InterHacks Discord Bot

Language Converter
Personal ID
Team
Team
Team
Team
Code
Code
Logo

Inspiration

Online international hackathons can be confusing sometimes. For example, time zone issues, language communication problems, inefficient time management, team-building confusions, etc. In our own team, we had a time-zone difference of 12 hours so we either had to get up really early in the morning or late in the night. There were one or two times where we got confused about the meeting time because of our time-zone differences. Furthermore, Discord has been a huge factor in communications during modern/online hackathons. We discovered there are no proper management systems in discord, so that prompted us to work on our own. So through confusion, constant working, and lots of sweat later - We present the InterHackBot.

What it does

Like many of the normal bots, InterHackBot can use clear to clear a few texts, all the texts, or a specified amount of text messages. We also made a custom website to support the discord bot. Like many of the other discord bot websites our has an elegant touch and is well suited to our bot.

In addition, our InterHackBot contains five main distinctive features.

Time Zone Converter: Helps you convert time zones in Discord and schedule a correct meeting time with your teammates.
Language Converter: Helps you translate between 75+ languages simply in Discord! Non-English speakers will then be able to join hackathons as well!
Hackathon Timer/Reminder: This feature allows you to set a Pomodoro timer for your team, urging you guys to work more efficiently. In addition, you can also use this feature to send a message/reminder to your teammate after a certain amount of time.
Personalized ID Card: Helps you organize all your information and automatically generates an ID card for you. Others can see your ID card and check if you will be a good fit for them!
Hackathon Information: This feature allows the admin to organize hackathon information all in one place, which participants can easily access by triggering the command.

How we built it

For the Discord bot, we used mainly discord.py and some JSON files to serve as a database. We also had to use the google translate API for one of our features. For our custom-built website, we used HTML and CSS. We also built our icons from scratch and used Figma for them.

Challenges we ran into

General

We had a time difference of 12 hours and it was quite difficult to set up a meeting. At least 3 of us had to stay past 3 AM to work on it together.

Website

There was a lot of positioning required and it was quite difficult to move them all the time. The website was quite time-consuming, and we had to change the positioning of all the elements more than once when adding the different images. There was also the problem of the paragraphs where the sentences in the paragraphs had to be broken down so we have space available to add images. Also, we made the icons ourselves so it took some work for that.

Discord Bot

Our primary challenges out of the infinite sea of issues we encountered were regarding time-zone conversion, language translation, and the personalized ID card. These were major issues that took us multiple hours to solve. The time zone conversion had a major bug of not being able to accept times as a string format, and being able to convert it into a DateTime format. We also had issues regarding converting the time between 12 and 24 Hours format. We solved these problems by rewriting the code from scratch while making conversions and formatting along the way. For the language translation, we ran into a bug regarding the google translate API, which we were able to solve by switching to another API. We used better string formatting to pass in our values to translate. For the personalized ID card, we had issues regarding databases, which we ultimately used a JSON file for. We were also running into an issue with getting the bot to read and understanding the values for the ID card. We solved this by using the direct messaging channels in Discord.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of building the whole thing from scratch and being able to pull it off. We actually thought we had to lose the language and time-zone converters due to the errors. However, we eventually managed to pull it off and we’re really proud of how far we’ve come. For the website, we really couldn’t believe we could make it look so elegant and professional while still being the best-supporting element to the discord bot. Also, the discord bot was really time-consuming and it had made us worry a lot. Also, we didn’t think we could pull it off in the time frame, however, not only we finished, but we finished early.

What we learned

We learned many different things such as using APIs and using the languages we learned to put together into a project. Some of us had no experience in making a discord bot before, but we have learned, and love it. We also learned how to work together efficiently even when the communication might be bad due to the time-zone difference.

What's next for InterHacksBot

The next step would be further updating, editing, and making sure the discord bot won’t get any errors of sorts. Also, we’ve using JSON files as a database, and are considering using MongoDB instead. We also want to include more languages and time zones and upgrade the features so they can be of better help to hackers. Our plan is to make it a fully functional discord bot, and deploy our website so we can have our discord bot be a general application for many of the upcoming hackathons.

For those who want to collaborate with us, or contact us: Saaketh: sjnormalboss@gmail.com Aryan: aryansumit0102@gmail.com Cho Jung Tsai: 29317@students.ausd.net