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+# Chatting on discord from 9front
+
+Sometimes you work with people who doesn't want to use the same communication
+tools as you do. A sad example is when your team members wants to use discord,
+and not something simpler like IRC. Oh well, gotta deal with it.
+
+This is the reason I wrote a "discord bot" (ugh) which can run on your 9front
+system and allow you to chat on discord anyways.
+
+## Example gif
+
+The example below just opens two chat windows with different channels in each.
+While it works both in acme and in the terminal, I like having everything
+together inside acme.
+
+[![An animated gif showing discord chats from 9front][1]][1]
+
+## The code
+
+The project is made of a few scripts and a go program. The only thing that
+actually communicates with discord is the go program, and the scripts just
+makes it easier to send and recieve on the correct channels. The code is
+available [here](https://git.sr.ht/~pmikkelsen/discordfront), and there is
+a precompiled version of the go program included (compiled for 9front amd64).
+
+## Usage
+
+To use the service, you must first create a bot on discord and get the
+access token. I personally found this step much more confusing then the
+actual coding itself, which either tells you something about my google
+skills, or about discord.. Oh, and then you must invite the bot to your
+discord server..
+
+Next, the server part of the bot must be started:
+
+	`discordsrv YOURTOKEN`
+
+This will post a pipe in /srv/discordfront, where messages can be send
+and recieved from, but you should not read from it directly. The
+`discordsrv` script does this for you as well, and it takes each line
+and dumps it in a nice readable format into 
+`$home/lib/discord/logs/$serverName/$channelName`
+where the server name is the name of a discord server (or guild?), and
+the channel name is, well, the name of the channel.
+
+Now that the server is started, you can either run `discordacme` which
+opens an acme with the file `$home/lib/discord/channels` open. This file
+is not handled by any of the scripts, so it is just a handy text file to
+keep shortcuts to various channels (see the gif for an example).
+Inside `discordacme`, the `openChat` command will open a new chat window,
+using the simpler `discord` script.
+
+The `discord` script simply runs `tail -f` on the given channel's logfile
+while it reads messages from standard input and sends them to
+/srv/discordfront at the same time.
+
+## Using remotely
+
+Since this program does not fetch previous messages, it might be a good
+idea to run the server part `discordsrv` on a machine that is always online,
+so that all messages gets logged. Since this is plan9, it is almost trivial
+to still use the client on your local machine, just by using `rimport` to
+import the relevant file trees from the server.
+
+Here is what I do (in a seperate script which is run at startup):
+
+	#!/bin/rc
+
+	rfork
+	rimport -ac -p $serverhost /srv
+	rimport -c -p $serverhost /usr/glenda/lib/discord
+	discordacme
+
+I don't even notice it is not running locally.
+
+## Notes
+
+* Yes, the names of the scripts suck.
+* Yes, there is a lot of missing functionality.
+* No, this has not been tested very much, it just seems to do the job
+well enough for now.
+
+[1]: /images/discordgif.gif