Discord is a popular online chat platform that initially appeals to gamers and younger generations but has grown in scope significantly recently. The Humans-of-Julia is a Discord community server founded during the fall last year. The community started building a chatbot called HoJBot in March 2021. This poster will cover some background information, our motivation and the bot’s functionalities
The HoJBot has several overarching goals:
1) Help members learn Julia. The bot provides convenient functionalities for members to quickly look up documentations from Julia and popular packages, as well as performing a search at the Julia Discourse site.
2) Promote open-source collaboration. As we encourage members to contribute to the bot, it becomes a natural playground for members to learn Julia and go through open-source development process.
3) Automate moderation duties. The bot can detect inappropriate words that potentially violate community rules and automatically hide them as spoiler tags. Moderators are notified automatically in case that the event requires manual investigation. Offensive message can be reported by members, and can be auto-deleted upon reaching a threshold.
4) Build games and have fun. The bot provides some simple text-based games that our members can enjoy together. For example, a trading game is created for members to buy/sell stocks using virtual money in real-time. It is one of the most popular features enjoyed by our members.
The bot is currently under active development. They are too many contributors to list here. See more details at https://github.com/Humans-of-Julia/HoJBot.jl