Corki Discord Bot Development Timeline

This post is a brief overview of the history of the Corki Discord Bot I created as well as an explanation of why it’s no longer in operation.

2016

Telegram Bot

In 2016, I threw together a Telegram chatbot for my highschool robotics team and hosted it on my home server. In addition to coordinating team communications, the bot became somewhat of a swiss army knife with ever more functionality.

2017

I continued making Telegram bots for more than just my robotics team, but eventually started using Discord as well.

Corki Mains Discord

In 2017, I joined the Corki Mains Discord server – a community centered around the videogame League of Legends (LoL). The server had a bot, Oriana bot, which is the most popular League of Legends focused Discord bot, however it was misconfigured and didn’t work. The server owner was unable to fix the configuration due to mixture of bugs, bad UI, and him not caring enough. By the end of the year, I had created my own Discord bot with plans to replace Orianna Bot.

2018

I started out adding many of the features from my old Telegram bots, but my goal was feature parity with Orianna Bot. I added lots of LoL-related features and other things to make it user-friendly.

With a strong start, I presented the bot to the server owner, and he added it to the server. The bot immediately started getting used, and everyone was happy and sharing ideas on how to make it better.

Features

By the end of the year I had alternatives to many of Oriana’s features, although many were admittedly rough around the edges. One key feature I added was a web-portal, allowing users to do many actions with an interface that’s easier to work with than text-based commands. This web portal also opened the door to broader moderation functionality which became useful for moderators.

2019

Discord Server Takeover

The Corki Mains Server Owner hadn’t been seen for several months starting in late 2018. The moderators were doing a lot to manage the community but didn’t have administrator priveleges needed to perform many tasks so they sent several messages to the unresponsive server owner requesting help and/or permissions.

Eventually, the server owner did come back online, with his friends, but instead of helping, they raided the server posting spam and even NSFW material. Acting fast to save the community, a moderator created a new server without the previous server owner. I used Corki Bot to direct message everyone in the old server an invite link to join the new server. Making sure to skip over the bad actors. After this, the old server only had inactive users so I continued to use it to test new bot features.

Discord Bot Lists

With the bot approaching feature parity with Orianna Bot, I put it on top.gg and another bot directory. After filling in the forms the bot gained over 40k new users almost overnight.

Orianna Rewrite

Orianna Bot was eventually rewritten, fixing its UI and even added some of the original features I added to Corki bot. At this point Corki was no longer Competitive with Orianna bot but because I now had users it made sense to continue development.

AutoRoles

One of Orianna Bot’s features was that it automatically assigned Discord guild roles based on user rank and mastery points. I had previously created a system for this but it was buggy. I decided that instead of simply cloning this feature I should make a generic system that would use user-defined conditions. Having just finished making a programming language, I decided to make a language-based rule engine to do this. I quickly got the system working and deployed to the Corki Mains server. I had plans to make a user-friendly editor for the conditions but out of the blue I got a call from an old friend asking me to work on her startup. I spent most of the rest of the year at that startup making a similar system which bought and sold stocks instead of assigning and removing guild roles.

2020 - 2022

During this time, only basic maintenance was done with the bot in terms of code.

Discord Bot Verification

Discord warned about requiring verification for popular bots (like Corki). I requested verification to prevent my bot getting shutdown. After a long time in review, my bot was mistakenly rejected by Discord. I submitted an appeal and complained to support, getting no response for over a year. Eventually my bot crossed a threshold and Discord restricted it. After communication with Discord support, the issue was resolved and my bot was verified and working again.

2023

The Beginning of the End

At this point I realized that although my bot still worked, it was in desperate need of a rewrite. Additionally with Discord wanting me to use a different system for commands and other APIs continuing to change, continuing development looked like a difficult task. With that in mind, I reached out to the developer of Orianna bot to transfer users’ LoL data over.

2024

The End

Despite Corki Bot being functionally obsolete, I kept it online and it did still have users. My plan was to keep it online until it stopped working. However, Discord requested a bunch of legal documents in order to renew my bot’s verification. To me it wasn’t worth the security risk of putting these on the internet. Eventually Discord revoked my access token and Corki was dead.

Conclusion

Developing, maintaining and hosting Corki Bot taught me a lot and with it peaking at well over 200,000 users it’s one of the projects I’m most proud of.