Running a discord channel is hard enough, which is why bots are prevalent in pretty much every channel. They can be used for practical reasons, or humorous ones depending on what the community wants out of a bot. Discord bots may be programmed in a variety of languages, with Python being one of the most popular.
What you can do with your discord bot is entirely up to one’s imagination, but here is a list of suggestions on how you can utilize it:
Greet New Users While AFK
Especially if you are starting a channel with little activity, it would be nice to have a bot engage with new users as they enter the channel. Not only would it reduce the chance of them bouncing to another server, but you can also make them aware of the rules and any other instructions you have for the channel.
Requesting Music & Youtube Videos
You may use your bot to use as your channel’s automated DJ, allowing people to make song requests or to pull up certain videos. Media can also be shared during certain chat events, like if someone gets kicked/banned or if a moderator enters the chat. You may use a premium bot like ProBot, which supports music.
Sharing Memes
Something hilarious that you can do with your channel’s discord bot is creating and sharing memes during certain triggers. You may take text from users’ posts, put it on a timer or make it post memes at random.
Here is an example of what someone did with their Discord’s meme bot:
Voting
A voting system may be implemented to help Discord communities to make democratic decisions. This could especially be used for video game guilds that need to pick players for certain roles or to make decisions during a boss. Most bots have some sort of API variables for voting so the implementation is quite easy.
Searching and Posting Content
Something that would be a bit complex yet useful is having a bot search and bring up content via Discord commands. This would assume that the bot has access to certain web crawling libraries to accomplish this.
An example would be: “/Reddit captain Picard”
...Which can then bring up popular posts or images of Captain Picard from Reddit.com.
Social Media Integration
A bot can also be used to consolidate the flow of information from multiple social media groups or profiles. For example, if there a guild has a new facebook or forum post, it may then be aggregated into the channel so everyone gets notified. You may also want to tag it to everyone in the channel (or certain users), so they get global notifications about an important post.
Wrapping Up
Discord bots, whether a premium product or your creation, can be quite flexible and you’ll be surprised at the stuff people do with it. Keep in mind that you may need a dedicated server to host a bot, especially on a popular server with lots of commands being evoked.