the state of altdentifier: may 2019

Yazar: Auxim

Hi friends,

Today I am starting the series "State of AltDentifier", a review of events, plans, changes and more about how AltDentifier is doing. So without further ado, let's get this party started!

First of all, I'm really excited AltDentifier is fast on his way to break the 9000 server barrier, and with an average growth of 23 servers per day over the past 30 days, I reckon we'll be able to break the 10k server milestone in as little as 2 months. We're so popular now, that on weekends, we are hitting the limits on our VPN detection functionality. I've released a hot-patch, to ensure verification still works after reaching the limits, but VPN detection won't be available. I'm currently in talks with the provider we use to see what sort of upgrades are available for us. Standard plans with our provider are not cheap, so I'll segue directly to how we're planning to make some income from AltDentifier. A while back, we've partnered up with Venatus Media, an advertisement network focused on gaming, and one that is quite connected in the Discord sphere. We've been serving advertisements on verification for a while now, and while personally I've received little complaints about the advertisements, I am always listening to your feedback and opinions on this, so do share them.
I won't lie, I don't like advertisements either, however one must realise that advertisements are a more consistent way to generate money, and allow us to be able to pay for our servers, and any paid integrations we might need to purchase to continue providing the same features for free, as we always will, and always have been planning to do. I never intend to make any core features paid, and our premium plans only offer extra customisation for those who are interested in having more personal pages. The truth is, hosting bots and services for others takes up a sizeable chunk of my monthly income, and since I've become 20 years old a while back, I'll be having more responsibility and bills that need to be paid. I can afford this, and I can afford building this bot for you, but we will all have to face the fact, that if AltDentifier wants to survive and grow, we need to start generating income, as I don't know what the future holds.
Having advertisements in AltDentifier now, means we'll be able to pool the money, and keep the lights on, even if times become dire. But enough about this, let's go to the cool part!

I'm really happy that so many of you like what we do, and I'm still hard at work on building the new update, which unfortunately, will also take a while to complete. The 4.2(0) release will completely overhaul the way translations work, paving the way for our site to support translations on every page, expanding and improving on current strings on our site and in the bot and making translations easier to manage for the translators and myself. This does take a while to complete however, as different translators not being available, means I'll be machine translating a lot of these new strings, in order to keep support for the languages we offer today! For example I can share that the Turkish language will be available with this update, paving the way for AltDentifier to be accessible in a community where English is not always fully known.

I'd also like to ask those from other nations, if you are interested in volunteering for writing translations, you are always welcome. I'm looking to have more people who speak a different language available, so that in the event one translator falls off, we'll be still be able to update AltDentifier swiftly with real human translations. I'll be sharing more information on how I'm planning to restructure the way translators can join us in the near future!

But don't worry, I'll also be bringing some much needed quality of life changes and requested features to this update, with more to come in 4.3!
For example, one often requested feature is the ability for staff to set the time users have to complete verification. While there will be some restrictions on this, and it won't be possible to have unending verification at this time, server staff will now be able to set a time for users to verify, between 10 and 45 minutes. I'm also looking into letting members in your server self-verify, as this has also been requested by some. I'm still working out the kinks of how I want to offer this, so this may not make the cut in this update. And last of the more major features, we're doing away with the confusing "Reverse Default Role", and replacing it with a selectable "In Verification Role". This allows servers to mix the functionality of the default role and the old reverse functionality, and hopefully be less confusing to new users and current owners. For those who have reverse enabled at this time, I recommend using ;settings 2 and choosing reverse, this will disable it. You can then set the in verification role on the dashboard. For those choosing to keep reverse enabled, nothing will change for now, but be aware this setting is being deprecated, and might be removed in the future.

For now, that's all I have to share. I'm excited to release this update soon, and be able to start work on 4.3, an update that focuses more on new features and other improvements I'd love to make

Signed,

Auxim, AltDentifier Developer