Back in 2018, I wrote about Grepbot, a small bot that ran inside Skype for our gaming group. It was a simple but effective tool, letting us quickly search for game-related info with a single command. It had been running quietly ever since—until Skype announced it would be shutting down in May 2025.
That meant our whole team had to migrate to Discord, and Grepbot had to come along for the ride.
Porting Grepbot to Discord
Moving to Discord wasn’t as simple as copying the old bot’s code and pointing it at a new API. While Skype bots also required a mention in group chats, Discord structures things a little differently, and I had to rethink how Grepbot would process messages. For example, within Discord, user mentions are formatted differently, and messages are in channels within guilds rather than conversations. Small things, but details that made lining up the command structure time-consuming.
While much of my code for Skype was written from scratch, I needed a little help creating a persistent bot that would handle event processing. After testing a few libraries, I went with DiscordPHP. It’s a solid event-driven framework that made it easy to hook into Discord’s message events and start translating Grepbot’s logic into something that worked within Discord’s ecosystem.
Mentions, Slash Commands, and Formatting
In Skype, commands required a mention (@Grepbot), and I kept that structure in Discord to keep things familiar. The bot listens for mentions and processes commands accordingly. However, Discord also offers slash commands, which I’ve been slowly adding (/map, /whois, etc.).
Slash commands help in two ways:
- They remove ambiguity—no more weird spacing or parsing issues.
- They make it easier for new users to discover commands, since Discord suggests them.
The catch? Every slash command has to be registered ahead of time with its own handler, which means rolling them out gradually instead of all at once.
Improving Readability
Discord’s message formatting options gave me an opportunity to improve how grepbot presents information. Instead of walls of text, I now use embeds, markdown, emoji, and better spacing to make results easier to skim.
Webhooks for Automated Updates
One of the bigger improvements in the Discord version is the addition of **automatic webhooks**. Now, when Grepbot joins a new channel, it sets up a webhook that allows it to post updates whenever my data harvesting scripts run.
With Skype the bot only ran on demand so every time a new message came in, or an update needed to be published the bot was initialized. With Discord I have a bot that is constantly connected (persistent), which makes message responses very fast, but limits how update notifications are handled. Creating a webhook solves this problem. Webhooks don't require the full bot to load, only the destination URL. Once a formatted message is sent to the webhook URL Discord publishes the message in your channel as the webhook user.
What’s Next?
With Skype out of the picture, Grepbot is now fully running on Discord. The transition wasn’t without its headaches, but overall, it’s a major improvement.
Next steps? Expanding slash commands, refining webhook notifications, and maybe integrating richer embeds for certain queries. But for now, Grepbot is alive and well on Discord.
RIP Skype, you had a good run.