Bot Developer Panel Questions

[honest cairn]

Please leave any questions you have for the bot developers here irrelevant messages will be deleted without warning.

[serene ermine]

how long did it take to develop your bots?

[true peak]

How did you come up with the idea for the bot name?

[bright ermine]

When and why did you create your bot?

[flat willow]

Whats your best source of motivation?

[iron zephyr]

What is the story of your bot?

[flat willow]

How do you manage a big bot? Like community wise, bug issues, etc. Do you have any tips for growing bots that may struggle with this?

[flat willow]

When did you start monetizing your bot, and how did that affect it's reputation?

[long igloo]

What advice do you give someone trying to promote their bot?

[little pilot]

Do you think that top.gg would be replaced with the discord bot list that's coming soon?

[exotic cliff]

How did you grow your bot

[delicate flower]

Who are these 5 Best developers?

[cosmic badge]

How did you come up with that whole idea?

[somber girder]

which hosting do you use

[eternal musk]

How difficult was it to make 1 bot. And how many days does it took.

[exotic cliff]

i bet that their own vps

[timber fiber]

What would be your best advice to grow your bot apart from making it the best you can feature-wise.

[normal orchid]

Did you ever used free hosting, and did you ever hosting issues?

[honest cairn]

please avoid chatting here, thanks!

[long igloo]

Not a question for developers but just in general, will this be recorded and uploaded to yt?

[honest cairn]

we do upload VoDs but it usually takes a lil while

[worldly delta]

yes

[magic snow]

How did you get into discord bot development?

[misty stream]

Using off-the-shelf hosts like Replit is a better? Or would vps be a better choice?

[maiden oar]

How did you got your bot a lot of users and can we do that for free?

[eternal grove]

What is your opinion of bots adding nfts? (e.g tatsu)

[bright ermine]

how did you plan your bot? did you get right into coding it and think of features along the way or create something like a functional design beforehand?

[worldly delta]

**Questions only in this thread - For discussions go to #general **

[hollow jungle]

How do you deal with people speaking different languages when asking for help in your support server?

[prisma thunder]

what stuff did you guys have to change to make the bot more scalable?

[wind canyon]

How did you monetize your bot?

[eternal grove]

Are you planning an automated support system built with ai?

[brave monolith]

How much of the bots growth came from organic growth vs paid growth?

[prime pecan]

How do you scale your bot properly; how do you make sure your bot can handle abusive behavior and rate limits.

[hollow jungle]

How many 3rd party services do your bots rely on, and what is your course of action if any of them go down?

[misty stream]

What should we do to get motivation?

[modest glen]

How to prevent burnout?

How do you handle not being overwhelmed by the workload?

[fathom tree]

Are any of you coding in React?

[hidden gust]

A little more about monetizing your bot, how did you strike a balance between offering free features and paid features?

[prisma thunder]

What do you think about app commands?

[terse blaze]

What language do you use to code your bot?

[zealous abyss]

Looking back to decisions made within your bot that might've affected/did affect your bot: Do you have any regrets from back then and things that you would've changed by now?

[wind canyon]

How much does it cost to run your bot? It would be interesting to compare since everyone has different sized bots.

[mental jungle]

Do you selfhost or do you buy hosting?

[upbeat charm]

If you were to track the data points, how much would you say your bot goes through when it comes to memory, network, and overall storage usage when running when it comes to long term uptime? /asking for a friend

[prisma thunder]

how much ram does your bots use?

[sour vigil]

It is shared hosting?

[lucid granite]

Is this a hosting?if yes is it paid or free? Ping me when any1 ans

[versed quest]

What service you hosting your database on?

[dawn burrow]

how did u guys learn how to code? was it self taught?

[scenic oar]

How to make your bot online 24/7?

[woeful rampart]

what is your preferred host?

How did you grow your bots?

[fiery sorrel]

do you ever have thoughts about just stopping your bot in general? either bc of burn out, financial problems etc? what are the reasons why you’d have thoughts of stopping?

on the bright side, what are your motivations of wanting to keep it going and to not give up your hardwork ?

