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Badges and guidelines

Badges show your work, and a few good habits make your bot one people want to keep.

#Badges

Bot Developer

On your own profile, from the moment you make your first bot. It's earned automatically.

Verified Bot

A checkmark on the bot's profile: Roar staff have looked at it and trust it. Staff give it by hand.

To ask for Verified Bot, message a staff member on the official Roar server once your bot has been running for a while. Tell them what it does and which servers use it. Staff look for bots that follow the guidelines below.

#Built-in bots

Every node has two verified bots run by the node itself, so they never go offline. Add them from Server Settings → Bots:

• Welcomer greets new members in a channel, or by DM, and can give them a role. The message can use {user} and {server}.
• Levels gives 15–25 XP a minute to people who chat, announces level-ups ({user}, {level}), and answers /rank and /leaderboard.

If one of these does what you need, you may not need your own bot at all.

#Good bot guidelines

Keep it safe

• Keep the token secret. Load it from an environment variable or a file you never share. Don't put it in code you upload. Reset it at once if it leaks.
• Give it only the permissions it needs. A dice bot doesn't need Administrator. Server admins are more likely to add a bot that asks for little.
• Check who's asking. Before a command kicks, bans, deletes or changes roles, check the person using it is allowed to (for example, that they have a moderator role). The bot's own permissions say what the bot can do, not what the person should be able to make it do.

Be a good guest

• Answer when asked. Reply to commands and mentions. Don't post on your own in busy channels, except for things a server asked for, like welcome messages or reminders.
• Don't DM people out of the blue. Only send a DM when someone asked for it (a reminder they set, a reply to their command). Never send DMs in bulk.
• Ignore other bots (msg.author.isBot), so two bots can't answer each other forever.
• Use answers only the person sees (ephemeral: true) for errors, settings and anything private.
• Say what it does. Give the bot a description and a /help command.

Respect people

• Store as little as you can. Don't keep people's messages unless the bot needs them to work, and tell people what it keeps. Delete their data if they ask.
• Don't pretend to be someone else: not Roar staff, not another bot, not a real person.
• Follow the server's rules, and keep 18+ content to 18+ channels.

Run it well

• Handle errors. When something fails, tell the person what happened instead of going quiet.
• Don't hammer the API. Roar.js waits out rate limits for you. In other languages, honour retry_after.
• Run one copy. Two programs with the same token both get every event, so they'd answer everything twice.