expr.link

expr.link keeps your discord servers clean of long URL's. expr.link is a minimal bot that automatically shortens ALL url's posted on the server. Turn embeddings on/off or just have expr.link convert your URL to the websites title!

Commands

expr.link currently has three commands which all require admin privileges.

• £embed - toggles preview embeddings for URL's on the server. When triggered a message displaying whether the toggle is on or off is written to the channel in which the command was invoked.
• £title - switches to title mode in which the URL's are converted to discord embeddings including only the title of the previous URL.
• £help - a short description of the previous commands mentioned.\n
• £permissions - sends a message to the admin who invoked the command which permissions are enabled/disabled for expr.link in the specific channel.
• £expr_link - to toggle the bot on/off on the entire server.

By default embed and title are turned off. Make sure expr.link has the right permissions in the channel you intend to use it, it won't shorten URL's if they are not fullfilled

Version list

• Beta (current)

Technical details

For every link in a chat the expr.link bot identifies the link using regex and makes a http request to expr.link. The bot then creates a new URL(hopefully shorter) and rewrites the message that was previously sent. Since bots do not have access to edit members messages the bot sends a new message with a format the makes it clear who the sender is of the original message, and then deletes the previous message. However do not fear, the message is only deleted if the new message has been successfully sent to the channel!

The default formatting of the messages is simply a new message with an expr.link shortened URL, using the £title commands converts the message to a include an embedding with the title. The message is then split up into several messages. Firstly the text which was included in the original message, followed by embeddings.

In the current version of the bot expr.link is hosted on a server which sleeps if not used. This can make the bot slow to respond if the server has not been active within the previous hour.

Upcoming features

• Command for only showing domain as embeddings title.
• Possibly adding a category to the server which saves all original URLs in a text channel sorted by domain name.

Contact

For contact, feature requests, contributions any other questions. Please email me at [email protected]