An attempt to reduce moderator work at utopian - Automating accepted-posts channel

Hello,

I have been moderating at utopian in the last couple of weeks. Due to huge growth in the project, we have been getting a lot of contributions daily.

We have a convention in our discord channel where we post contribution links on some cases.

• If we start working on a contribution, we reserve it by posting to #i-am-on-it channel.

• If we approve a contribution, we remove the link at #i-am-on-it, and add it to #accepted-posts channel.

• If we hide a post, we post it to #hidden-posts channel.

Removing the manual work

I thought, at least that manual work on #accepted-posts and #hidden-posts could be removed by a discord bot.

I am fan of automating things.

Connecting discord channels with utopian API

Even though it's not documented well, Utopian has a web api which gives you useful data about the contributions which you can access approved contributions.

After researching a little bit about discord web hooks, I have managed to code a simple integration.

The bot currently posts accepted contributions to #accepted-posts-test channel. If it works well, we may switch to that automated posts instead of manual posting which will save moderators' time.

Related code is open source: @emre/utopian-accepted-post-hook.

It's also a simple example for discord webhook integrations.

Image sources: XKCD - Automation