Discord-Registration-Bot

A bot to restrict access to a Discord server and grant access after a successful registration with the university email. This bot was created for the Lecture "Grundlagen der Bioinformatik" in SS 2021 at the University of Tübingen.

What does this bot do?

This bot is used to register students on a Discord server and is intended to prevent abuse (as far as possible).

To register, the student needs an email that matches a regex. In this case, the university email must be used. The student must send their email address to the bot as a direct message.

Then they should get an email with a (random) token.

This token should be copied and send again as a direct message to the bot. The student will then receive the role of "student" and can compose messages and join all channels.

Setup

Discord

• Create a Discord-server
• Create a Role for the students
• Remove all permissions of the role @everyone
• Create a channel called registration
• Send a message in this channel welcoming the students and advising them to send their email address to the bot.
• Modify the permissions of the registration channel for @everyone:
  • Turn everything off
  • Allow: Show channel
  • Allow: Show message history

Discord-API

• Create a Discord-Application at https://discord.com/developers/applications
• Create a Bot with the name Registration
• Activate Server Members Intent
• Copy the token modify the first line in tokens.py
• Go to the OAuth2 Section:
  • Set the scope to bot
  • Set the permission to Manage Roles and Send Messages.
  • Copy the URL and open it.
• Grant your bot access to your server.

Discord Part 2

• Go to the Role-Settings
• IMPORTANT: Drag and Drop the roles in the following order:
  • Registration
  • Students
  • @everyone

Bot

• Modify config.py to your needs

  • Set GUILD to the name of your server
  • Set STUDENT_ROLE to the name of the student's role
  • Set REGEXMAIL to a regex of valid / accepted emails
  • Set all SMTP_ variables accourding to the smtp-server settings
  • Set CSV_FILE to the path where the keys will be stored.
  • Set TOKEN_PREFIX to a good prefix for the token (Example: "token"). This prefix shall not contain a dash "-".
  • Set GUILD_APPENDIX to your organisation (Example: Uni Tübingen)
  • Set ADMIN_NAME to the discord name of an admin.
  • Set VERBOSE_EMAIL_REGEX to a valid example email.
  • Adapt all strings in the config.py if necessary.

• Set your SMTP email password in the tokens.py file

• Install the python discord package: pip install discord

• Your done. :)

Usage

• Run the python-script
• You may want to create a cron-job that kills the bot every 12 hours and restarts it. This should prevent some bugs and limit downtime.

Limitations

• This bot will work fine with a small amount (lets say 300) of students. For a more sophisticated bot check out: https://github.com/jensengillett/verificationbot
• The performance is ok, but not excellent.
• No database connection, the temporary tokens are saved in a csv-file.
• No Brute-Force-Protection
• No Banned email adresses