I have a bot named R. Danny. It is actually the oldest bot on Discord. I made that bot within a few hours of me joining Discord. I remember the first day I joined Discord, August 10th 2015, my friend was trying to convince me to move our operations from Skype and IRC over to this chat he had just found today called Discord. So I logged on and tinkered with it and I was pretty impressed as my first impression. I spent that day looking up an API for Discord and couldn't find anything until I stumbled upon a package named node-discord by izy852. This node-discord package was incredibly barebones, it was just a WebSocket wrapper with two events, a message and a debug event. It might as well be the simplest sugar for Discord. But I looked at it and I played with it for a while and I decided it was possible for me to move our tournaments over to Discord with what I had there.
I didn't use node-discord for very long, I really only used it for probably the first two days before throwing it away and started reverse engineering the API myself via discord.py. I didn't like JS much and I wanted to make a library for my bot to truly shine. I essentially made discord.py for the sake of my bot. It was during this time that Voltana, izy, and I made a server known today as Discord API. In that server we spent our concentrated manpower reverse engineering the API for fun. Stan would join and give us API announcements on things that would break between v1, v2, and v3 along with new features that might affect our really tiny ecosystem. Our ecosystem was small -- we barely had 200 members at the time and that was a lot! But it was our nice little ecosystem.
I made R. Danny with the intention of using it in the r/Splatoon server. It was there since day 1 essentially. We used to do all sorts of cool things like tags, profiles, and checking in-game information like maps and equipment. It was a vital resource for that server. I remember people were impressed that I had a bot and asked me how I did it. I motivated a few others to start making a bot of their own. One of those people was someone you might know as jagrosh. He wanted to make his own bot and add it into the r/Splatoon server as well. He ended up becoming a major bot developer for the platform by creating popular bots such as GiveawayBot and Yggdrasil. People still, to this day, mention how my bot has impacted them and improved their experience.
R. Danny was the first bot to come up with a starboard feature. It's been copied a lot by other people nowadays, which is fine. The feature came from StackOverflow Chat, which is where I used to hang out before Discord was a thing and I wanted to come up with a way to port it over so my friends would move over to Discord. I've implemented a lot of influential features using R. Danny and used him as a way to drive the design of discord.py into what it is today. Most library developers did not maintain public bots -- I used to be the sole exception.
During the verification fiasco, my bot became gimped. I was against the verification system and didn't appreciate that my hobby was being neutered over concerns that I did not share with the newly formed API team. My bot is a vital moderation bot for all the communities I'm in. Mason insulted my bot's potential death. I still hold that very personally. Due to a bug and lucky accident, my bot still has the members intent despite being unverified. It was a lucky accident -- I had checked the box before the flip was switched and it never toggled itself off. It's been unnoticed since I haven't told any staff about it. Please don't fix it.
Unfortunately for me when this message intent change goes live I'll have to officially sunset R. Danny and all my bots. An actual literal death of my oldest bot and everything this hobby meant for me. A piece of my history and my time. A piece of Discord history. I'm sure a lot of the people over at Discord Inc. don't care about my bot at all. Maybe some would even do another jab at me for being emotionally attached to it. But to me, this actually matters.
It depresses me.
The stupid thing that Discord doesn't get is that this doesn't stop selfbots at all, but rather encourages devs to make selfbots to get around these restrictions (yes I know about the guild limit, but you get all intents handed to you) It just hurts legitimate devs. Get your s**t together Discord.