I’m trying to figure out how to build a Discord bot that automatically grabs specific data from a gaming website and posts it at scheduled times. I saw this bot that pulls information about certain game elements and filters it to show only specific items like weapon van locations. The bot runs automatically every day at 3am and posts the filtered content to a Discord channel. I’m really struggling to understand the technical process behind this. What programming language would work best for this? How do you set up the scheduling part? And most importantly, how do you extract and filter the website data before posting it? Any guidance would be amazing because I’m totally lost right now.
for sure! python is awesome for this, especially with discord.py. if u gotta deal with js, selenium is ur best bud for scraping. for scheduling, check out python’s schedule library or go with cron jobs. lots of tutorials on youtube to guide ya!
Built something like this last year - here’s what you need to watch out for. Web scraping gaming sites is way trickier than it looks because they’ve got anti-bot stuff everywhere. I used Python with BeautifulSoup and requests, but had to add delays between requests or I’d get blocked instantly. Discord.py works great once you nail the bot permissions (took me forever to figure that out). For scheduling, skip cron and use APScheduler - it plays much nicer with Python. The biggest headache? Sites change their HTML all the time and your bot just dies. Build solid error handling and logging so you know when extraction breaks. And don’t forget rate limiting plus checking robots.txt - you don’t want legal trouble.
Node.js might work better than Python here, especially if the site loads content with JavaScript. I had similar issues building my first scraping bot - Puppeteer handles dynamic content way more reliably than traditional scrapers. You can use node-cron for scheduling and keep everything running continuously instead of dealing with external cron jobs. Here’s what most people miss: check the website’s network requests first. You can often skip HTML scraping completely and hit their API endpoints directly. Way more stable and faster. Also, host on Railway or Heroku with persistent storage for your filtered data. Free hosting restarts your bot randomly and you’ll lose everything.