dcom (discord community bot) is a (python3.6+) bot for communities to trigger upvotes from specified discord channels/servers. - announcement post

dcom's registration module was a success. It has been working the last 2-3 days and working well.

The remaining planned features were also completed today.

Automatic Curation

After having registration and manual curation capabilities, the next step was building an automatic curation process.

• Step 1: Discord user gains access to a designated role. (Let's call it patron.) in the discord server.

• Step 2: Discord user registers his STEEM account to their discord handle by using the $register command and verifies ownership.

• Step 4: dcom checks the voting power of the main curation account in the background, periodically.

• Step 5: If the voting power is greater than %99, it will fetch a list of votable patron posts in the STEEM blockchain and upvote them with a %20 voting weight. (Voting weight and voting power should be configurable in the .env file.)

There are a couple of limitations are already in place. Ex: A patron can only get one upvote in 24 hours.

^{Bot listens the user change events and marks or remove user's patron role in it's internal database.}

Listening the "role" change events

In order to implement Step1, dcom needs to track member_update events in the discord server.

By attaching your custom function to that event, you get two parameters. The first one is the old instance of the user, the second one is the fresh instance of the user.

That way I could check the roles in both old and fresh instances and checked if there was a change in their "patron" roles.

^{The snippet to check role change events}

Curating in the background

After completing the step1 by listening role changes, the rest of the logic was easy to implement.

A new background task called auto_curation is attached to the main asyncio loop.

This function checks

• if the VP is enough
• if there are registered and available patrons available for curating
• if there are suitable posts with the available patrons

and curates automatically.

One minor problem in this part is that the blocking calls to the STEEM blockchain. Steem doesn't have any asynchronous library to interact with the chain, so there are some parts blocking the i/o.

I don't think that's a huge problem on a small scale like this, but if that results with a lag in the bot, I am thinking about separating the background voter from the main bot.

Pull request on automatic curation

• Implement auto-curation

Implementing global blacklist API

@themarkymark has been maintaining a global blacklist API for a while. For the $upvote command of the bot, there is a check placed if the author is blacklisted in any community, then the upvote operation won't happen.

The same "blocking i/o" problem was also the case for here, too. Using the good, old requests library in here creates the same problem.

So, I have used aiohttp library to make sure the main asyncio loop is not blocked.

Pull Request on blacklist feature

• Implement global blacklist api

Updating the bot

$ pip install dcom --upgrade

New configuration parameters

A .dcom_env file at your user path should store the below fields:

Key	Value
BOT_ACCOUNT	The account used for the curation
BOT_POSTING_KEY	Private posting key of the curation account
STEEM_NODES	A list of STEEM nodes (comma separated)
DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN	<Token of the discord bot>
CHANNEL_WHITELIST	Curation channel id list (comma separated)
LATE_CURATION_WINDOW	Maximum age for a post (in seconds)
EARLY_CURATION_WINDOW	Minimum age for a post (in seconds)
CURATOR_GROUPS	Discord roles authorized to use the bot (comma separated)
REGISTRATION_CHANNEL	Registration channel (ID)
REGISTRATION_ACCOUNT	Registration account (steem username)
REGISTRATION_ACCOUNT_ACTIVE_KEY	Registration account's active key
ROLE_FOR_REGISTERED_USERS	Role name for registered users
MONGO_URI	Mongodb connection URI
COMMUNITY_NAME	Community name
PATRON_ROLE	Designated discord role
BOT_LOG_CHANNEL.	Channel id for the bot logs on auto-curation.
ACCOUNT_FOR_VP_CHECK	Which account's VP should be checked for auto-curation
LIMIT_ON_MAXIMUM_VP	When should auto-curation triggered
AUTO_CURATION_VOTE_WEIGHT	The default voting weight.

(New parameters with this version is marked as bold.)

Running

$ dcom

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That's all for this update. I think dcom is in a good state for feature-wise at the moment. All planned requirements are implemented.