Dev Update March 2020
Firstly I just want to take a moment to say from both myself and Rade that we hope you and your families are safe during this difficult time – remember to look after each other and your neighbours.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have family close by and there are people who will be feeling more isolated now than ever.
With the bad out the way, this situation has given me and Rade the ability to spend more time working on PartyBeast.
So what have we been doing?
Testing Suite:
Right I can’t stress this enough – Rade has literally halved the amount of work I have to do for testing before pushing a release.
After seeing the frankly dizzying list of tasks I go through to test a candidate before release Rade built a whole testing rig.
This means that going forward we can commit code, mark a release, pull it locally and run the testing bot.
This should catch any snags I would usually find manually and greatly reduce the time between marking a release and go live.
Features:
Currently in my opinion we’re failing in that regard and configuration is more difficult than it needs to be.
The new config system will be visual and reaction driven allowing you to type !pbconfig first to get a list of rooms (similar to !pbshowconfig and !pbroomname do now) followed by !pbconfig Room#.
This will then provide you with an embed showing you the current configuration for that room ie: how are room names displayed (!pbroomname), where will new channels be created (!pbparent), are the permissions correct (!pbchandebug).
You can then use the reactions attached to the embed to make changes.
We looked at implementing a messaging system but when everyone bailed out a room it spam messaged everyone.
Moving forward we’re looking at setting a nickname with a emoji of some kind to show they’re the room owner.
We’d be interested to know your thoughts on this, our goal is to make it non obtrusive.
This presents a problem because I am a luddite who can barely speak English let alone any other language.
With that said once the config system is done and we’ve generally tidied up the commands to be uniform we’ll be turning to you as our community to help us localize PartyBeast.
Wrap up:
If you’re one of those people and the thing we’ve discussed isn’t above don’t worry, I guarantee you it’s in on the list.
Having brought Rade on board one of the things it’s forced me to do was become more organised and transparent but with that has come the discovery that we have a bigger backlog of features and issues to clear than originally thought.