christmas-countdown/bot

The original Christmas countdown bot for Discord.

Christmas Countdown Bot

The original Christmas Countdown bot for Discord.

Find out more at christmascountdown.live/discord.

Information · Add to Discord · Support

Environment

BL_TOPGG=
BL_BFD=
BL_SPACE=
BL_DBGG=
BL_DADEV=
BL_DBL=
BL_DS=
BL_VOID=
DISCORD_TOKEN=
DATABASE_URL=
PORT=
OWNER=
STATCORD=
SUGGESTIONS_WEBHOOK=

bot's Issues

Replace Countly

Replace Countly with https://statcord.com/ or a custom solution.

I want to use https://grafana.com/ but https://prometheus.io/ isn't intended for long-term storage and analytics. Could use https://www.timescale.com/promscale.

Do something about `/suggest`

because 95% of suggestions are not related to Christmas.

Explore the idea of more US-hosted infrastructure

The general consensus (from my admittedly little knowledge on the subject) seems to be that Discord's main API gateway will probably be hosted in the US. With that in mind, maybe more of the shards could be hosted there?

This will probably need some testing at some point, probably in line with #71 but it'd be fun to explore as it could potentially improve the response time of the bot.

food for thought

Make Secret Santa good

Santa Tracker ending bug

 25/12/22 18:27:33   notice  (manager) 📣  An error was not caught
 25/12/22 18:27:33   error  (manager) ‼️  TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'city')
    at Object.module.exports.track (/home/container/src/santa-tracker.js:41:60)
    at Timeout._onTimeout (/home/container/src/index.js:75:28)
    at listOnTimeout (node:internal/timers:559:17)
    at processTimers (node:internal/timers:502:7)

It doesn't show the ending embed, there is an error before it is sent.

Smooth snow GIFs

Make the countdown images loop more smoothly by making the snow start and end in the same position.

Use webhooks

Better avoid rate-limiting and permissions issues by creating a webhook in the countdown channel, storing the URL and sending a webhook for the countdown message.

Configurable countdown target?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observance_of_Christmas_by_country

• 24th December 00:00
• 24th December 16:00 (https://www.whychristmas.com/cultures/austria)
• 25th December 00:00
• 6th January 00:00
• 7th January 00:00

Web-based initial setup

https://christmascountdown.live/discord/add could have a form that asks

• which countdowns and features to enable
• server timezone (international or local)
• user timezone (suggest from browser)
• #85

Then

1. Store answers in local storage? or submit the form to the bot
2. #79
3. After callback, apply settings.

Also, have a similar wizard for /setup?

Catch MissingPermissions errors

and tell the user how to fix it

Improve Santa Tracker map

The theme (especially font sizes) could be better.
Zoom out more.

Don't keep tring to update missing Santa Tracker messages

If the message doesn't exist anymore, remove the message from the store and send a new one.

Run on the hour rather than every hour from startup

Use cron

Improve Secret Santa Error Messages

The error messages for some Secret Santa errors are really vague or just completely useless. Add more detail to them, something like this:

Localise commands

Add localised names and descriptions for commands and options.

Countdown images

Generate 366 (leap years) images with a big number in the middle and a random Winter/Chrismtas background image

Maybe animated with snow:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations
• https://designers.hubspot.com/blog/how-to-implement-an-animated-snow-effect-using-html5-canvas-and-javascript
• https://seblee.me/2010/11/javascript-html5-canvas-snow-in-3d/
• https://dev.to/benjaminadk/encode-gifs-with-node-4c75
• https://www.developphp.com/video/JavaScript/Particle-Effect-System-Tutorial-Snow-Falling-Animation

Countdown messages push the Santa Tracker out of view

...until the bot is restarted to re-send the message.

Use Interaction#locale

Create webhook with OAuth2

Create the countdown webhook when the bot is added:
https://discord.com/developers/docs/topics/oauth2#webhooks

This would require a functional callback (it could be serverless but needs to connect to the database).

v4: Interactions rewrite

Rewrite the bot (again), most likely ditching akairo, to use interactions (slash commands). Could go serverless (Firebase), which would require #55.

Load balance shards across different physical servers

This is less about handling excessive demand (the existing setup already does that incredibly well, not to toot my own horn) and more just to improve uptime and also potentially response times from the bot.

Essentially, host the different shards of the bot on different servers on different physical nodes rather than how it's currently setup of all the shards on a single container on a single physical server.

Current ideas for this are mainly assuming most of the bot will still be in the same/nearby datacentres however shards will be on nodes all over the world. This is so if a physical server has issues for whatever reason, most shards won't be affected and will go online to handle the increased number of requests.

This idea likely won't be acted on anytime soon, if at all. But I'd like to document this so I know it's something that can be worked on.

Microservice

Separate the gateway so restarts take seconds instead of several minutes.
Doesn't need to be serverless, could use something like https://discordeno.js.org

Premium users, not premium guilds

• Ko-fi assigns cool people role
• Bot checks if user has role (has role = is premium)
• If the owner of a server is premium, the server gets premium features.

Or remove premium entirely?

Add a voice channel countdown

Similar to an older idea for a countdown widget (a message that is updated instead of a new message every day), add an option to update the name of a voice channel with the number of sleeps left:

This could be done with a command that creates a new voice channel with the default (localised) format and setting the guild's voiceChannelId. It could also support custom formats by replacing the first number in the channel name with the new number, instead of overwriting the name entirely.
On Christmas Eve, replace the format with something like 🎅 7 hours left, and 🎄 Merry Christmas! on Christmas Day.

Original idea: https://ptb.discord.com/channels/451745464480432129/516662786760245258/1011050283482234981

Use Guild#preferredLocale

When the bot is added to a server, check its preferredLocale and change the settings if the bot has the locale loaded.

Use stdin for admin commands

https://github.com/christmas-countdown/bot/blob/main/src/listeners/messageCreate.js

Replace these commands with stdin commands because the message intent is now privileged.

Use Weblate

Use Crowdin (or maybe Weblate) for localisation.