CuratorBot
About
CuratorBot is a bot dedicated to selecting the best screenshots from a channel and sending them to another channel. In addition, it uses discord as a host for a website and exports a couple of.json database files to a github repo (I don't like to pay for good hosting, sorry).
Since I made this for a server I am in, it has a lot of assumptions, like searching for a message with text around the screenshot message if this one has no text specifying the game, so I apologise for it.
The bot puts every curated shot link in a .json file, creates a thumbnail which is also uploaded to discord and includes it in said .json file and pushes it to a github repo, so the file can be used as a database for a website showing the screenshots and the bot as an updater for said database.
It also creates a database of authors that includes a lot of useful information. This authors database gets updated every time a shot gets accepted into the shots database and every time a message is sent to the socials channel by adding (or updating) the authors information.
How does it work
The concept of "best screenshots" is determined by the reactions of the messages where the images are, so I made a number of algorithms to use these reactions in order to determine if the image is worth sending.
Algorithms
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Basic Curation: Simplest of algorithms, takes the amount of times people reacted to the most reacted emoji of the message and compares it to a trigger value. If the number taken is bigger than said trigger the message is sent.
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Historical Curation: Given the start of a channel (this has to be hardcoded since I was getting a wrong date with the created_at method, sorry) and a "min" a "max" value it does a linear interpolation with said values and a value representing how new is a message so it can vaguely understand the grow of a server overtime. The result of this linear interpolation is used as a trigger value like the Basic Curation.
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Extended Curation: Like Basic Curation but besides taking the amount of the most reacted emoji it also counts the other emojis as well, reduced by a constant.
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CompleteCuration: A combination of Historical Curation and Extended Curation
All algorithms also check if the message has an image, if not they discard the message.
SetUp
To setup this as your own bot you will need to create an .env file with the discord bot token inside:
DISCORD_TOKEN=yourDiscordBotToken
GIT_TOKEN=githubPersonalAccessTokens
Later you will have to change the input channel (where the bot looks up for messages), the output channel (where the bot will send the accepted messages), the thumbnail channel (where the bot will drop the thumbnails it makes) and the socials channel (where the bot gets social links for the authors DB).
You can change the curation algorithms and their values from the code. The info is in the Constants section and at the start of each algorithm function.
Keep in mind that you can also discriminate between different servers for the input and output channels in the getchannel functions.
To change the repo where the bot will push change the link in the Github integration section.
To change the the thumbnails options (extension of the fil, size, filter used in the resizing, etc.) check the Thumbnail creation section.
The bot can ignore shots from people that have an specific rol. To specify the names rol change it in the is_user_ignored function.
Usage
The commands can be accepted in the channel where the images will be sent or via DMs, but you would need to include the users ID in the authorizedusers list for the latter to be accepted.
I made this bot for being able to curate retroactively, so the correct way to use it after setting it up would be to use the !dawnoftimecuration (using a new, clean channel as an output channel) to curate all past screenshots, and later use !starcurating to constantly check for new screenshots for the bot to send. If for some reason the bot goes offline, whenever it gets online again it will curate from where he was (make sure to run the !dawnoftimecuration command first).
Commands
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!curationsince: Curate the shots that are less than a certain number of days old.
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!dawnoftimecuration: Curate a seated up channel since it was created.
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!startcurating: Start actively curating the shots since the number of days specified by the daystocheck value.
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!forcepost MESSAGE_ID: Force the bot to post a message regardless of the amount of reactions. ATTENTION: a MESSAGE_ID that doesnt belongs to the inputchannel will crash the bot. Make sure to only force posts with an image in an attachment (aka uploading it to discord) or text with ONLY an external image.url.
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!setcuratorintervals: Define the time interval (in seconds) between the channel reactions check.
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!setdaystocheck: Define the maximum age of the messages to actively check.
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!setinputchannel: Define from what channel will the bot curate.
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!setoutputchannel: Define the channel where the curated messages will be sent.
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!help: Show this help message.
Do bear in mind that the values changed by the set commands work only on runtime. If you don't know if your bot will go down temporarily change the values in the file instead.
JSON Database structure
The .json file generated, modified and pushed by the bot consists of elements of the following structure
Shots DB
{"gameName": string,
"shotUrl": string,
"height": int,
"width": int,
"thumbnailUrl": string
"author": int,
"date": string,
"score": int,
"ID": int,
"epochTime": int,
"spoiler": bool,
"colorName": string }
The "score" value represents the amount of "points" the shot got. The way is set up is the amount of reactions of the most reacted emoji. This value will be updated when the bot runs the reaction checks.
The "date" is using the format Year-Month-DayTHour:Minute:Second.Millisecond.
The "ID" value is the value the tinyDB assigns to the element of the structure being described and the epochTime is the epoch time of the shot. Both can be used to iterate and sort, but I would say the latter one is more reliable.
The "author" value is the authorid used in the authors DB.
The "colorName" value is the name of the most prominent color in the shot, if you want to do color search or some fancy stuff.
Authors DB
{"authorNick": string,
"authorid": int,
"authorsAvatarUrl": string,
"flickr": string,
"twitter": string,
"instagram": string,
"steam": string,
"othersocials": [string]}
The "authorsNick" is the lastes nick retrieved of the user, the "authorid" is the internal value discord assigns to the user, "authorsAvatarUrl" its, well avatar lol, and "flickr", "twitter", "instagram" and "steam" are links for those websites, where "othersocials" is a list of links from websites that doesnt match the mentioned sites.
Final notes
I made this bot in a free week that I had and it kinda grew up from there. Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to learn front-end programming to make a website showing the shots. Hopefully someone will make one and I will be sure to include a link here whenever that happens.
I apologize that I didn't write the bot so everyone can use the one I am hosting. Hopefully the code and explanation here are enough for setting it up yourself, and if not I hope at least you learned something from it. I know I did.