Andrew Hong

Posted on Sep 24, 2021Read on Mirror.xyz

Announcing Mirror-Bot, a Discord bot for Community Discovery and Discussion

Open data in Web3 means we get to play with a large variety of interfaces for displaying information. While this means there is a lot of flexibility, it does introduce an extra step in the groundwork requirements for creating any kind of live discovery feed. We’ve decided to build a V1 feed into our Discord server for all Mirror events from our smart contracts, which can be further leveraged for our web interface in the future.

So why Discord? On most platforms, it's fairly difficult to get both organic discovery and discussion across content, teams, and individuals. Discord provides a happy (albeit chaotic) medium to bridge this gap and it also has a strong third-party developer ecosystem around bots.

While the basis of development is a feed, building this into a Discord bot will help supplement discovery and discussion within the community on a platform that already enforces a tight feedback loop between those two elements.

The development of the bot came in three parts:

  • provide a feed that covers all new writers, their project and content creation, as well as their funding or sales progress in activity channels.
    • the bot can sit in any Discord server and push the events of a specified set of Mirror publications.
  • provide interactive commands for easily viewing all ongoing project raises/sales on Mirror
  • provide commands that enable streamlined communication of feature requests and bugs, pushed directly into our development backlog

Activity Feeds

We've added event tracking to activity channels in our discord for live updates based on the following categories:

  1. #sign-ups: A new creator has started or joined a publication on Mirror.
  2. #new-entries: A live feed of all entries published.
  3. #crowdfund-updates: someone has contributed to a crowdfund.
  4. #edition-updates: someone has bought an edition.
  5. #milestones: A creator has started a crowdfund raise or editions sale. Additionally, all crowdfund closes and editions sell-outs will get a shoutout on both Discord and on Twitter as well.

Registering Mirror-bot in your Discord

Want to bring all of the above events from your publication to your own community server? You can now register any channel to track your ENS-specific events (as long as the bot has access)!

After you invite Mirror-bot to your server, you can use the /track register_ens slash command in the channel you want events to feed into:

For now, you can add up to five publications to your server, any of which can be removed from tracking by using the /track remove_ens slash command.

If you're interested in this feature, please DM me and I'll give you the bot invite link and help get you set up!

Interactive Commands

We've leveraged Discord slash commands to bring more interactivity into other channels as well. Are you wondering what projects are currently raising a crowdfund or selling editions? Pull up a paginated table using either the /table crowdfunds or /table editions commands!

In case the activity feed gets too cluttered, this is a great way of catching up on the last few weeks of projects on Mirror.

Direct Feedback into Dev Pipeline

Mirror is a constantly growing product, with great ideas and suggestions flowing constantly in the chat. To make sure these ideas aren't lost, we have a /feature notification that pushes the idea directly into our product development backlog for prioritization in future sprints.

On the flip side, if you encounter any bugs then you can notify us and put them in the queue as well with the /bug notification command.

Discord Bots, Roll out!

Mirror-bot will continue to grow with the community, aiming to supplement the mirror.xyz experience for everyone. Come join us all in the Mirror discord, and if you have any ideas for more bot capabilities then put your ideas down with /feature 😉