities where all parties are benefited. Discord provides a platform for developers to contribute to the community and various guilds with its publicly available Application Programming Interface (API) - called the Discord API. This paper aims to analyse bot applications, taking our own bot created for student communities, called ‘Kanmani’, written in Python, as an example. Development of a bot involves a multitude of steps right from creating an application on the developers’ portal, writing code for the backend of the bot, ensuring maintenance of security features, and hosting it on a platform that allows the service to be always available to Discord servers. Depending on the requirements of a server and its members, an appropriate bot can be developed and added using Discord's API.