A Slower Month...

...but with some news of what's coming next

Hi all,

April was a slower month- I didn't roll out any big updates except for the SoundFX update towards the beginning of the month. Some SoundFX users may have noticed that there's been some intermittent trouble with the bot going offline- this is something that I'm actively working on mitigating and solving, so thank you for your patience on this.

This month will be starting slow too, since I have a lot of priorities outside of Discord to take care of. However, here's some information on what I have been working on, and what's coming next:

1: Slash commands and improved ease-of-use

A big target recently has been to improve the usability of the bot. This was the purpose of updating the timezone and language commands, improving the help command to show better information and examples, and improving the descriptiveness of error messages.

The next step in this will be moving as much functionality as possible into slash commands. If you haven't tried slash commands yet, they're a new system built into Discord itself for bot authors to interact with users. They offer advantages of showing the arguments as you type, performing checking for the developer, offering different option types and hints to the user, and a nice interface within all Discord clients. 

It will be my goal to move the majority of the critical functionality onto slash commands, then followed by other functionality. At first, I aim to have all the informational commands, all the setting commands, and basic reminder commands available through slash commands as an alternative, and not a replacement.

2: More functionality

This bot has a lot of different users with a lot of different uses. With the next updates, I will be working on a few more advanced and niche functionalities, and extensions to some existing functionalities. 

Embeds will now support the author field, something previously overlooked. 

Interval reminders will now have a more advanced 'restartable' mode, where the reminder should be manually restarted rather than restarted automatically. 

Autopinning is arriving, for reminders that are not to be missed. 

3: Maintenance

There will be a database migration to move 3 models with a complicated relationship into 1 model. This is to make development and maintenance easier in the future.

There will also be a bug fix issued for the reminder poster that will hopefully ensure reminders are sent on time, even when the amount of reminders is very high.

If all goes to plan, these updates should be available at the end of May or start of June. A number of features are already completed, and just need integrating with the dashboard to be finalized. However, due to the database migration, these updates will be rolled out simultaneously.

Thanks,

JellyWX