How-To: Receive Discord Notifications for Translation Updates

by qikiqtarjuaq
Posted on 2020-08-30

While many translation site discords have their own notifications system set up, you may want to have everything in one place or you may encounter some translation sites that don't offer discord pings/updates. This guide is geared towards people wanting to set up their own notifications channel for translation updates.

Step One: Create a NovelUpdates Account + Reading List


(How to add a new book to a reading list on NovelUpdates)

There are a few ways you can go about this. You can either create one single reading list for all the novels you want updates for, or you can create one reading list per novel in order to customize the title/image of your notification on a per-novel basis.

Step Two: Get the RSS Feed URL for Your Reading List

Right-click on the green RSS icon on the top-right corner of your reading list and "Copy Link."

Step Three: Create an IFTTT Account + new Applet

Go to ifttt.com and create a new account. Once you're done, go to:

https://ifttt.com/create to create a new applet.

Step Four: Set up the RSS Feed for the new Applet

Click on the plus sign next to the word "If" to set up your RSS feed.

Type "rss" in the search bar and click on the RSS icon and go to the next step.

Choose "New feed item" as your trigger. (You can also choose the more complex option of "New feed item matches" if you want to only get notifications on a subset of novels in your reading list. For the purposes of this guide, I'm assuming you have curated your list to not require any further filtering.)

After finishing your RSS setup, the next screen should look something like this:

Step Five: Prepare your discord server + setup your discord webhooks

For the next step, you will either need your own private discord server where you have admin privileges, or you need the Webhooks permissions + approval of the server mod to send your updates to a specific discord channel.

On the discord server you plan to use, click on your server name to expand the options dropdown, go to Server Settings , and click on the Webhooks section.

Click on "Create Webhook."

Here, you can specify the name and icon used when an update is sent. You can also specify the channel where the updates will be sent. On my server, I've created a custom channel named #c-novels-feed for my updates.

Once you are happy with the settings, select and click "Copy" on the Webhook URL section at the bottom of the screen. Then click "Save."

Now, go back to your IFTTT applet and click the plus sign next to the word "Then."

Filter by "webhook" and select the Webhooks option.

Select the only option there, "Make a web request."

Paste the URL of the webhook you just created in Discord.

Choose "POST" for the Method.

Choose application/json for the Content Type.

Paste the following JSON code in the body. You can modify this to say anything you want, as long as you keep the EntryTitle and EntryUrl sections intact.

{"username":"My Reading List or Book Title Here", "content":"[{{EntryTitle}}]( {{EntryUrl}})"}

Give your applet a more user-friendly name and Finish creating it.

Step Six: Set Up Discord Notifications

Now that you've got IFTTT set up to send a message to a specified discord channel whenever your reading list updates, you should set up discord to send a notification anytime you receive a message in the specified discord channel.

You can see here that I've enabled Mobile Push Notifications, and I've set the #c-novels-feed channel to send push notifications for *any* message received in that channel. If you're not doing this on a private discord server, you might want to set your channel permissions so that only you can send messages to that channel. Webhooks don't require any special permissions of their own.

The End Result

After you're done setting up your reading list(s), you should start receiving new messages from your Webhooks. Here's an example of what my #c-novels-feed channel looks like:

Other Options

This guide uses the NovelUpdates RSS feed to receive updates, but you can also extend this to reading the RSS feed of any translation site or blog directly if you prefer.

If you're not keen on using discord or want some other method of notifications, you can play around with the other "Then" options on IFTTT. For example, if you have the IFTTT app installed, you can send notifications through it on your phone instead of discord. Alternately, there are also options for sending e-mails or texts, but I haven't played around with them much personally.

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