Discord Bot | 2025-2026
Javascript, AWS, MongoDB, Reddit API
Role: Solo Developer
Responsibilities
- Design & Implement all Features
- Listen to Feedback & Patch Bugs
- Add Mod-only Controls
- Cloud Deployment & DB, Live 24/7
PROJECT OVERVIEW
I created a custom Discord bot to improve user engagement and retention for an online community I moderate. The bot has a game for server members to play, moderator utilities, logs, and saves player data to a cloud DB. The community grew from 1k to 13k members across Reddit and Discord with the help of this bot. This was a volunteer effort I did in my spare time, and I used Github for source control.
LEARNING
There was a lot of learning with this project! It was my first time using javascript with Node.js to make an app outside of a SPA site, and I'd never made a Discord bot before, or used the Discord or Reddit APIs. I hosted the bot on an AWS EC2 instance with a MongoDB Atlas database for data persistence. I had to build an system that could fetch and diff slash command code to intelligently choose whether or not to upload files to get around Discord's API throttling when doing rapid development.
FEATURES
The main user-facing features of the bot revolved around a playful game between Brats and Tamers. Players could be given either Discord role, and then interact with ".text" triggers in messages to give or take points from each other. Point leaders were shown on the
LINKS
leaderboards, and points could be hoarded to win the weekly reward for top points, or spent in a point shop to apply text taunts to other players. Players tagged as faction members contributed to faction wars. Each week, scores reset, and winners were announced, but only after a detailed report was sent to the mods showing a summary of the week's stats, and a full breakdown of each player's stats.
The bot handled auto-verification of new server members, linking Reddit accounts, and auto-claiming of bounties for making Reddit posts. There are many mod utilities, such as detailed player reports, anonymous suggestions, the ability to manually adjust player and faction scores, automatic Reddit posts, and more. I built the bot to support a dev environment and database, so it can be tested on a private server without affecting the live server. For more details, checkout the project's README.
