LangPolizei (Language Police)

Toolkit and Telegram/Discord Bot to enforce one language in the group chat. How does it do it?

If LangPolizei detects that the language doesn't match the one specified in .env file, it rebukes and/or mutes the user for the specified period of time.

Usage

The bot, once added to the group chat / server should be granted with admin privileges. Admins can also add particular words as "exceptions". The bot will be relaxed about them in the future.

To add or remove an exception

To suppress bot warnings for "yeah boii" string in the future, write the following in the group chat.

/except yeah boii

or

/remove yeah boii

How to run it?

The bot is designed to run on Google Cloud Platform's App Engine. Usually, setting everything correctly takes about 20-30 minutes.

Ready? It won't be hard:)

Do git clone and npm install. You'll also need to set a few environment variables and projects.

1. Create a new Firebase project
2. Enable Cloud Firestore
3. Go to Project Settings -> Overview -> Service accounts and "Generate a new private key". A .json file will be downloaded
4. That .json contains a lot of stuff. Find project_id, client_email and private_key and copy them to the their respective environment variables in .env file.

TELEGRAM_TOKEN - Telegram Bot API key and/or

DISCORD_TOKEN - Discord Bot API key

GCP_API_KEY - API key to the Google Translate API. Enable this API and use it (it always starts with "Alza")

REQUIRED_LANG - two-digit language code which the bot will consider as the correct language. English is en, French is fr, German is de, Polish is pl and so on...

PROJECT_ID - Firebase Project ID

CLIENT_EMAIL - Firebase Service Account's email address

PRIVATE_KEY - Firebase Service Account's private key

BE_HELPFUL - true if bot should translate messages, false otherwise

MUTE_PEOPLE – true if the bot should mute people for using bad language, false otherwise

MUTE_TIMEOUT – mute duration, in milliseconds (default 30 000)

It uses Cloud Firestore, so you'll need to create a new Firestore project.

Finally, run npm run [PLATFORM NAME] to start the bot for the specific platform or npm run start to run bots for all platforms.

Structure

This project emerged from a Telegram group of Google Code-in 2019 winners. A first working version was created in less than 1 day by me with help of some other people. Initially, it was just another fun project written in JavaScript. As it grew and features were added, I rewrote it TypeScript and modularized to make it possible to add support for other messaging platforms.

This project is basically a toolkit containing some useful methods (gathered in src/core.ts) and actual bot implementations for particular platforms (currently only for Telegram – bot_telegram.ts and Discord bot_discord.ts).

core.ts in completely platform-independent.

It uses:

• Google Translate API to detect the message's language
• Cloud Firestore to save exceptions

The Telegram Bot implementation takes advantage of the Telegram Bot API, and the Discord Bot uses the Discord Bot API.

Create your own bot!

If you want to create a similar bot for some other messenger service (IRC, Slack, etc), we'll be happy to help you. Only one very smart person has done that before (@diogoscf), so you'll be our second early adopter :)

1. Take a look at how bot_telegram.ts and bot_discord.ts are written
2. You'll see that they do platform-specific integration stuff and delegate the business logic to core.ts
3. Try to somehow replicate the behaviour of the Telegram/Discord Bot with your messenger platform of choice

PS If you find any bugs or have some ingenious idea on how something could be improved, we'll be happy to accept your Pull Requests.