[sharp rover]

How much do bots even make in profit. Tbh I think discords about to kill all the bots (automof etc)

[fiery sorrel]

jamie ;; your bot is a mental health bot and in my opinion, probably has the most accurate resources — mental health is such a serious issue and i know your bot provides self care/“anxiety games” and has a lot of reliable sources.

how much research did it take you in making these features in Aphrodite? (ie: making sure your info was correct and not misleading, etc)

do you have any advice as well for bot devs who might want to tackle mental health ?

also what steps did you take to prevent to make sure users don’t end up completely relying on your bot and actually seek professional support / have you ever encountered this problem where someone is completely relying on ur bot for mental health instead of using it as some type of feel good self care since there’s always a thin line between that ?

[leaden wind]

How could i avoid rate limiting and make my bot faster, what I mean by faster is more responsive. What would you recommend as specs for hosting a discord bot that is currently in 1000 servers.

[unreal barn]

Want to know about chaos, was there some critical bug that happened to your bot that got it offline and did something really bad that wasn't supposed to do? How did you fix it?

[fluid tusk]

cluster 4

[bright ermine]

Where and how much do you pay for the .bot domain annually?

[hearty python]

What do you think about the new changes Discord is making/has made to permissions for slash commands and how are you implementing it in your bot?

[fluid tusk]

https://www.amazonregistry.com/bot . They cost like ~$70 a year but dont feel you need a .bot domain, i dont even have one

[proven heath]

but how will people know it's a bot

[leaden wind]

how much do you reckon a bot between 1k to 10k should pay on vps?

[fluid tusk]

this is contextual

[proven heath]

this isn't really a question anyone can answer, its entirely based on what your bot does, how many users it has, how many entities are cached by your bot (roles, channels, members)

[leaden wind]

Fair enough ig imagine a multipurpose bot with a dashboard

[proven heath]

still doesnt really help, you just have to figure it out or have good enough analytics to make enough of an educated answer

[bright ermine]

Where did you get the "welcomer.gg" domain name and why was it necessary to hide whois?

[proven heath]

hide whois because people are creepy . Side note if you register a company, use a forwarding address (1stformations is a good one)

[fluid tusk]

all .gg domains have whois by default and, namecheap.

[unreal barn]

yep, self-experience pls use whois privacy

[lost trout]

per every resource, i spend about 45 minutes researching total for it before developing the resources. i make sure the links i use are reliable and well credited, its hypocritical to put a harmful resource in something that should be helpful.

i don't have much advice other than make sure you're truly being helpful instead of toxic and harmful. every user is different and has different mental needs and different backgrounds, make it accessible an don't make it a side piece you neglect.

i include emergency numbers in every resource to ensure that they know that it cannot be used in place of a professional. i also include links to find therapists and mental health professionals near them in every resource, eg if they used the anxiety resource, i included a psychology site to push them to counselors and therpaists who specialize in that that are near them. hope this helps!

[lost trout]

i NEVER have used free hosting as it can be very unstable and your bot is insecure. free hosting sites need the money to keep the site up somehow, and may sell your data or have security flaws that allow people to access your bot's private info and token.

[hidden gust]

cheers all

[lost trout]

i've recently moved to slash commands and i think its .. Interesting how theyre working the permissions. i think its helpful for server owners and allows them better control

[lost trout]

my subscriptions in total create about $40 USD a month, which pays for the bot's hosting fee. i make $0 in profit LOL

[deep pumice]

It was a really nice seesion yall thank you ill be waiting for the next one eagerly ight guys byee and thanks again learned a lot today

[fluid tusk]

[lost trout]

i considered shutting my bot down simply because it was difficult to keep up with and i didn't have enough money at the time. i literally sobbed over trying to make that decision and my boyfriend helped me realize that i truly care about the bot and love it to bits and i shouldnt destroy something i love and enjoy

[languid garden]

Big bot devs: does uptime anxiety ever affect your sleep?

[fluid tusk]

If it's down, I sleep

[sharp rover]

Oh

[lost trout]

i regret not learning how to properly code first before launching my bot. simple solutions that i see now were hard to me then and made user experience harder as i was a complete noob. i had to shut down my bot for hours because i couldnt figure out something with the port where now i look at it and laugh because i was so dumb

[languid garden]

Sir, I said big bots

[proven heath]

my unstable infrastructure does not give me any anxiety at all

[lost trout]

i personally use javascript and use the discord.js library js was easiest and made the most sense to me to learn

[lost trout]

i only rely on one- my hosting service. i use a very reliable vps and haven't had any issues with it. if it goes down, self hosting until it's fixed is what i would do, or invest into looking into better vps (but rn i dont see that happening!)

