August 2024 Review + Transparency

Hey folks! It's that time again: let's take a look at what's gone on over the past month

Transparency

TL;DR: We're still struggling

In terms of the housing and finances situation we've talked about these past few months, we're still not doing great. We tried to hold off on releasing this report too soon so that we could hopefully have some good news, but so far we haven't been very lucky.

In essence: we're still job searching. Over this past month, we did have some interviews, but several of them ended up being scams (with one person even going as far as to falsely claim to be a famous tennis player, which was... wild to say the least), and others passed us over. Our partner had an offer, but was unable to take it due to her mental health. We're still trying our best, but it feels like we're still stuck at square one unfortunately.

On top of that, our rent has been upped by $200 this month, going from $800 to $1000. While we've been able to make deals about rent with our landlord for the past few months, as far as we've been told so far paying this amount is actually unavoidable this time. Needless to say, we're pretty desperate about this one.

We still haven't convinced our partner's family to take us (GS) in if we lose the house, so the edit from last month's transparency still stands: if we get evicted, we'll probably have to find family back in our home state to move in with. At that point... we're not really sure what'll happen to us or our partner. It's difficult to really talk about the full extent of the issues we have there, since we try to keep this a positive space, but for lack of better words: there's a good chance we'll lose everything important to us if that ends up happening.

Anyways, with that depressing news out of the way, here are some of the things we've done this month:

What we've completed

New Patreon tiers added

Per request, we've added a couple new helper tiers to Patreon: a $10 "Big Helper Energy" tier, and a $20 "Extra Stronk Helper" tier. These were created to give folks more options when it comes to supporting us, instead of being limited to the $5 tier or having to change their pledge amounts after subscribing.

If you'd like to upgrade your pledge, you can do so by following these steps!

Hubbot: bug fixes

We fixed a couple bugs with Hubbot, specifically involving issues with the unique and required options on react categories. Now you should be able to set these up and have them actually work

What we're working on

Form Fox: Actions Update

We've continued to work on Form Fox's actions over this month, and we've decided to expand the scope a bit in the process. This doesn't add much extra work, but when it's done we'll have some new ways to use actions that weren't mentioned in July's review. That said, we're still trying to clean up and redesign our question handling process for Fox in order to support this update and future updates, but we hope to find the time to sit down and take care of this aspect soon.

Hubbot/Alex: Redesign progress

Speaking of redesigning things, we also pushed our current redesign work to Hubbot's repo! You can view the code here. The current progress has the reworked handler for server listing, including the new tags system, the new categories system, and the built-in server submission process (say goodbye to Google Forms!); along with previous features like edit requests. This code also has partial support for the new built-in server and user reports system, which is the next major feature we plan to finish. After this, we have action logging (delists, bans, etc), syncing, ticketing, react roles, starboards, and the feedback system to work on- approximately in that order of importance

Building up our streams

One of the other things we were idly working on this past month is trying to stream more, and making new commands and other fun integrations for our streams! While we still have a bit left to go, if all goes well (and we're able to find time to stream) then we're aiming to reach Affiliate status by the end of the year :3

This has also been part of our desire to get back into art, as we've had to create a couple of art-related assets for it!

A tool for VTube Studio users

Related to the above, we've also started putting together a small tool those who use VTube Studio. In essence, it'll be something similar to Macro Deck, but with customizable buttons that specifically integrate with VTube Studio. We wanted to work on this as a way to learn more about integrating websockets into our tools, which we're hoping will make the backend of our bot dashboard easier to manage by giving us another option for hooking into our bots' functions

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I think that's it for now! We're still doing our best to solve some of our problems and chip away at the things we can work on while we're at it. Like always, here's hoping we can give some good news soon

Thanks for reading, and we hope everyone has a great day!

- Kam