Spud - the RadioSpiral Discord bot
Spud was originally a Slack bot using the SLAPP library to communicate and provide services that Slack either didn't, or didn't do well.
- List of active users
Extra station-only services:
- Now playing command (also listed the number of current listeners)
To make him somewhat more amusing, Spud was also given a bit of personality by making hiim monitor for mentions and responding some of the time.
Spud provided these services by running an Icecast monitor for the stream, posting messages to Slack via a webhook when the track changes, and monitoring the number of users currently listening.
The active Slack users command was always finicky; Slack changed the APIs that were used to collect the data several times, and they were never particularly accurate.
The switch to Discord
The MOuntain Skies 2021 online music festival presented us with a problem: Slack does not make it easy to join. You need to have an invite to join Slack. Worse, the API we were using to generate auto-invites broke sometime last year, making it necessary to hand-invite people via email.
This is a particular problem when you want the barrier to joining the chat to be as low as possible; partly because you want the audience to join in without friction, and performers, who are busy trying to get ready to play, do not want to have to negotiate a time-intensive process (it is a sad truth that most performers really aren't that interested in joining a chat server until they're required to).
Discord, on the other hand, has very much an open-door policy: if you have the invite URL, you can join without any hassle at all; you don't even have to set up an account.
We set up the Discord, and it was clear that it was a much more friendly option within a coupke of hours, and it was clear we'd want to move to it going forward.
We did want to keep all the functions we had before -- luckily Discord provided some of them out of the box:
- The active users show up fine in the desktop client with no extra effort on our part. (We probably will want to set something up for mobile users, since there's no sidebar for them.)
- Easy sign-up (no special server or email dance required)
This meant that the only thing we'd really need was the "now-playing" monitor.
Porting the code
The infrastructure required for a Discord Node bot is significantly less
than is required for a SLAPP bot. Essentially you only need an index.js
that contains the necessary code to run your bot, and a package.json to hold
the required support libraries.
I used the example discord-botkit code from the Magic 8 Ball example found
here
and here.
We didn't need a very sophisticated bot, so this code was a great base to work
from.
This sufficed to get the base bot in place (Spud's snarking when spoken to
directly replaced the Magic 8 Ball replies). I was pretty much able to lift
the Icecast monitoring wholesale from the old code, bar the posting to
Discord; I was still using a webhook, but the payload needed to switch
slightly. I decided to change the implementation a bit by having Spud post
the track changes to a special #now-playing channel, to prevent him
cluttering up the conversation and scrolling previous shows off the screen.
We tend to have a fairly active chat during shows, and posting the tracks
to the same channel made it hard to scroll back and catch up.
I was able to add a few more commands to show the listener count and show
the current track only; I eliminated the history command, as the #now-playing
channel does a better job. The #now-playing entries were also extended with
a timestamp to make it easir to figure out what was playing at 2PM that was
so good.
Conclusions
- We should have switched earlier; Discord's a much better solution for less-sophisticated users and considerably less cognitive load for the admins and the DJs.
- Discord's easier to work with than Slack is, so far, providing more and better APIs to get the data that we really want.