What is a Discord Bot?

A Discord bot—generally speaking—is an AI that can send messages, moderate, and interact with Discord users in all sorts of unique ways. Bots add a lot of functionality to Discord servers, like moderation and student verification, and can be customized to suit our needs.

Why do we need a Discord Bot?

The UD CIS Department needs a strong tool to moderate chats for offensive speech or otherwise disrespectful behavior, and to offer tools and services to staff members looking to build a robust community and keep their students engaged. A custom-made Discord bot is the perfect way to keep a lot of these services automated—while still having room for real people to moderate and interact with the Discord server—and to tailor that automation to the needs of the UD CIS Department. We call our custom bot ‘Sage’ and proactively maintain it and adapt to any new needs of the UD CIS community and staff. Sage also provides students and professors with tools that can lead them to success and better organization for their courses.

What can Sage do?

Sage adds a lot of useful functionality to the UD CIS server. Some of the most important features of Sage include, but are not limited to:

  • An easy to use, robust verification system to ensure server security
  • Anonymous and private question asking functionality similar to that of Piazza
  • Self-assignable class roles that grant access to class-specific channels
  • Fun commands to encourage engagement, such as coin flipping, dice rolling, and rock-paper-scissors
  • The ability for users to set reminders at specific times/intervals for themselves
  • Miscellaneous utilities such as poll creation and a user leveling system
  • Student activity reports that professors can use for participation grades

Sage has many more features that are explained on this website’s command documentation. You can also bring up a list of commands via Discord, by entering /help in any channel on the UD CIS server.

If you would like to suggest a new feature, give feedback on current features, or report a bug, you can let the developers know by creating an issue on the public GitHub repository or by contacting us on Discord.