How do I make my bot send a message in a specific channel then delete it after a period of time

Question

I am getting back into javascript and coding and stuff because I have a passion project I wanna work on for a guild in a game I play. So I wanna figure out how I could get my bot to send a message at a specific time every day and then delete it after 5 hours. I've tried multiple things and its either two things that don't work well together or something that just doesn't work outright.

Answer 1

Set an interval to check the time and then send the message when the time is right

Set up a timer to call a function periodically. We'll also set up a variable to store the date's day, this is to avoid sending a second message in the same day

var day = 0;
setInterval(tick, 30000);

function tick() {};

The function will get today's date (and time) and compare it to see if it matches with the desired time, if it does, it will send the message and delete it after 5 hours. It will also store the day into our day variable to prevent it from sending it again in the same day.

function tick() {
  let now = new Date();
  if (day === now.getDate()) return;

  if (now.toISOString().slice(11,16) === "14:30") { // 2:30PM UTC
    day = now.getDate();

    channel.send("This message will self-destruct in 5 hours.")
    .then(msg => msg.delete(1000*60*60*5));
    .catch(e => /* handle error */);
  }
}

Notes:

• I've used now.toISOString().slice(11,16) to get the time, which would be equivalent to just using now.getHours() + ":" + now.getMinutes(). (Taken from this answer)
• Use Promises to get the message after sending it and call .delete() with the number of milliseconds to wait before deleting, like .delete(1000*60*60*5). (Taken from this answer)
• If you'd rather not use UTC, you may want to use things like moment-timezone, but then you may also want to use moment.js objects instead of vanilla JS date objects