Chronicle Bot

We just got word from Discord that our verification request is approved. The server installation cap has been removed, and anyone who has been waiting to try out Chronicle Bot can now get in!

This is also good new as I've been working on a bunch of new features, but hesitant to push anything with all of these verifications in process. I guess now it is time to see how many installs I can get.

A few weeks ago, we submitted for Discord verification when we hit 75 server installs. This is excellent news, as the bot has been added to servers faster than we expected. This milestone allows us to request Discord to verify Chronicle Bot officially.

Unfortunately, there is one little restriction. Discord limits us to only 100 installed servers until we are verified. A number which we reached today!

I hate telling people they need to "try again later" but unfortunately that is the situation I'm in for a little bit. Stressed out a little, but just happy people are finding the bot useful.

It has been a long week of emails, updates, and demo videos, but it is finally over. The Google verification process was long, fiddly, and fully of requirements spread far and wide. That said I’m happy to announce that our Google Verification process is officially complete!

Up till now, I’ve only been able to let a handful of testers in to use Chronicle Bot as Google restricts new apps until they are verified. I’ve just opened the bot web dashboard for all new users with this step completed.

For the last several months, friends of mine have been asking for a Google Calendar Discord bot.

You see, we have a weekly game night which likes to get canceled often (or for months at a time when things get crazy). Then, when we have a night scheduled, some of us tend to forget until the last minute. As the event got closer, we needed to auto-post event reminders to our Discord channel.

After much searching, we never found anything quite like what we wanted, so I decided to make it myself. I’ve never built a Discord bot before, but honestly, that makes it a fun project for me.

It took about three weeks, but I got a basic bot up and running, connecting to the Google Calendar API, pushing event reminders out to Discord channels, and a simple web interface to control everything.

The best part was Google Calendar pushes updates to the bot in real-time, making the entire thing seamless.

Then came the point in a project when I want to get some feedback before going further. So I did something I never do and posted it to Reddit to see how bad a response I would get. I threw together an animated GIF demo, closed my eyes, and hit post.

The result? Amazingly (for me at least), the post did well with very positive comments, much better than I could have ever hoped. I’m not sure how much further I would have taken Chronicle Bot without this, but now I want to see how far I can take it.