Baylee Discord bot

Baylee was the Discord bot for The Outpost, a Minecraft server, from 2020 to 2021. The server’s owner built the bot and was its lead developer. I built Baylee’s website myself, and on the bot I enhanced and tweaked what the owner had built and added new commands and add-on features. It matched keywords and pieced its replies together from templates, with no real language processing, and it still felt like AI before AI. It was my first time working on software that a whole community used every day.

All projects

Role Built the website · Extended the bot
Built for The Outpost’s Discord
Years 2020–2021
Bot built by The server’s owner
Replies Keyword matching and templates
Stack Node.js · Express · MySQL · Discord API

Baylee’s website: a dark landing page headed Meet Baylee, with the line The multi-purpose Discord bot with over 200+ commands and features and a View Commands button, above three cut-off screenshots of Baylee posting replies and memes in Discord chats

What it was

Baylee lived in The Outpost’s Discord server. It ran from 2020 to 2021, while I was part of it, and only our server ever used it. I was very new to coding at the time.

None of the bot’s original code was mine. I worked across all of its functionality, enhancing and tweaking what was already there and extending it with many new commands and add-on features, all written in Node.js. I don’t remember exactly which ones were mine. The website was entirely mine, and I built it in 2020.

The bot’s own code is in an old repository I no longer have access to, so what I say about the bot is from memory. I still have the website’s code, and the part about the website comes from it.

The bot

How it answered

Baylee worked by keyword matching. It had a large dictionary of nouns, verbs, pronouns and other kinds of words, and a stock of templated responses and messages it could piece together into a reply.

It also had commands for different things. You typed each one with Baylee’s prefix, bae, in front of it, rather than as one of Discord’s slash commands. The website billed it as a multi-purpose bot with more than 200 commands and features, and listed these:

Memes. More than 100 commands for finding and making memes.
GIFs. Finding a GIF to send, even on mobile.
Starboard. React to a message to add it to the server’s Starboard, where members could vote on the best and worst posts, a bit like Reddit.
Currency. Earning virtual currency by begging, fishing or claiming rewards, plus dice and slots.
Welcomes. A greeting for everyone who joined the server.

The website

The website I built

I built the website in 2020 on Node.js with Express, and it was hosted on Heroku. The screenshot at the top is its landing page. Behind it:

Sign in with Discord. You signed in with your Discord account, and the site used it to find your servers.
Your servers. The dashboard listed the servers where you had Administrator or Manage Server permission, worked out from the permission flags Discord sends for each server. Servers that already had Baylee showed an Edit Configuration button, and the rest showed an Invite Baylee link.
Modules and commands. For each server you could turn whole modules on or off, and switch off single commands inside them. The choices were saved to that server’s settings in MySQL.
The commands page. The public list of commands was built from the database, grouped into tabs by module, with each one shown with the bae prefix. A few modules the site had switched off were left off it.