[lost trout]

vps !!!! replit isn't made to host and has numerous security issues that others have encountered. it is entirely worth it to invest in a private vps for your bot

[lost trout]

not really, top.gg is very large and has rlly nice people working behind it that i've met/spoken to.

[little pilot]

no like the official discord one that's coming soon

[lost trout]

ohhhhh! sorry, i was confused i don't think so tbh as top.gg offers auctions and a better server discovery service

[little pilot]

ah understood

[bright ermine]

if i vote on my bot everyday if it gets accepted what is the average rate of ppl adding it in a month

[lost trout]

your bot will be on the new page and a lot of people will look at it ! voting helps too but try to get your users and friends to vote too~ i can't give you an average rate, but the first few days of it being added will be highlighted in the new bots section :)

[bright ermine]

k

thx

also not really related but how did you get the certified discord moderator badge

[misty stream]

Do you have any vps recommendations for bots trying?

[bright ermine]

are u looking for a budget 1?

[misty stream]

Yes if it can be

[lost trout]

DigitalOcean is very cheap and only charges what you use

[misty stream]

thanks

[bright ermine]

or contabo

[bright ermine]

dose this rate limit by discord

[fiery sorrel]

thank you for answering! i hope Aphrodite grows even more ~ i really enjoy using it thank you for creating such a wonderful mental health bot

[lost trout]

99% of my bot's growth was organic ! i haven't paid a cent for advertising with exception to top.gg auction credits. i only started using auctions about 4 months after the bot was released, which at that point the bot had hit over 1k

[brave monolith]

not too bad!

[lost trout]

i saw what my close developer friends were doing and i decided i wanted to do something with development but in my own unique style i wanted to contribute something helpful to the discord bot community and, well, here i am 10k servers later

[magic snow]

Cool!

[lost trout]

my bot is in constant active development with no plans to stop ^_^ there isn't really a set amount of days, and if you have no coding knowledge starting like i did, it's extremely difficult at first. over time, you get smarter and have better, more solid coding knowledge that can help immensely.

if you have background coding knowledge, it's a lot easier and takes a lot of worries off your shoulders. i am noob !

[lost trout]

friends, family, and top.gg ^_^ not to be #endorsing but top.gg was essential to the early days of my bot and is the reason why it's so big. i went into surgery- my bot was verified to be listed and within minutes we crushed 250 server maximum until it could be verified by discord. waking up from anesthesia to see your bot needed verification was a very Weird experience to say the least. i had a lot of friends as well who wanted to support the bot and added it to their servers as well which helps. all of which is free <3

[maiden oar]

Wow, Thanks for your reply!

[lost trout]

of course! glad to be able to help fellow devs in their journey

[lost trout]

translate/find a native speaker to help ! i try my best to accommodate for those who speak a different language/have plans to make my bot multilingual for accessibility c: usually if someone asks a question in a different language, i either translate if i don’t know the language or speak it if i do! i speak spanish and french aside from english and im learning mandarin + russian

[stark kelp]

What bot do you even own lol

[prisma thunder]

how does the bot determine what lanuage to use? in what order does the bot decide?
there are many places where you can get a langauge, interaction locale, guild locale, user db config, guild db config, fallback

[stark kelp]

Small bot I've never even heard of, hm. Interesting. Guess no big dev would want to do this panel since all they care about is the money they make

[copper crescent]

Lets be respectful please @stark kelp

[fluid tusk]

your bot is smaller 👴

[vague tulip]

hey good question

i wanted to get back to this once i was home, its around 5am here

people were trading our ingame items for real money against our terms of service, and getting scammed out of their paypal money

really nothing we could do about it since it was a he-said she-said issue, but we knew it was happening

we saw NFT technology as a way to ensure the secure transfer of value between two parties (if people are gonna sell their items now, they're gonna do it anyway in the future even without NFTs) and reduce the number of people getting scammed out of their virtual items or money

fully understand concerns behind this new technology and agree most of the stuff out there are scams

but for us its a way to protect our users and give them real ownership of the virtual items they earn in the game - do whatever you want with it, including sell it to others

i doubt many people in the discord bot space want to even dabble with NFTs due to the huge backlash

but for us not a big issue - and our users understood it was being used in a way beneficial to them

we didnt get any noticeable drop in users, or servers using Tatsu when we announced our NFT plans since again, I think we're using the technology in a way that increases the value to users rather than try to grift them of whatever money they have

