Early 2024 Releases and Updates

Heya! It's been a while, huh :'D

Today we're going over important news and updates, including some releases! Let's go ahead and get into it:

The Releases

We released our new website!

And, well, you're looking at it

If you're interested in learning more, feel free to read over our welcome post. It goes over some of the reasons why we built this site and some of the plans that are covered below :3

We released a silly little Bingo Boy

Ever wanted to have a funny server-wide bingo board to fill out? Tired of having to manually keep track of when and where the last image for it was sent? Look no further! Our little Bingo Boy is perfect for you :D

They come with a handful of features:

• Create multiple bingo boards under different names
• View each board's original and latest post, and easily pull up images for them
• Comes with a handy bot-compatible template to use
• Can randomize squares, so you can reuse boards!

While it may be a bit different from the traditional idea of bingo, we wanted to give people a way to keep funny text-based boards on hand for their server. Now your moderation team can create their own troll/spammer bingo and see how many squares they get during the next raid :)

The Updates

We gave Form Fox some more customization options

Embeds are a major part of the way forms are handled by Fox. Why not be able to give them some more glam?

With this latest update, you'll be able to use /form customize to change plenty of options, including:

• All pre-existing options, like a form's name, description, and color
• Features of the apply button, including style, text, and emoji
• And custom thumbnail and banner image

We hope you guys enjoy these new options!

We added some commands to Sheep

For those who haven't seen, we also went ahead and added the /admin permfix and /admin purge commands to Sheep, as well as fixed the previous behavior of color roles inheriting permissions from the @everyone role. The permfix command is for those who want to remove all permissions from their existing color roles; the purge command will completely delete every user-based color role created by Sheep. Use them wisely!

We fixed some major issues with Ticket Golem

Back in January, we gave TG some permissions-related updates that made it easier to control who has access to tickets. We also added a handy /config setup command to help automate some of the process of setting up the bot

The newest updates should've helped with tickets that were created and then "disappearing" for users. We were a bit concerned about some potential side-effects, but so far it seems to be working out!

We made some general bug fixes all around

YOU get a bug fix and YOU get a bug fix and- alright, I think you guys get it. We did a lot of squashing as we were able, and hopefully things are a bit smoother now!

And finally....... We quit our job :'D

Alright, time for the main reason why we wanted to make this announcement: we are officially jobless™
This part of the announcement is... bittersweet, honestly

To get a bit serious here: our job was tough on us and led to a significant worsening of our mental health and physical health, resulting in worsening memory issues, chronic pain, and breakdowns, among other things. We were on a slow decline from the start, and some recent changes at the job just made that decline happen faster. We had to get out of there to take care of ourselves

On the one hand, we're excited to have more time to spend on our projects again- with a much healthier schedule and mindset that (hopefully) won't push us into the ground. On the other hand, the finances situation is a bit more rocky, and while we're going to do our best to stay afloat, we may end up needing to get into another job in order to help fill in the gaps. For now though, we plan to get plenty of rest and to try to work on things in a way that's easier on us!

The Near Future

Okay, okay, I know. I'm sure everyone's tired of seeing the same handful of things on our roadmaps and to-do list. I'm also sure that everyone is tired of hearing deadlines that we struggle to hit. Trust me, we are too! But we want to be clear about what IS and ISN'T on our radar, so that we can tell y'all what to expect going forward- and so we can at least try to hold ourselves accountable

This section is dedicated to things that we're trying to work on first. It may not always end up being what gets done first, but it's what we're actively working on or what we're looking at next

With all that said, here's a look at things that fit the bill:

A dashboard for all our main bots

Yep, we're still working on this! We've done some planning and some learning (building this site helped a ton), and we're still looking forward to releasing this

As a refresher, here's what we're planning for the dashboard:

• A place to manage settings for all the main bots we have- Sheep, TG, FF, Ocelot, etc. Other bots may also get included, but we're focused on our main ones right now
• A place for documentation for each bot
• A place to subscribe to premium perks, once we implement those
• A place to find change logs, announcements, and other info outside of just our bot support server

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to the dashboard (especially since it'll be for handling 6+ bots!) but we want to do our best with it and give you guys a handy place to manage everything!

Premium perks

Premium stuff is still complicated for us, but we want to get it out at some point. We're hoping to have a concrete plan here sooner rather than later, and for lack of better terms it's still a very big dot on our radar!

Plenty of maintenance updates

As always, we want to keep chipping away at our bots and making sure that they're maintained properly! As part of that, here's what we're looking at in the short term:

• A full rewrite of Alex, cleaning up and expanding on their features with more maintainable code
• Interaction updates for Ocelot and Ender
• Various bugfixes, code cleanups, and other quality passes for our bots

Weekly streams

We're getting back into streaming again!

As of right now, we plan to stream every Monday starting at around 1PM EST. Feel free to join our content server or follow us on Twitch to see when we're streaming. We're going to keep it to games for now, but in the future we may also stream development progress and similar things!

The Somewhat Distant Future

This section is dedicated to things that we still want to do, but have either run into roadblocks with or want to focus on other things first. They're still on a radar, just much further out than the points in the last section

Specific feature updates for bots

Right now, when it comes to our bots, we want to focus on cleaning up and maintaining our existing code. Some features might be added as part of that process, but we're not intending to implement anything new just this second

That said, here's a list of some things we want to add in at some point:

• Sections and conditional logic for Fox (yep, that's still on our list!)
• Ticket claiming, ticket types, and better ticket archives for TG
• Various role handling tools for Ocelot (like sticky roles and auto-roles)

These are things we plan to start (or in some cases, continue) working on once we've made better progress in our focused areas

Technical write-ups and tutorials

These are also still on our radar! In fact, we've had a few saved in our drafts for a while. To explain a bit better, when we say "technical write-ups," we're referring to in-depth explanations of how specific bots or features work, including our thought process with them and how we went about building them. Tutorials speak for themselves: we want to write up small guides on how to do certain things like start a bot project or create a small website

Several libraries and frameworks

We have a handful of smaller libs and frames that we plan to finish, polish, and release at some point. One of those is Scaffold, the bot client package that we want to finish. Another is a small library and API for managing feature flags across all our bots- something that each bot can use to check if a certain feature should be enabled or not

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All in all, I guess the main takeaway of this announcement is this: we're back on the grind >:3

We've got a lot of things we're planning, a schedule that'll keep us accountable (while giving us proper time to rest where needed), and a drive to continue to make things. We're gonna do our best :D

Anyways, that's about all for now! We hope everyone here has a great day, and we hope to have some more content out soon!

- Kam (α¹)