"Public Bot" feature

[sammy-kuang]

Hi, when updating the bot, I got the following message:

[ERROR] [JMusicBot]: JMusicBot cannot be run on this Discord bot: "Public Bot" is enabled. Using JMusicBot as a public bot is not supported. Please disable it in the Developer Dashboard.

I was wondering why this is the case? I know how to disable it, but I was wondering why public bot is not supported.

[sad-cactus]

I was wondering the same. I used this bot because people could invite and use it without them needing to give me administrative privileges. Why did it need removing?

[Varelion]

I'm currently wondering the same thing. Why would this feature be removed? I doubt it's necessary for the operation of the program — wasn't it perfectly able to operate in public mode before?

[sad-cactus]

Version 0.3.9 works this way, guess i wont be updating yet :(

[sks316]

@Varelion @sad-cactus Both of you might be interested in the fork I've just made, which reverses this change and instead just makes it show an info dialog (or, if running headless, a simple message in the terminal/systemd log)

[rojosinalma]

Are you commiting to keep the mirror up to date?

[sks316]

@rojosinalma Yes, I am.

[BlasterM5]

Same question, is this a setting we need to change or do I have to revert?

[TetraTsunami]

It seems to be a result of PR #1486, and the reasoning is explained in #568. Notably, because the bot can't shard, it will completely stop working once it hits ~2500 guilds (to my understanding).
Public mode specifically shouldn't be outright disallowed, though I agree that verification is dubious. I want to share my instance with friends without them having to give me manage server perms in every guild they want to add it to.

[sad-cactus]

perhaps it would be better to add a warning telling the user what can happen when enabling this token.

[jagrosh]

JMusicBot's internals are not designed around nor optimized for being a public bot on a lot of servers. The setup instructions have always instructed you to disable the bot from being public. Version 0.4.0 is just the first version to actually enforce this; this is one of several warnings that were added to help alleviate issues that people frequently run into when they haven't set the bot up correctly on the developer dashboard.

It is very likely that the majority of users running into this error message didn't realize that their developer dashboard settings were incorrect; there is a long history of people needing support because someone added their bot without their permission and needed help removing it from other servers.

Unverified bots are also hard-capped at 100 servers. When a bot hits that, its invite status effectually becomes "locked," where it can't be added to any new servers (even if the bot is removed from some to put it back below 100). Additionally, the bot's intent settings become "locked," preventing any further change to what the bot will have access to.

Note that this check only happens when the bot starts; if you want a friend to add the bot, you can temporarily make it public so they can add it, and then make it private again afterwards. Alternatively, your friend could temporarily grant you Manage Server permissions for you to add the bot to their server (the bot's owner can still add a bot to servers even if the bot is private). Again, because this bot is designed to be private, you should really know about every time someone is adding it.

[sks316]

This is not the way. It should be up to me if I want to run the bot as public in an "unsupported" manner. I shouldn't have to manually enable and disable public bot every time a friend wants to add it, that just feels like a hacky workaround to a problem that didn't exist in the first place until it was intentionally introduced.

Instead of completely crashing the bot, maybe just give a simple "this behavior is unsupported and we won't be able to help you" error. That feels like a much better solution than completely crashing the bot, and getting the token reset due to "potential abuse" for those of us who have it enabled as a systemd service to auto start.

[rojosinalma]

Just 2 cents on this:

While I understand the intention of minimizing people complaining or not informing themselves correctly about the Discord bots limits and overall ToS, the solution should not be to restrict your bots functionality, but rather direct those people to Discords documentation and call it a day.

It's particularly annoying when people have issues that are not really your responsability to fix, but making the bot less open and objectively worse because of some ignorant/lazy people is also wrong.

Anyway, the project is yours and you can do whatever you want with it, but I would wonder how many people were complaining about what you described before, and how many people are gonna complain about this issue now. I'm betting is gonna be about the same, but this time the problem is actually yours.