[vague tulip]

since no one has answered this: mostly bots default to english, and upon setup offer a way to select another language which is stored as a configuration on their database

1. guild language -> bot replies in the language set by guild owner
2. user language override -> bot replies in user's selected language instead of guild's chosen language (if user has set language)
3. fallback -> probably english? not sure what this is

as for interactions, Discord is working on multilingual slash commands so you'll probably have to wait for that

[proven heath]

wasn't there a major concern about privacy with that

[vague tulip]

yeah all the time, especially when you're faced with the fact that you're going to disappoint many of your users if you don't make it through

motivations, responsibility to users biggest factor since they're the ones who brought us to where we are today

[proven heath]

(bots being able to see a users language)

[vague tulip]

i think as long as its in the terms of service or privacy policy that should be fine

[proven heath]

or are you referring to the user setting the language on the bot

[vague tulip]

yes user setting the language of the bot

that was what RGB was asking i believe

[proven heath]

I see , i remember there being discussion in ddevs about language stuff with slash commands

cant remember which route they were talking about with that whilst also protecting users privacy

wasn't it meant to be bots submitting their translations to discord and then its parsed in the client

[vague tulip]

you'd probably be surprised at how little many of the big bots make
While i don't have exact numbers, i know many aren't able to afford bringing on more people without external funding, much less a sizeable profit and some also struggle to pay server bills

[median juniper]

hmm any idea about.....how we can create a music setup channel like hydra one without message intent....

[proven heath]

You can't, the premise of it requires the content intent

[vague tulip]

except bots like mee6 of course

[median juniper]

discord modals can help?

in setup channel

[proven heath]

this is a moment tbh, people thinking bots make like 50k a month and that it doesn't cost anything to host them

[proven heath]

it still doesn't really achieve it

[median juniper]

ig so . fr

[vague tulip]

hey we use tempo on our server LOL

[proven heath]

wait do you actually

[vague tulip]

yeah didnt realize you were tempo creator

[proven heath]

epic

omg you weren't joking

not premium

[vague tulip]

yes I wasn't hahah we've been using it for quite awhile

[vague tulip]

just subscribed for a year:

our community team probably forgot to do it after testing out music bots

[proven heath]

yo ,

[vague tulip]

we only changed music bots I think around 2-3 months ago

[proven heath]

might have to kick and re invite , advice is use premium bots, they get issues very very infrequently

[eternal grove]

The hostings costs are very low, when you built a structure, which can be scaled on less resources.

[hollow jungle]

music bots use a hell of a lot of resources

and for the amount of servers, thats a hell of a lot needed

especially as likely 99% of those servers don't pay

[eternal grove]

When you use djs, yes, bad mistake

• Music Bots understandable

[bright ermine]

....

[torpid comet]

Where and how did you learn to code your bot? ( Is it to late to leave a question now?)

[ebon monolith]

Was there any method in particular that was used to help boost your bot growth?

[proud bone]

I learned bot coding from YouTube. It's free and has everything you're looking for.

[bright ermine]

Hi

[torpid comet]

Can I know the most suitable language and platform to start from/use for a begginer?

[bright ermine]

When event start?

[proud bone]

Start with learning Node JavaScript and JavaScript. If you are going to do it from a computer, I recommend Visual Studio Code (VSC). If you are going to do it from mobile, I recommend Bot Desinger For Discord (BDFD).

[prisma thunder]

i personally use user override(db) -> user locale(db) -> guild override(db) -> guild locale -> fallback, and if its a guild-wide command(for example, warning announcements), it ignores the user language

i also want to store users locale's from slash commands to use with normal commands, is that against TnS?

[brave monolith]

i'd use a statically typed language if you are learning. Something like Java is good. Then you can remove the training wheels(static typing) and know what youre doing with a more powerful language like JS.