The problem this bot is trying to tackle is a lack of flexibility in conditions for assigning roles to your users. It aims to achieve maximum freedom in what you can check for role assignments.
Usually, Discord bots have a predefined set of conditions you can select. Those conditions might include but are not limited to:
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In Alliance
A player is in a specific alliance or a list of alliances. -
In Corporation
A player is in a specific corporation or a list of corporations. -
Standings
A player or his corporation/alliance have a specific standing.
What if you would like to check if a player is in a specific alliance, enlisted in Factional Warfare, has Jump Drive Calibration trained to 5 and the necessary skills to fly your doctrine capitals? Would be nice if you could give him a Discord role that provides him with access to a capital ping channel, right?
Whit this bot, that and more is possible.
How does this work?
The EVE Online ESI does provide a lot of ingame information for developers to play around with. If you have experience with programming, you can use that information to do a lot of nice stuff. If you do not, you are usually limited to using the tools of other players, but those might not always entirely provide what you need.
The way to solve this issue is to provide the information you are getting from ESI in a format non-developers can work with, which is what this bot does. Instead of giving you predefined conditions, it provides you with ESI Endpoints that you can use to create your own conditions in a graphical user interface via drag and drop.
To give you an example… a request to pull public corporation information from ESI will provide you with the following attributes: alliance_id , ceo_id , creator_id , date_founded , description , faction_id , home_station_id , member_count , name , shares , tax_rate , ticker , url , war_eligible .
For this bot, such an attribute is called “Endpoint” and they are provided in a list you can drag and drop onto the page to check for specific values. If we would like to know which corporations in the alliance VINDICTIVE have 100 members or more, that would look like this …
A condition like that can now be used on the Rules page and linked with an action (Create Role, Assign Role, Change Nickname, …) that will trigger, when the condition is true. How you connect those endpoints and what you want to check for, is completely up to you. Most elements in this condition will show you a popup when clicked and provide you with more options.
How do I use a condition I’ve created?
Once you have saved your condition, switch to the Rules page. When creating a new rule, you will be greeted by two red boxes. One is for selecting the condition you’d like this rule to have, the other box is for selecting the action this rule will execute.
Clicking Select Condition will provide you with some predefined conditions (in yellow) for convenience and your custom conditions. Select one of the conditions, and the box will turn green. After you’ve selected your condition, click Select Action and choose what should happen when your condition is true. After you’ve selected the action, additional options for the action you’ve selected will appear. In our case, we would like to create a Discord role called Big Corp when our condition is true.
After saving this rule, you can switch to the Bot Control page and (if not active) activate the bot. You will find a server console there that will forward any logs that are specific to your server and show you what the bot is doing in the background.
As you can see, the bot created our Discord role Big Corp and moved it to the correct position in the role list. It then told us that it has finished updating all endpoints and enforcing the rules. It will do a new check every 60 seconds.
What’s with the other pages?
This bot is still in beta. That does not mean it isn’t feature complete for its main purpose (authentication and role assignment), but that there’s still a lot more to come before release. It is intended for a broad Spectrum (heh) of tasks like event forwarding and pings, kill feeds, intel gathering and fleet management. The pages Dashboard and Payment currently serve no purpose, because during beta I will not ask for any ISK payment for this bot. The beta will continue for a few months while I’m adding new functionality via Modules , which can be subscribed to and tested and will provide the mentioned features. It is likely there’ll still be some bugs to fix as well.
I have a feature request / bug report / question!
Please join the development Discord server: Bot Development
At the time of writing this, we are at 707 endpoints and new functionality and endpoints are added regularly. If you are missing endpoints or features or something is not working correctly, the development Discord server will be the best option to get in contact. You will also find people there that might be able to help with any questions regarding the configuration.
How can I make this bot join my server?
Click this link: Discord
What chat commands are there?
!auth
The bot will send you a private message with a link. Follow the link and select your character. The bot will then link your character to your Discord user.
!config
The bot will send you a private link to the configuration page. When the bot joins your server, only the server owner will be able to request this link at first. He can add more bot operators. Having admin rights on Discord will NOT automatically grant you access to the bot configuration.
What scopes does the bot request from my users?
That is dynamic and depends on which endpoints you are checking for in your conditions. If you are only checking for public information like corporation names, alliance names or member count, the bot does need no scopes at all.
The requested scopes in the authentication link will change according to what information you require from your users.
Important
If you change an already running configuration so it does require scopes that were not needed before, every user that was authenticated will receive a message telling them to re-authenticate within 72 hours (3 days), or their tokens will be deleted.
There is also a page where you can add scopes that should always be requested, so you can plan ahead a bit and ask for more scopes than the bot currently needs.
What permissions does the bot need on my server?
At least one channel where it can read and write, so it can see commands being entered. Other than that, the server should allow private messages between users, so the bot can answer the authentication and configuration commands.
Everything else depends on which actions you have select in the rules. If you would like the bot to change your user’s nicknames, it will need the permissions to do that. If you want it to create and assign roles, it will need those permissions.
Hint
Be aware that the bot can not create roles with permissions that he himself does not have. If you want the bot to create an admin role for directors in your corporation, the bot itself will need admin roles as well.
That’s it.
I still have a lot of work to do, but I feel like this project is mature enough to be used by the public. I hope this will be useful to some people and would be happy for feedback during the beta.
