Incoming Shutdown

Heya, it's about time we shared some things that have been on our mind for a while now.

To put it mildly, we've been struggling with a lot of things for a very long time. Physical health, mental health, finances, housing... The list goes on. Lately it feels like the list has just been getting longer and longer.

During all of this, we've especially found it hard to continue putting the time, effort, and funds into our current projects that are necessary. Earlier this year we opted to switch gears away from our bots due to this, but we still committed ourselves to keeping them up and running as much as we could.

Since then, things haven't really gotten better for us. In some ways, they've gotten worse: our Patreon income has been cut in half, our emergency move to try to find support with family has left us even more stressed out, and that move has also left us financially in the hole for the foreseeable future due to our lack of energy and brainpower to figure out funding options for ourselves.

To be clear as well, whenever we say "we", we're describing our system- the collective of folks living in our brain. We've been trying to keep all these things afloat as a team with a total of one single body. We don't have an actual team of devs, and the other people who help with user support are either our friends or fellow users. Considering our nonexistent budget, onboarding more help really isn't an option here, either.

So, with all of that out there, here's the situation:

We're shutting down the bots

We've considered a lot of other options here. Taking out loans, asking friends to provide hosting space, and throwing out another call for funds are just a few of them. The truth is, we're just not mentally or physically able to keep the bots running even with the proper funding or hosting options. We don't want to push user support handling onto someone else; we don't want to rely on another person's hardware to handle all the resources a bot like Sheep takes up. Even if we can get the funds to keep things going on our own, we still find it hard not to force ourselves to handle user support and code changes despite the damage it does to our health. It's been a fight to keep ourselves from compulsively checking the support server or offering to try and fix things that we just don't have the bandwidth to fix.

In light of all that, we're opting to shut things down for the time being. We just need to pull back fully for our own health and sanity at this point, and we need to try to reclaim the brain space that these bots take up. We've spent a long time running ourselves ragged trying to keep up with them, and we can't keep sustainably doing so.

Moving forward

In order to give people time to swap to self-hosting or alternative bots, we'll be trying to keep the bots alive for about another two weeks, and will aim to take them down on November 14th, 2025. We thought about keeping them up for another month, but ultimately we just aren't able to afford that right now.

During this transition, we won't be able to offer as much support as we would like. We were originally planning to add export systems to all our bots to make something like this easier, but we just haven't been able to make that happen due to other constraints. That said, Form Fox already has an export and import system for forms, and Sheep has a system for saved colors; this should hopefully help with the two main bots that people use.

In the future...

Honestly, we still have big plans for these bots. We've wanted to find the time and energy to fix them up and give them a nice polish for ages, not to mention how many times we've promised to get the dashboard up and running.

If we ever find the ability to work on things again, we would love to make these plans a reality. The only caveat is that we'd still likely need them to pull in enough funding to keep them sustained, which means that we also have plans for more integrated premium features next time around. To be blunt though, we don't really see this happening for a good while due to our current situation

Conclusion

All of that said and done, there's really one thing left that we want to put out there: we're sorry.

We know that these bots are a part of the backbone of a number of servers. We know that transitioning to different bots may be difficult, and self-hosting may be impossible. We know that this update will likely be frustrating, panic-inducing, or upsetting for some people. And we know that we've made a lot of promises that we just haven't been able to keep over these past 7 years.

We're sorry for that. We really wish that things could be different here. It's taken us a long time to come to this decision largely because we didn't want to take these bots away from the people who need them, and because we've felt guilty for not being able to deliver the quality and features that we've wanted to.

In the end, this turned into something that we just aren't able to handle anymore, and we're sorry for being unable to keep up with it the way we've promised and said we would for so long.

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So... I guess that's all for now. Kind of a heavy post, but it's been a long time coming. We've been back and forth on this for a very long time now, and it's time for us to put the cup down fully (or rather, the barrel, if we're being honest. These bots are very heavy even without holding them up for so long )

Thank you to everyone that has been with us through this journey and has continued to support us through all of this. Seven years (actually, technically eight) is no small amount of time, and all our friends that have joined us through this are so very much appreciated

If you'd like to show thanks, consider subscribing to our Patreon or sending us a couple bucks on Ko-Fi. Every little bit is appreciated and will go towards helping to dig us out of a hole caused by our emergency move back to our home state. If you don't have money to spare, consider sending folks this post and spreading info about the shutdown- that's also super helpful!

We hope everyone has a good day, and we once again thank everyone for being here through all this

- Dusk

Addendum

To clarify, the bots that will be doing down are:

• Sheep
• Form Fox
• Ticket Golem
• Ocelot
• Enderbot
• Herobrine
• Alex

Birthday Bot and Bingo Boy will be staying up, as they were commissioned from us and currently have their hosting costs covered. They're also effectively feature-complete, and haven't needed very much maintenance, unlike our other bots.