apollo_bot

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 u...

Mid year update

When I wrote our last blog post early this year, my intention was to write them monthly moving forward. As you may have noticed, that hasn’t exactly happened! Whenever I sit down at my computer to work on Apollo, I inevitably go straight to the code as I want to bring you guys new features. Moving forward, I might aim for an update at least once a quarter. I’d love to do monthly, but I know that I’d likely disappoint!

The year so far

The last six months have been about get...

Apollo in 2021

2020 was quite the year; I don't need to go into the reasons why. But amidst it all, Apollo was able to help connect people from all over the world, something I'm very grateful to have played a part in. But even more so, I'm grateful for all of you!

I wanted to take some time to highlight the places we've been in 2020, and to paint a picture of my plans for Apollo moving forward into 2021.

A year ago, Apollo was much smaller than it is today. On January 1st 2020, Apollo was on 2...

The Great Migration

Today we completed a migration of Apollo from one of our personal AWS (Amazon Web Services) account, to a new account just for Apollo. Doesn't sound super exciting I know, but there's a neat story behind it for those interested in the technical bits of Apollo.

When we first set up Apollo, we weren't really thinking long term; we just set it up on a personal account and called it a day. It quickly became a bit of a pain to deal with though, as for the last six months I've been messaging...

Premium Launch

Today we launched Apollo Premium. A journey that started at the beginning of the year is at a close, but another is just beginning.

The idea for a Premium tier first came to me early this year when we were migrating Apollo to AWS with a managed database, which ended up costing significantly more than we were paying previously. We did this for a good reason though. Earlier this year, Apollo started to take off. For context, Apollo was on 2,000 Discord servers as of January 20th, 2020. T...

Looking forward to custom signup options

The release of configurable signup options, while a nice thing to have, was really only done to pave the way for custom role signups.

Next steps for me are to add a way for Premium servers to define their own custom signup options. This will be interesting, as it’ll be the first time that we have limited a certain functionality based on being a Patron. Interesting technically, but also interesting to see how the first pay walled feature is received.

I’m hopeful that users will...