Big If True

A place for the curious and unconvinced.
_{NEWS · MARKETS · CULTURE · POSSIBILITY}

Big If True is an open Discord community for people who follow the news closely and still want to argue about what it means. We cover world events, markets, politics, technology, crypto and whatever else is worth discussing.

A claim should have a source. A disagreement should have a reason. A good question should make room for another one.

Reporting is where we start. Members follow the sources, challenge the take, watch together, and see what comes next:

1. Read the reporting. A live news desk groups coverage of the same event into one source-backed story.
2. Talk it through. Every story gets its own Discord thread, along with topic channels for World, Markets, Politics, Technology and Crypto.
3. See where it leads. Daily games, Watch Nights and four companion bots keep the conversation going after the headline.

Curiosity is a team sport. Come find the thread →

The server runs on four bots we build in-house. They share a design language, a login on bigif.org, and in three cases a common AI runtime.

Big The Editor	A live news system for Discord forum channels. Big reads RSS/Atom, Reddit and X feeds and groups reports from many publishers about one event into a single story. Each story gets one forum post, which keeps updating as new sources and developments arrive. Event clustering. Coverage is matched on what actually happened, not just similar headlines. Stories move through NEW → DEVELOPING / BREAKING → UPDATED → STALE and can be merged or split. Factual summaries. Each summary is split into Summary · Key facts · Context · Unclear or disputed · Sources. Citations are checked against the stored articles, and opinion is not allowed. Quality gate. Opinion pieces, podcasts and filler are held back. Posts are auto-tagged, related stories are linked, and article photos keep their original credits. Top Stories. A pinned roundup in each forum, refreshed hourly and mirrored on bigif.org/news. Right-click tools. Summarize Article runs any link through the pipeline. Fact Check rates claims as True, Mostly True, Misleading, False, Unsupported or Unclear, backed by evidence from the web. News chat. Ask Big about current events with ?ask, a mention or a reply. It also powers the Big Daily game and the public story API behind the website.
Custodian The Host	Moderation, security and server life. It "catches scammers before they catch your members." Containment. A member reports a suspicious account and a moderator contains it with one click. Custodian removes the account's roles, confines it to a holding channel, captures evidence and links related accounts. Released members get their roles back. To get out, the account has to pass an escape room: a CAPTCHA plus a reflection wait. Threat assessment. A 0–100 risk score, backed by evidence for each signal. Optional, anonymous cross-server reputation is shown only when enough independent communities agree. Security suite. Anti-nuke and anti-raid protection. A scam link filter that catches typosquats, homoglyphs and IP grabbers. Smart dehoisting of impersonators. Covert-promotion detection. Bot permission monitoring. An offline anti-malware scanner that reads QR codes and uses OCR, without uploading anything to third parties. It never asks for Administrator. Transparent moderation. A categorized, hash-chained (tamper-evident) mod log. In Big If True, the moderation and containment logs are open to members, so anyone can see what action was taken and why. Community. Leveling with rendered rank cards, streaks and role rewards. Giveaways, polls and predictions. Sticky, booster and event roles, and an automation builder. Vote rewards and server backups. Watch Nights. Staff-hosted anime, movie and TV nights with queues, RSVPs, suggestions, votes and attendance rewards.
Disco The Spark	The AI companion of the server: curious, direct, well-read, lightly playful and occasionally dry. Disco follows the community standard: check sources, disagree freely and explain why, and correct bad information, including its own. Conversation with memory. Disco answers mentions, replies and ,ask, and remembers past conversations through semantic search. Thinking, searching, reading sources and generating all appear in one live message that edits in place. Research. Disco searches the web and reads articles, then cites its sources. A deeper Try Harder mode handles questions that need more digging. It can also search Big's published stories directly. Vision and images. Disco describes the images and GIFs you show it, and can generate new images. Threads. Conversations can be saved, linked, grouped, searched and resumed with ,thread. Extras. A DEFCON world-tension reading graded from live headlines, song lookups, and a sandboxed private workspace for trusted users. It also runs Disco Daily, a daily game about what happened in the server.
Ticker The Pulse	Markets and moving numbers. Ticker covers crypto and stock quotes, chart images with indicators, coin research, personal tools and an AI market assistant, all from one /market desk. Charts. /c ethusd binance 4h rsi macd returns TradingView chart images with RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, MA/EMA/DEMA/TEMA, Ichimoku, Stochastic and more, plus buttons to switch the interval. Data. Quotes from CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CryptoCompare, Finnhub and major exchanges. Also covers market cap and all-time high comparisons, movers, trending coins, Fear & Greed, perp funding, long/short ratios, ETH gas and ENS lookups. Personal tools. Private watchlists, holdings and DM price alerts. Asset threads. Follow a shared thread for any coin or stock. Each thread keeps a live candle chart pinned at the bottom and posts alerts on big moves. AI analyst. Mention Ticker to ask about stocks, ETFs, crypto or economics. Answers are sourced and timestamped, and catalysts are kept separate from confirmed events. /brief gives a market summary. Ticker never executes trades. It also runs Ticker Daily, a shared daily game about crypto, stocks and the economy.

