On Slash

I suppose I need to start out by acknowledging that I’m not capable of pushing these updates out at a regular cadence; there’s always something “more important” to work on! Perhaps it’ll continue to be a trend that I start out these posts with some semblance of an apology for how long it’s been since the last one. Glad that’s out of the way.

Turbulence

As some of you know, Discord announced last summer that bots will no longer be able to read message content from users unless granted special permission. For the most part, message content is limited to use cases like moderation bots; all other bots are required to migrate to slash commands.

While slash commands offer a lot of improvements over text based commands, it’s been a big lift to rewrite, and in some cases reimagine all of Apollo’s commands for slash commands. It’s been an exciting time, but it’s been stressful too.

Shortly after Discord announced the message content restriction, the maintainer of the library Apollo uses, discord.py, announced the project (which lacked slash command support) was shutting down. This came as a shock to many, as with a looming deadline and an abandoned library, the existence of many Discord bots (including Apollo) was brought to question.

Thus the hunt for a successor (or “fork”) ensued. I spent a significant amount of time evaluating potential successors, and even contributed to the codebase of some. The future of Apollo was at stake, and I was doing everything I could to help bring forward a world in which stability could return. Thankfully a suitable replacement was identified late last year; it currently powers all of Apollo’s slash commands!

Though to throw a wrench into the mix, discord.py’s maintainer recently revived the project, and there’s been a flurry of activity from many contributors (myself included) to get the project up to speed. This is great news for us, but it brings up a new question of whether or not we put in the work to migrate back!

There has been a lot of turbulence in the development of Apollo in the last year. None of this concerns you directly, but I more want to share some insight as to why you may not have seen as many feature releases over the last twelve months that you may have seen in previous years. It’s not for a lack of effort; the effort has simply been primarily low visibility.

Looking Forward

Uncertainty aside, the future of Discord is exciting. They have invested a lot of time and energy into their bot ecosystem. While this sometimes means we need to make big lifts, the result is a net benefit.

Slash commands make a lot of operations easier, especially with autocomplete options. Selecting a value from a text based menu by typing in a number certainly works, but it’s not the most elegant flow, and it’s tedious to build.

Slash commands are continuing to improve. They are expanding into full blown modals, which I’m excited to explore. Slash commands are also getting support for full localization, so you’ll soon be able to view translated commands in your Discord client! Slash command permissions (soon to be released) will also allow us to take advantage of Discord’s native permission system for restricting who can use commands. This will be a much needed improvement over the existing Apollo commands to restrict access, as they’re fairly limited.

It’s been an interesting transitionary period. Migrating to slash commands has been a bit of a cumbersome process, especially as we’re still supporting text based commands in addition to slash commands. I’m looking forward to switching over fully so we can spend more time delivering value instead of maintaining backwards compatibility.

On the note of new features that aren’t related to slash commands… I haven’t forgotten! I read all of your comments and requests, and plan to get back to some “regular” feature development in the near future. Even though it hasn’t changed much recently, our roadmap is still the best place to get an idea for what’s up next!

As always, thank you for choosing Apollo 😊

- Asal