How to remember channels where bot is enabled

Question

I'm making a discord bot using discord.js and node.js.

Essentially, the bot needs to a message every predefined amount of time.

To not send a message to every channel of every server the bot is in, I made an enable-disable system:

when you type !enable, the bot saves in an array the channel and when it needs to send a message, for each channel in the array, it sends a message to that channel.

The problem is that when I update/restart the bot, that array is gone, so I have to re-type !enable in every channel I need.

This is the code that handles the !enable and !disable

enabled_channels = [];

client.on("message", message => {
    if(message.content.startsWith("!")) {
        if(message.content === "!enable") {
            if(!enabled_channels.includes(message.channel)) {
                enabled_channels.push(message.channel);
                message.channel.send("Bot enabled in this channel");
            } else {
                message.channel.send("Bot already enabled in this channel");
            }
        } else if(message.content === "!disable") {
            if(enabled_channels.includes(message.channel)) {
                enabled_channels.splice(enabled_channels.indexOf(message.channel), 1)
            }
            message.channel.send("Bot disabled in this channel");
        }
    }
});

And this is the code that sends the message to all the channels

function sendToAll(message) {
    for(let c of enabled_channels) {
        c.send(message);
    }
}

setInterval(() => {
    var message = functionThatGenerateTheMessageContent();  //really simplified here
    sendToAll(message);
}, 5 * 60 * 1000);  //5 minutes

Is there a way to save the enabled_channels array? I tried with node-localstorage but I found that saving an object, just saves [Object object] and saving the stringified object saves only the attributes and not the type so I cannot call functions associated with that object.

Its not really possible to save object with all its methods. Your best option would be to save an array of channel IDs and then use client.channels.fetch(id) to fetch each channel and send a message. — ignis

Joe Moore Joe Moore · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-18T08:41:38

I would personally use a SQLite database, and save a user input channel in the db, then loop through and send a message to them all.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3 This is a faster, easier sqlite package - the docs will help you on anything you need

How to remember channels where bot is enabled

1 Answers