I built a Discord autodelete utility


posted | about 2 minutes to read

tags: nodejs autodelete discord automation

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of Discord chat servers I’m in started talking about creating some “emotional venting” channels where folks could scream into the void. One of the things they were looking for as a result of that was a way to clean up old messages - the idea being that, well, it’s meant to be void screaming. Get it out of your brain and into chat, but then it’s ephemeral. They had been looking into some autodelete bots that already existed - there are plenty out there, trust me - but everything they tried seemed to suffer from reliabiity issues.

I had been meaning to get back into Discord bot development in the near future anyway[1], and this was a really good opportunity to build one out! It was kind of a shitpost to begin with - “can I build something to do this in less characters than the Discord message character limit?” - but then I did, and then I drew a very silly icon for it, and then I said to myself, hmm, why don’t I just spin it up so people can use it? So I did, and that brings me to … this. It’s actually available on Github as autodeletebot, and you can add it to your very own Discord server using this link. If you like it, drop something in the tip jar in this page’s footer!

Update 2024-03-19: There’s a support Discord for this and other bots I’ve written now, if you have any questions about how it works or want to use it on your own server.