Event Horizon

This is a Discord bot that slowly deletes all posts in a channel as they expire, sliding inexorably into oblivion. You can use it to remove all posts that live longer than a certain age. This is useful for things like #venting channels, selfies, and anything sensitive you don't want years of history getting exposed in the future.

Goals

• Configuration
  • Load delete config from a human-readable file on startup
  • Write delete config to a file if updated using /commands
  • Load discord bot login tokens from a configured file
• Deleting
  • Be able to fetch a list of posts in a channel older than the configured timeout
  • Be able to delete all posts in a channel older than the configured timeout
  • "Dry run" (read-only) mode to list what WOULD be deleted without deleting anything
  • Don't delete pinned messages
  • Be able to only delete messages with images/video, leaving text-only messages intact
• Running
  • Add a /command to trigger this manually from discord
  • Add a /command to change the configuration manually from discord
  • Have it poll periodically in a loop
  • Use docker and cron to schedule this to run periodically
  • Be able to edit the config externally without having to restart the container
• Nice-to-haves
  • Anyone can technically host this
  • Config files are bootstrapped into existence
  • Document how to host this
  • Write a short script to make it easier to create a new self-hosted instance of this bot
  • Tests!

License

Licensed under GPL-3. Please feel free to copy and modify this, and host it yourself.

Contributing

Please open an issue or a pull request!

Installation and Deployment

Anyone can download and run this bot themselves! Just make sure you've set up a discord bot first, grabbed its token, and added it with sufficient permissions to your Discord server. You need permissions to "read message history" and "manage messages".

// TODO: add an image showing what permissions to set!

Using Cargo and Rust:

cargo run -- --config-path="./config.yaml" --discord-bot-token-path="./token.txt"

For details, run cargo run -- --help.

Using docker-compose:

secrets:
  discord_bot_token:
    file: ./token.txt

services:
  discord_autodelete:
    container_name: "discord-autodelete"
    build: https://github.com/brownian-motion/discord-autodelete.git
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - "./config:/app/config"
    environment:
      - "CONFIG_PATH=/app/config/config.yaml"
      - "DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN_PATH=/run/secrets/discord_bot_token"
    secrets:
      - discord_bot_token # mounted into /run/secrets/discord_bot_token

Configuration

This bot relies on two configuration files: a file with the bot token allowing access to the API, and a config file containing per-channel delete schedules.

Discord Bot Token

Just paste your discord bot token, on a single line, into a single file, and direct the program to it using the DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN_PATH environment variable or the --discord-bot-token-path flag.

Config

Your config file will be created for you if it does not already exist, and you can edit it while the app is running (changes will be picked up and applied on the next run).

Config files should have the following format:

guilds:
- id: '2417843429083125945'
  channels:
  # delete everything from channel <#1641798796715016192> that gets older than 2 minutes:
  - id: '1641798796715016192'
    delete_older_than:
      minutes: 2
  # delete every message with images/videos from channel <#637575874339525219> that gets older than a day and a half:
  - id: '637575874339525219'
    just_images: true
    delete_older_than:
      days: 1
      hours: 12