DiscordAutoThreadBot

A simple Discord bot to allow users to automatically join any newly created thread.

Status

This project is actively maintained and functional (as of late 2023 at least), however it is lower priority after the advent of Discord Forums. Its primary use case is for one specific Discord community (Denizen) and while outside users are welcome to use this bot or fork it or whatever, I don't necessarily have enough free time anymore to consistently provide support for use-cases outside my own needs.

Usage Details

The way it works is simple: somebody with admin permission on the Discord can type @AutoThreadsBot add (user) to add a user to the list, or remove to remove them.

The (user) can be either a user ID, or an @ping of the user.

Whenever a thread is created, all users on the list get added to the thread.

You can also use @AutoThreadsBot user (user) whitelist/blacklist/clear (channels) to configure a specific user to be whitelisted or blacklisted to certain channels. Channels are referenced by ID or with a #channel tag. The list can be separated with spaces or commas.

You can also @AutoThreadsBot user (user) forumexclude (true/false) to configure whether to exclude that user from being auto-added to Forum channels.

Users on the list can block the bot to be added to the thread without seeing the notification.

There is a maximum of 15 users you can add to the list. This is because adding new users to a thread gets rate limited (4 users per second) so the more you have, the longer the bot has to freeze for each thread.

If you're running your own instance, you can edit this number by editing GuildDataHelper.cs, find the public const int MAXIMUM_PER_LIST = 15; line and change 15 to whatever you please.

If you reach the limit, check @AutoThreadsBot list to see if there's any users you can remove.

You can also configure @AutoThreadsBot firstmessage (text) to set a message that the bot will post in any new thread, before adding users. You can use this to ping users to add them into threads too (as a way to reduce the delay for the ratelimit, at the cost of the annoying notification showing up for those users in the ping message).

You can also configure @AutoThreadsBot extramessage (text) for the current thread-user-add hack to send additional text, for example a role ping. The current hack works by sending a blank message, then editing it to contain pings, then deleting the message - which effectively adds users to a thread without actually pinging them. This may not work in the future if Discord's API changes.

The bot can also apply username-prefixing if wanted, via @AutoThreadsBot autoprefix true. This is a feature we use on the Denizen discord to more readily distinguish threads. It applies the format (Username) titlehere, so for example if mcmonkey creates a thread I need help, it becomes (mcmonkey) I need help. This will disable if the thread title already has a prefix.

You can also use @AutoThreadsBot autopin true to enable automatic pinning of the first post in a thread after it's created.

You can also use @AutoThreadsBot adminrole (role) to set a specific role as having bot-admin permission (or 0 to disable).

Anybody who has the Manage Threads permission (or who owns a thread) can use /archive while in a thread to archive that thread without locking it. This also is available as a @AutoThreadsBot archive command. This is left in ThreadBot because Discord's developers have casually deleted the GUI button that does this natively in Discord with no explanation on two separate occasions, leaving us unable to archive threads for several days both times.

Want To Add The Public Instance?

• Just click here.

Setup Your Own Instance

• 0: Before setup: This is intended to run on a Linux server, with git, screen, and dotnet-6-sdk installed. If you're not in this environment... you're on your own for making it work. Should be easy, but I'm only documenting my own use case here.
• 1: Clone this repo with git clone
• 2: Make sure to checkout submodules as well: git submodule update --init --recursive (the start.sh will automatically do this for you)
• 3: create folder config at top level
• 4: You need to have a Discord bot already - check this guide if you don't know how to get one. Requires messages intent, and slash commands grant. Make sure to add the bot to your server(s).
• 5: within config create file token.txt with contents being your Discord bot's token
• 6: ./start.sh. Will run in a screen which you can attach to with screen -r autothreadbot

Licensing pre-note:

This is an open source project, provided entirely freely, for everyone to use and contribute to.

If you make any changes that could benefit the community as a whole, please contribute upstream.

The short of the license is:

You can do basically whatever you want (as long as you give credit), except you may not hold any developer liable for what you do with the software.

The long version of the license follows:

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2022-2023 Alex "mcmonkey" Goodwin

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.