Norris

Norris is the registration bot for the official University of Nottingham Computer Science starters Discord server.

Features

User registration - Users joining the server must go through a multi-step registration process before they are allowed access to most channels
Automatic de-registration - Users leaving the server are automatically de-registered
Nickname requests - Users can request nicknames, which must be approved by a mentor
Simple configuration - Data is deserialized from a configuration file at startup rather than using hard-coded values
Robust error handling - Errors and failure cases are handled gracefully, without panics or crashes
Log files - Errors, warnings, and other notable events are logged to files that are created on a daily basis
Fully documented - Comprehensive documentation regarding design and setup, intended for future maintainers

Norris supports the following slash commands:

/registration add [NAME] [KIND] - Add a user to the registration whitelist (usable by administrators only)
/registration restart [USER] - Restart a user's registration (usable by mentors and administrators only)
/registration nuke [ROLE] - Restart the registrations of all users with a particular role, defaulting to all undergraduate and postgraduate students if ROLE is not provided (usable by administrators only)
/nickname [NAME] - Request a server nickname
/count undergrads - Report the number of registered and total undergraduate students
/count postgrads - Report the number of registered and total postgraduate students

Norris only stores the minimum amount of user data required to perform registration, as seen in its database schema.

Student names and kinds (undergraduate or postgraduate) are obtained from the University via the proper channels.
Users that join the server have their Discord user ID stored to keep track of their registration state.
Pronouns and housing information are provided voluntarily by users, can be skipped, and are not stored in the database.

Additionally, access to user data via the database is limited to server administrators only.

Thanks to:

Joe Sieniawski and the University of Nottingham Computer Science Research Support Team, for providing a database and server to host Norris on
Ben Flynn, for providing the previous year's codebase, which served as a foundation for the current bot