When the community for my comic grew, I made a Discord server called Aineko’s Domain to give my audience a place to congregate. Here is a link tot he server. I use the alias MadMonkey on the server. I found a need for more features than what came with Discord by default but I didn’t want to use a lot of bots to accomplish it. I wanted to make my own that I could have full control over. I made the Aineko bot using Discord.js running on Node.js on my Ubuntu server.

One of the biggest updates was the “Scritch Bucks and Activity Bucks Update”. It added a currency called Scritch Bucks, denoted by the Thai letter ฅ which I think looks sort of like a cat’s paw. Users could get Scritch Bucks by giving Aineko pets with the /scritch command and could spend them on collectible cats that unlock new commands. The other half of the update tracks member activity. Users get activity points from making messages on the server. Activity points decay over time and users who run out of activity points have their member roles removed. Getting the member role back is as easy as choosing a name color again so it really just makes it easy to know that users who have access to the channels are actually active on the server.

The next command I added was /blackjack. Up to 3 players at a time can wager Scritch Bucks on a hand of blackjack. I learned a lot about asynchronous functions from working on this command and the users loved it! Another popular command was /generate which uses the Dalle-2 API to generate AI images.

As the bot got more complicated there grew a need for a dashboard to control the settings. I found myself digging into the MySQL database just to make changes so I made https://aineko.gg with React.js, Express.js and Apache. Now the bot is publiclly accessible to anyone!