A Telegram bot that posts the latest posts from the Digit Forum.
I am fairly new to Kotlin programming while coming from a Java background. I mostly wrote this as a way to practice programming with Kotlin.
Before building, you need to get your own bot token and bot username using @BotFather. More details on creating Telegram bots can be found here.
Once you have your own bot token and bot username, enter these details in the app.properties file against the fields NEW_POSTS_BOT_TOKEN and NEW_POSTS_BOT_USERNAME.
Set the frequency of posting as needed against POSTING_FREQUENCY_SECONDS, the default value is one hour.
After this, run mvn clean package in the project root, and you will get the built executable JAR in the target directory as DigitForumBot-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar. This can now be run as java -jar DigitForumBot-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar.
Search for your bot via the handle and add it to your chat.
Once added, either post /start or /start@<bot username> if you have multiple bots. You should receive a message like:
Welcome! DigitForumBot has been activated for this chat.
After this, you will receive a message with the latest posts based on the frequency you have set above.
Some future enhancements that need to be implemented:
Add support for deactivating in a chat.- Add support for additional updates from the forum such as user updates.
- Generalize the bot to work with any Xenforo based forum.
- Make the executable configurable to accept properties from a properties file outside the JAR or from arguments or from environment variables.
- Decouple the parser from the bot.