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Comment by yrro | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered logging what's said in each channel and publishing it to your project's web site?

i have a rough prototype of this if anyone with a Discord is interested in trying it out email in bio

That makes me think, has anyone created a Discord bot that automatically archives chats? Preferably as HTML files similar to Pidgin? That would be great.

I suspect it's against the Discord TOS - but even if it's not there's a bunch of community expectations to manage. For recent forums we've added a disclaimer to the channel discription notifying people that we might make the contents web public at some point.

Discord also encourages certain usage patterns that are unhealthy. Threads are rarely used and have poor discoverability, search is incredibly limited etc.

Someone stirred up a bit of drama doing something similar a few years ago. The biggest difference is that they were selling it and harvesting it without any consent from users or server admins.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221205181242/https://www.reddi...

I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project.

Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting users know that their messages will be posted on the web is important, but either way, if it's a public channel of a FOSS project's Discord server, surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?

> surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?

For some reason, this is really hard for people to get. The discord company is super paranoid about scraper bots joining through public links, and people themselves are continuously in awe when someone digs up an old message about whatever, asking the mods to ban them for doxing.

I completely agree with the sentiment, however, and I think it should become more socially acceptable for some chats to be viewable online, like forums used to be back in the day. Even then, people would close certain subforums off from appearing for people without an account (e.g. in public searches). As it stands, however, people are not comfortable with this because nobody is doing it.

It would be wise to disclose that messages are archived publicly. But you also don't need to archive the identity of everyone in the chats, you can replace their usernames with generic identifiers in the public archive.

Well, yeah. I wouldn't do it behind people's backs, but I'm pretty sure people would protest, and new people would miss the message no matter how big you make it in the introduction channel.

Pidgin supports Discord, so you could simply republish Pidgin HTML log files.

I would need to use Pidgin as my main client though. Pidgin only keeps records from your chat history.

You could register a second account and run finch (command-line version of pidgin) on the server where you store the logs.

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