Discord Office Hours Queue Bot

Discord is great for office hours, however with large groups it can be hard to maintain the order of arrival of students so that they can be helped in the correct sequence by the instructor.

This is a very simple bot for discord written in python, allowing to maintain an order of arrival for students. Upon arriving in the server the students start a private conversation with the bot and use the following commands:

• !joinq to join the queue
• !status to enquire for their position in the queue (0 being the first position)
• !leaveq to leave the queue

The instructor/TAs also interract with the bot in private chat with these privileged commands:

• !popq to select the next student to see (automatically dequeues the student)
• !viewq to print the entire queue
• !notify when the queue is empty, to have the bot privately message the instructor/TA once someone joins the queue
• !notify-always works similarly to !notify, but does not need to be relaunched each time a signal is sent, i.e. it will always signal the instructor/TA when someone joins an empty queue
• !clearq-yes-I-am-sure to clear the queue

You need to setup a role named TA in your discord server and give it to the person(s) you want to be able to use the privileged commands. A Discord server template with the correct setup is available here: https://discord.new/6tXKxc93fsm5.

Installation

Dependencies:

Python3 as well as the discord library:

pip3 install -U discord.py

Once your discord server is set up, get a token following these instructions: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter/wiki/Obtaining-Token-and-Channel-IDs

Write the token in a file named settings.json in the local folder, see for example settings-sample.json. Finally launch the bot as follows:

./bot.py

Obviously, the bot will only answer when it runs. Don't forget to setup a role named TA on your server and give it to the people supposed to use the privileged commands.