For developers who like to know how things work:

                         ┌──────────────────────────────┐
                         │          bigif.org           │
                         │  static HTML/CSS/JS · no     │
                         │  trackers · Discord login    │
                         └──────────────┬───────────────┘
                                        │ story API · daily · watch
        ┌──────────────┬────────────────┼──────────────────┬───────────────┐
        │              │                │                  │               │
   ┌────▼────┐   ┌─────▼─────┐     ┌────▼────┐       ┌─────▼────┐    ┌─────▼─────┐
   │   Big   │   │ Custodian │     │  Disco  │       │  Ticker  │    │  Jellyfin │
   │ Python  │   │  Python   │     │ Python  │       │ Node.js  │    │  (Watch   │
   │ SQLite  │   │ Postgres  │     │ Postgres│       │ Postgres │    │  Nights)  │
   └────┬────┘   └───────────┘     └────┬────┘       └─────┬────┘    └───────────┘
        │                               │                  │ (Python AI adapter)
        └───────────────────────────────┴─────────┬────────┘
                                       ┌──────────▼───────────┐
                                       │  Shared AI framework │  policy · tools · research ·
                                       │  (Postgres + Redis)  │  one weekly credit ledger
                                       └──────────────────────┘

• Big: Python 3.11+, discord.py, aiohttp, SQLite with versioned migrations, and feedparser. It runs in Docker as a non-root user on a read-only filesystem.
• Custodian: Python, discord.py, PostgreSQL and a FastAPI REST API. The offline scanning stack is Pillow, zxing-cpp and Tesseract. Its dashboard is TanStack Start (React 19, SSR) in TypeScript.
• Disco: Python 3.12, discord.py with the Components V2 UI, PostgreSQL via asyncpg, and Redis/Valkey. Private workspace commands run in a Bubblewrap sandbox.
• Ticker: Node.js and discord.js v14, with Puppeteer for chart rendering, ccxt for exchange data, and PostgreSQL. A small Python adapter connects it to the shared AI framework.
• Website: framework-free static pages with self-hosted fonts and no tracking scripts, served through nginx or Cloudflare Pages.
• Shared AI layer: Big, Disco and Ticker share one AI runtime that handles model policy, tool calling, bounded web research with citation checks, and a single weekly credit ledger. Models are routed through OpenRouter, with zero-data-retention routing where it's available.
• Engineering norms across the projects: Docker everywhere, CI on GitHub Actions (ruff, mypy, pytest, node --test), forward-only migrations, and least-privilege bot permissions.

We're moving parts of this stack into the open under this organization, and expect to start with the bots and the website. Watch this org or ⭐ the repos as they arrive.

Ticker began as a fork of the excellent TsukiBot by EthyMoney, and we keep its original MIT notice.

Want to help build this? Stop by the Discord and say hi. We'd love your help with news pipelines, Discord bots, market data, moderation tooling, the website, or just good arguments about the news.

_{News, conversation, and the people between them.
bigif.org · Discord · X · Bluesky · Reddit · Reddit Feed · Bots · Terms · Privacy}