Over the last few days I've written a Discord bot called *Moira*. It watches channels for posts by people with particular roles and if these posts contain just one URL, possibly with some text, then that URL is turned into a feed item.
Moira can be addressed directly and the exact list of channels to watch and the roles to pay attention to can be changed by anybody.
For the OSR Discord server, it looks for posts made on the `#blogroll` channel by people with the *Blogger* role. You currently need to request the Blogger role from one of the mods. This is how you opt-in.
The resulting feed is published here:
https://campaignwiki.org/files/osr-discord.xml
The entire setup is currently being tested. 😅
This allows people not on Discord to discover the blog posts people link to.
Anybody can post links to the `#blogroll` channel, not just the owner of the blog. The bot does not verify ownership. Potentially, some blog authors might disagree with the syndication of their blog posts.
The feed can be merged into other feeds. It can show up on blogrolls elsewhere. Somebody could use software like RSS Bot to take the posts on the feed and repost the links to the fediverse or other social media.
The bot also doesn't check whether a post links a new or an old post. This is how older blog posts can resurface. Currently the bot doesn't pick up on blog posts if it has seen the exact URL in the last 30 days. This, too, can be abused. It's trivial to create new URLs for the same article and spam the `#blogroll` channel. This problems is handled by the OSR Discord mods.
If it turns out that the bot is abused, let me know and I'll talk to the OSR Discord mods and we'll try to figure something out or take it down.
This section lists useful commands Moira to quickly fix problems. You have to address Moira directly to issue these commands.
@Moira stop watching this channel
You must issue this command in the `#blogroll` channel if you want to stop Moira from picking up URLs. You can also issue this command in any other channel that Moira was told to watch if you think that command was ill advised.
@Moira forget the url http://example.org/post.html
If you think that Moira should drop a URL from the feed, this is how you do it.
@Moira reload the url http://example.org/post.html
If you think that Moira should refresh its copy of the post, this is how you do it. You need to issue this post from the channel that Moira is watching, and you need to have the correct role.
See Moira for more commands.
#RPG #Discord #Bots