Happy New Year! Introducing Message Rewrite, Notifications, Deleting, and more

Jan 2, 2023

Happy Snowsgiving and New Year everyone! We're proud to release some of the features we've been working on for the second half of 2022, as WidgetBot v3.8. Thanks to our Emerald subscribers for testing out some of these features for the past few months.

Here's a roundup of the new features:

  • Message Rewrite (Message Deleting and Speak Message)
  • Embed Notifications and Unread Indicators
  • embed-api and Crate Notifications
  • Custom Auth/Anti-Impersonation
  • Text Chat in Voice Channels

Previously on WidgetBot

Earlier this year, we added a new section in the bottom left of the embed which shows you which account you're logged in to. We also added a settings panel that lets you enable the new Send Message button.

Message Rewrite

We've rewritten our message rendering! This let us clean up the code and implement new message actions: Delete Message, Speak Message, and Copy Message Link/ID!

The new user info section and message rewrite were done by the newest member of our team, JohnyTheCarrot!

The Return of embed-api and Crate Notifications

It's been a long time, but they're back! With this release, your site can once again use embed-api to listen to events from the embed. Our currently supported events are signIn, message, messageUpdate, messageDelete, messageDeleteBulk, and sentMessage. Note that at this time we do not support sending messages through embed-api. If you had a previous embed-api integration, you may need to update it to support the new structures.

With embed-api comes the return of Crate notifications! New messages are shown above the Crate button and a count of new messages is shown. Crate notifications are on by default (as they originally were), and you can change them using the notifications, indicator, and timeout options. By default, notifications are only shown for the default channel. You can change that by setting the allChannelNotifications option to true; that will also enable embed notifications (described below).

Embed Notifications

In addition to Crate notifications, we have added opt-in embed notifications! If enabled, when a message is sent in another channel, a notification will be shown in the top-right of the embed. An unread indicator will also be displayed on the channel.

You can enable embed notifications by setting allChannelNotifications to true in Crate, or by notifications to true in react-embed, html-embed, or an iframe.

By default, the timeout is set to 3000 (3 seconds), you can change that by setting embedNotificationTimeout in Crate, notificationTimeout in react-embed, or notificationtimeout in html-embed or an iframe.

Custom Auth/Anti-Impersonation

If your website has an account system, you can now securely hook into WidgetBot and set their account details. User messages will show their name and avatar in your website, and they will not be able to set a custom name or use Discord login.

More details about setting up anti-impersonation will be available very soon.

Text Chat in Voice Channels

We now support Discord's text-in-voice (TiV) feature. Voice channels now show in WidgetBot's channel list, and users can chat in the voice channel's text chat.

Note that WidgetBot does not support actual voice communication - we are just showing the channel's text chat. If you want users to join voice, we recommend using /setinvite to show your server's invite button inside the widget.


We hope WidgetBot is useful for you and that these updates make it even better! If you have any feedback or need any help, talk to us in our Discord server.

Also, a big thank you to all of our subscribers! If you want more out of your widget, check out our plans. Our Emerald tier unlocks an exclusive instance that gets early access to features, including the ones in this update, and a new ML-powered filtering system!

If you want to use WidgetBot for a large website or an event, reach out to us at contact@widgetbot.io for an Enterprise instance.

Thanks to all of our users; we will keep working to bring you improvements in 2023!

Advaith

WidgetBot frontend and bot developer