Allow for hosting bots on Discord

Since most of us do not have access to hosting outside of our own computers, it would be good if Discord bots could be coded and hosted on Discord. That does not mean they must; but Discord bots could be hosted on Discord, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for Discord bots.

I thought of how implementation could work for this. A user would be able to host up to three bots for free on Discord. Each bot would be allowed on 100 guilds (as it is currently), except for bots that gain verification. Bots that gain verification would not count towards the free bot limit, but changes to verified bots would require approval from Discord itself. Bots hosted on Discord would also come with their own guild that allows for management and editing of the bot, with added permissions like "edit bot related files", "view bot related files", and "view bot console".

Getting Nitro would change the free hosting limit from three to ten. At that point, up to five bots would be allowed to be hosted on Discord, and each non-verified bot could be in up to 200 guilds.

Once the bot limit is reached, the first non-free bot hosted would come at a price per month. Nitro users would get 50% off the next five non-verified bots.

Finally, hosts would be able to ban users from interacting with bots via slash commands by banning the user from the guild the bot was created in. Since guild bans are both by username and by IP, it would effectively prevent the banned user from interacting with the bot, without having to know the IP of the user to stop ban evasion. It would not stop the bot from interacting with the user, unless if they blocked the bot.

This has several advantages: for one, it allows for virtually no lag. I have seen self-coded non-verified bots suffer from the problem with latency. Bots hosted on Discord would have less of a problem with latency. Even verified bots still get a latency problem simply because they are not hosted on Discord. Another thing is privacy; a bot could potentially be set up such that all the settings for the bot could be configured directly in the Discord app with a GUI and everything, rather than on some third party website. But the main advantage is that it greatly lowers the cost to entry. Currently, if you want a Discord bot, you will have to have a spare computer (server or otherwise) that is always online (which is never a guarantee if you are hosting your bot at home), and you will have to pay for the cost of maintaining that computer. By having bot hosting on Discord, you allow for anyone with knowledge of a programming language (and possibly without) to develop their own bot for whatever purpose they wish.

sir lemons

17. Oktober 2021 02:16

I find this is incredibly flawed. This is a huge server waste on Discord's end since it's not really a effective business model. If you want hosting, pay for it. Discord already uses a bunch of server space for what they already host, allowing free hosting would just make it 10x worse. There are a lot of strings that come attached to this. Considering that Discord only makes money through Nitro Subscriptions, they would need a lot more money to be able to host the amount of bots. There would just be a bunch of bots that would be lying around not doing anything and just a total waste of usage.

donovan_dmc

17. Oktober 2021 08:36

If you really want free hosting, go use GCP or AWS, both have free tiers for at least 3 months (12 on AWS) which would do a small bot just fine

Any bot needing more than that can pay for hosting

Ganoosh

20. Oktober 2021 08:02

Digital Ocean offers a $5 VPS, AWS is free, Oracle Cloud is free, Google cloud offers a free micro t1 instance, repl.it is a free but more annoying route, you could get a raspberry pi zero for literally $5 (I have like 10 of them), there are also dedicated discord bot hosts like pebblehost for $3 a month.

I don't see the need for discord to do this, with all these options available, it just makes everything more complicated.

Lastly, if you're serious and know what you're doing, there's a good chance you already have access to a server to host it on.

Nothingness

21. Oktober 2021 01:53

I thought of that when I'm starting ( coding ) a bot, and I thought.... wait the bot is offline and I figured why because my command prompt is closed. It's a nice feature to get, but not for Discord.

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