Channelguessr: A Discord game

I'm part of a small Discord server and thought it would be funny to make a Geoguessr-style game¹ where you get presented with a random interesting² message from the server and have to guess when, where and by who it was posted.

How It Works

The game works by running /start to start a round.

Discord bot message showing 'CHANNELGUESSR — Round 5' with sections for Context Before, Mystery Message marked with a target emoji, and Context After. Message content is redacted. At the bottom it prompts 'Which channel?' and 'When was this posted?' with a 60 second timer. — Example of a round, started with `/start context:2`. The bot selects a random interesting message in the last year and displays some context around it.

Then players all guess the correct channel, date and user with /guess, and then finally the round auto-ends after a timeout.

Discord bot message showing 'Round Complete!' with the answer revealed: Channel, Posted date of July 22, 2025 at 3:06 PM (6 months ago), Author, and a 'Jump to message' link. Results show one player earned 100 points, with an X for incorrect channel guess and +100 for time. — The end of a round, where the only player did very badly. The maximum score is 1500 points: 500 for correctly guessing the channel, user and date, with partial credit for nearby dates.

There's also a leaderboard and personal stats.

Installation

I deployed the bot to cheap cloud provider, and you can install it on any server with this link:

The messages are selected with paging shenanigans⁴ to avoid having to ever store or index your messages, and I avoid storing any information except user IDs, server IDs, and scores (although user names and server names do appear in logs). See the privacy policy⁵ for details.

Source Code

The source code is on GitHub at brendanlong/channelguessr¹.

Details

The full help command output:

Discord bot help message showing game description, How to Play steps (use /start, see mystery message, use /guess, round ends after 60 seconds), Scoring (500 points each for channel, time within 1 day, and optional author), and Commands list (/start, /guess, /skip, /leaderboard, /stats, /cleardata)

https://github.com/brendanlong/channelguessr - "GitHub: brendanlong/channelguessr"
https://github.com/brendanlong/channelguessr/blob/main/docs/DESIGN.md#interest-criteria - "channelguessr/docs/DESIGN.md at main · brendanlong/channelguessr · GitHub"
https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1464797297706795193 - "Discord"
https://github.com/brendanlong/channelguessr/blob/main/bot/services/message_selector.py - "channelguessr/bot/services/message_selector.py at main · brendanlong/channelguessr · GitHub"
https://github.com/brendanlong/channelguessr/blob/main/docs/PRIVACY_POLICY.md - "channelguessr/docs/PRIVACY_POLICY.md at main · brendanlong/channelguessr · GitHub"