Text Bridge Sends Chat from Second Life to Discord -- And Vice Versa!

So much social activity around virtual worlds now takes place on Discord, since the messaging platform is much easier to use in various everyday contexts (i.e. on the train, in the bathroom, etc.) But here's one solution in a virtual dance club that offers the best of both mediums: A bridge connecting public chat in Second Life to Discord, and vice versa.

You can see that in the above screen, with me posting a message in SL (left) that's instantly sent to the club's Discord group (right).

The club's owner, Puddles Kayleigh, implemented it a few years ago in her Trance Music Club -- click here to teleport to the club in SL, and click here to join the club's Discord server. 

When you enter the club, you'll get several alerts warnings, notifying you that your SL chat is being sent to Discord.

"In 3 years I have not received a single complaint [about the bridge]," she tells me. "However many of my guests love that they can listen to the club stream and chat real-time to the club when they are unable to log-in to SL, via their phones, tablets etc."

Still, it's important to warn SLers that their chat is going off-world, so to speak:

"This process can be important for some community groups who will only allow remote participation in meetings if users can all be identified by their SL names and the verification system prevents anyone banned from the region where the poster is from joining the meeting, even if the Discord server itself is open to the public."

As for how she created the bridging system, here's Ms. Kayleigh's highly technical explanation:

It uses Webhooks for SL to Discord, but going from Discord to SL is harder.

When the link object is activated, it requests a URL from the Linden Lab server and sends that via a webhook to a hidden Discord Bot command channel on the Discord server. My Bot then uses that to communicate back, using transliteration for the UTF-8 characters in Discord that wont display nicely in SL. The script keeps checking and will update if it’s URL changes, so its a basic dynamic DNS server.

I use a verification system, where SL users click a poster in SL and enter the Discord user name. This assigns them a Role on the Server for remote participation and changes their Discord Server nickname to their SL username, binding their accounts for identity. Any posts to the Discord channel are deleted by the Bot before sending to SL, which looks up their Display Name, so they appear in the chat with their SL Display & Username. The link object then sends their post back to the Discord channel via a webhook, so the logs show everyone by their SL names, whether they posted locally or remotely.

So there you go. Puddles tells me she might sell this bridge as a kit for other Discord server owners, but I'm told other SL groups are already using a similar bridging system. (More background here.) But frankly this is something Linden Lab should officially integrate directly into the SL messaging system by default.

Speaking of which, her club also has several LLM-powered bots, so you can compare and contrast them with Linden Lab's new Convai bots, now giving out quests on a beach. By contrast, Puddles Kayleigh's bots are built for club chat:

"I am using ChatGPT to give my bots personalities and give our guests information on the Artists and Tracks the DJs are playing real-time, from the metadata."

Comments

[DJ Puddles]

I would like to thank Wagner for his excellent article. It's great to see such a knowledgable and respected journalist stimulating debate about using tools like Discord and AI to enhance and entertain us in SL.

One minor point of clarification: My club system does not use my verification system normally. The club relies on warning anyone coming to the club, via three separate means, that they are approaching a 20m area that is linked to Discord. Anyone who then proceeds and remains is doing so with consent. That triple warning goes beyond the requirements of the LL Community Standards and GDPR Law.

For normal daily operations, our club uses Smartbots and the excellent Lethal Add-ons for linking our SL club chat and SL groups to Discord and our web site at http://spaceunicorn.radio

The verification system is used with my "Meeting Logging & Remote Participation System", for community meetings in SL that can log and allow remote participation via Discord, when access to the linked chat in Discord needs to be controlled and users identified by their SL usernames, even if they are participating in the meeting remotely via Discord.

[Adeon Writer]

It's interesting because I cite discord as one of the biggest factors that killed Second Life for me. As more people just hung out on discord voice channels, fewer and fewer used SL to communicate, before it was just deemed entirely unnecessary because nothing actually happened on it, just avatars staring at each other.