carlbot

Carl-bot rewind 2018

Added 2018-12-13 02:17:40 +0000 UTC

In 2018 the bot saw a lot of new features and updates. If you're a new user of the bot, you might be surprised by how much of what you're used to was added in this year.

Reaction roles

This was clearly a fantastic thing to add back in April and has clearly been the key element to my bot's growth this year.

Moderation commands

No, seriously, didn't have any of them before 2018. Things like !muterole, !mute, !ban, !tempban, !softban, !tempban, !kick, !warn are completely new.

Welcome messages

The bot had welcome messages since 2017 but 2018 added variables and the ability to send DMs upon joining.

Patreon and music

I can't stress enough how helpful Patreon has been for the bot's continued growth. I can safely say that I would have had to artificially prevent the bot from growing because of the increasing costs of hosting. I really can't convey my gratitude for the people making it possible but an attempt was made and that came in the form of music.

Repeating timers

Mod logs

Mod logs were created because r/wow's mod bot was getting retired and I didn't like the look of my hacky modlogs.

Feeds

Autofeeds

Autofeeds started off as my worst designed group of commands by far. The syntax was impossible to remember, required you to name them for no reason and the fact that I as the creator had to look up the docs on autofeeds meant I had to change something. Luckily that change came relatively soon and made autofeeds tolerable to use.

Triggers/autoresponses

Didn't have these at all before, seems silly in hindsight.

Suggestions

As a token of appreciation to all the people coming from Zira shutting down I threw together suggestions in a couple of days and I think the consensus is that they're very useful for the right kind of server.

Logging

OG Carl-bot users will remember the days of text-only logging. While the facelift was universally liked, the internals is what interested me the most. The bot grew a lot during 2018 and my internal message cache went from saving messages for two days to about five minutes during peak hours - clearly something had to be done. The solution ended up being less taxing on the cpu, with less ram usage and I even started logging purges.

Role management

Before you could set up self-assignable roles through commands but that was it. This update came with ways of managing roles in bulk and also the creation and management of new roles.

The concept of 'modonly'

Before you could either disable or restrict commands, this update meant you could prevent normal users from using annoying commands without disabling it.

Timed autoroles

A surprisingly tricky update with silly amounts of optimization.

Custom embeds

These were clearly much appreciated by some people (looking at you, Hilent) and despite requiring normal users to learn how embeds are represented as json internally, almost nobody struggled with these.

Spacemychannel

The best worst command.

Documentation rewrite

Going from a single page github readme to gitbooks made things a lot more organized and aesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately I didn't really see a change in number of people asking for clarification.

Scaling

The update that nobody noticed. In October I rewrote some internals to allow for splitting up the bot across several processes leading to a more distributed load. I was terrified of adding this update but it ended up being pretty easy.

Automod

1900 lines of code led to a great system with awful UX. Automod initially suffered from the same issues that plagued autofeeds with odd syntax and unclear feedback.

Drama channel

A great suggestion from the mods from r6s which led to a moderation system I genuinely enjoy.

Trello

Lists are great, let's do more of them.

THE DASHBOARD

Most anticipated release of 2018 by far was the dashboard which took 4-12 hours of work per day for over four weeks straight. The dashboard was easily the biggest upgrade with the most impact. The number of documentation visitors sharply dropped because certain confusing parts of the bot were replaced with intuitive design that gave a better overview of the current settings.

This update wasn't just a website however, it also added embeds (managed with embed builders on the dashboard) to tags, autofeeds and triggers.

The release was smooth and I'm amazed by how few bugfixes had to be done.

Command permissions

After being fed up with the ever increasingly specific requests for command permissions and modified behaviour I decided to solve the problem once and for all by allowing users to set rule 'overwrites' for individual commands effectively solving every single request I've ever gotten with a single update.

Tagscript 2.0, the playground and shareable tags

The highly anticipated update to welcome variables, tags, triggers and autofeeds saw a more programmatic approach to everything combined with a unified syntax that makes more sense. Since I knew that this would spawn more creative and useful tags I decided to add an easier way to test them (the playground) combined with a way of sharing tags with a fast and easy way of importing tags

Too much to list

Hundreds of improvements and thousands of bugfixes (yes, literally)

Growth

Support server: 17 ➜ 1500 members

Gateway events: 5.7/s ➜ >2000/s

Servers: 33 ➜ 14,493

Members: 33,173 ➜ 3,043,341

Database rows: 50k ➜ 310m

Messages seen: <5k/day ➜ 4.5m/day

Different countries: ??? ➜ At least 115 countries (using the website at least)

Resource usage: 200mb ram, 0.9% cpu ➜ 6.5g ram, >130% cpu

Lines of code: ~4000 ➜ ~35,000 (pointless metric though)