Roadmap for the coming months

About time I made one of these posts.

Initial thanks
June to October was a crazy couple of months, seeing the bot go from just 300 servers to about 6.4k as of writing this, showing no signs of slowing down. During the same time the bot saw several major upgrades, such as unique reaction roles, the suggestion system, improved logging, much improved moderation commands, a new wiki ...twice, auto-mod and of course my favorite change: the death of the random death bug.

In the process I've found myself with a server full of friendly people, generous patrons, commissioned bots and something fun to wake up for each day. So for that reason I'd like to say thank you to anyone using the bot, but of course especially much to my patrons.

Anyway, the title is roadmap so I better get to the interesting bits.

Web dashboard

Long overdue but it is definitely happening. My recently created trello page has a more detailed list of things I'm planning on adding. Ideally this website will be mobile friendly (about 30% of docs.carl.gg visits are made from mobile devices) without taking away from the pc experience.

Scriptable reaction roles

"Can I do this? Can the bot do this? I have <specific situation>, can the bot do that?" 

The answers to basically every single reaction role question will soon be yes. With scriptable reaction roles you'd be able to add as many roles as you'd like, remove as many roles as you'd like, prevent certain members from picking up roles, sending messages (not just dms) and probably much more. Since this would be a pretty substantial change I would prefer to build it from the ground up (don't worry, your reaction roles will work without any extra work from your end when this update goes live). 

This also has the added benefit of being something you could share, certain situations (adding and removing a role for instance) get requested constantly.

Scaling

I was originally terrified of the idea of splitting up my bot into several separate processes as I feared it would complicate things and lead to massive downtime, if I would even be able to do it at all. Luckily this turned out to be a lot less scary than originally thought. As of writing this the new version of the bot has been running for 10 days without any downtime combined with the fact that some of my previous issues are now gone.

Starboard customization

This has been requested for well over a year and it will actually happen (after the dashboard though)

Patreon posts

Posts like this one! They're fun to write it turns out.

Who knows

A lot of the things that makes the bot great isn't something I had planned for ages and put a lot of work into, so keeping an open mind and bouncing ideas with people in the support server is a good way to not let any ideas go to waste.

Finishing thoughts

Working on the bot was fun even back when it was in five servers with tens of users, the past few months has turned this into something I genuinely enjoy doing daily and I don't plan on quitting any time soon.

- Carl