MarkovBot Dev Diary #1

By: Cam Wohlfeil
Published: 2019-02-08 1440 EST
Category: DevDiary
Tags: python, markovbot

Project Repository

Unlike with Shelf, I didn't create a post for this project before I got started. It's been on the backburner for a while now due to time and frustration, but it's been living on in the back of my mind now since I did have fun working on it.

The basic idea here is just a Python bot that reads the messages in a Discord server and can generate a Markov sentence based on the messages. Easy enough since discord.py and markovify exist, but I overcomplicated it last time and got frustrated trying to store everything in a database to support server separation and per user Markov sentences, plus discord.py hadn't finished their support for Python 3.7. At least in the process I learned discord.py and a lot about async/await.

This time, I've decided to go back to basics, just use a simple deque to collect only new messages. Once that's working I'll move on to adding more features, such as:

• Support multiple servers (store corpus in database or file instead of in memory)
• Support generating markov for specific users (see above)
• Support explicit message count limits (currently hardcoded in deque to 500)
• Unit tests
• Move config to ini at the top level (currently a dict)
• setup.py
• TTS for the big meme
• Better error handling
• Request rate limiting

References

• discord.py
• markovify