Carl bot rewind 2019

I did this last year and it was fun so of course, I'm doing it again this year.

The dump command

Seems to be a fan favorite. Even the initial release without the new syntax.

Tag sharing

This is one of those things I made because I was too lazy to copy tags from one server to another which accidentally created a group of hard-working tagscript engineers sharing their insane work in the support server.

Big upgrades to reaction roles

Made reaction roles bearable, separating individual reactions from reaction messages to allow for some cool new stuff.  I had forgotten how big this upgrade ended up being, [click me for the announcement message] 

Locking channels/ the server

One of those things I should have added way earlier because it ended up being a very small amount of work. It has been useful for me in the support server for preventing everyone from going crazy whenever the bot restarts. Unfortunately, I'm sort of an idiot so I forget to lock it before restarting half the time.

Overriding default permission checks

One thing I've had to learn is the fact that servers differ a lot and the solutions I want to offer might not work for your server. Because of this, I added the ability to add roles that ignore permission checks.

Voice role linking

One of those things that I didn't expect people to care about (because I don't have a use for it in my server) but that ended up very well received.

New documentation

I had enough of gitbook's antics so I decided to change the docs. This gave me way more control over how everything looked and with easier collaboration.

Levels

I've said a lot about levels in the past and how I don't care for them. That said, people kept requesting them and I saw some interesting ways of using them to lock certain permissions behind a specific level so I caved in. You can expect upgrades to the leveling system in 2020!

Twitch upgrade and Youtube

More lightweight, more customization. The twitch upgrades were good for me and great for you. Youtube notifications were also added and have been extremely useful for me at least.

Logging with webhooks

A major issue the bot had for a long time were these daily disconnections. They would affect 10-40% of the bot at once. Nobody ever mentioned it but I know it was an issue. In hindsight, it seems like this was related to the bot sending too many requests at once. Moving logging over to webhooks was a lot of work for basically no real reward. Anyhow, the logging now deals with burst events much better (think purges, mass kicking people, etc)

Mobile improvements to the website

Did you know over 35% of all users use carl.gg on their phones? I didn't expect it at least. Because of this, I figured I had to improve the mobile experience. I went over certain problematic elements and tried to make them take up as much space as possible on mobile.  [Before and after] 

Hitting 100k servers

This was huge. I think I was too busy worrying about uptime and pleasing users that I missed how much the bot had grown. Hitting this monumental milestone sort of forced me to stop and think about it though. Seriously hugely grateful for everything.

Moderation update

One of those updates that I think I started talking about in 2018 but just never got around to doing. Lets you change what message gets sent when a moderation action is taken as well as setting defaults when the command author doesn't specify something.  It also came with notes and reports which were commands requested for over a year.

Embed visualizer

Requested for ages, finally added. It was a real pain to get working. 

Website facelift

Just a new splash page and font really, but boy did it change the look and feel of the website, I'm super excited.

Status page

One of those things I can't believe took me so long to add. I didn't have a good way of knowing how well each shard was doing so this was super useful for me as well. I got to use it the same week I added it.

In 2018 I said  

"I hope 2019 will be just as good (will be hard to top this though)"

But I can safely say you guys blew me away. I think this was the best year of my life and if you're a patron you're an especially big reason for that.

Stats

Last year I ended with a few stats and I thought it would be interesting to have that this year as well to show the amount of growth

Support server members 1500  ➜ 15,839 (+955%)

Gateway events 1000/s  ➜ 11,100/s (+1010%)

Servers 14,493  ➜  165,199 (+1032%)

Members 3,043,341  ➜  30,845,166 (+913%)

Database rows 310m  ➜  250m (Peaked at over 1 bil though) (-19%)

Messages seen per day 4.5m  ➜  56.2m (+1148%)

Different countries according to analytics 115 ➜ 208 (Some lists don't even put the total number of countries this high) (+80%)

Resource usage 6.5g ram, 130% CPU ➜ 45g ram, 950% CPU (+592%, +630%)

Lines of code 35,000  ➜  42,181 (+20%)

Banned members from the support server ???  ➜ 1355

Main invite uses ???  ➜ 57,578

Announcement channel reach 0  ➜  382

Huge thank you to everyone who uses the bot, it's been one hell of a year.