BotShade is now generally available

Hi — Tettu here, the person building BotShade.

As of today, October 23, BotShade is generally available. The “beta” label is finally coming off.

First, to everyone who used BotShade during the beta: thank you, truly. Without the people who put up with the bugs and sent us their thoughts, we wouldn’t have made it to today.

What changes with general availability, and whether you need to do anything, are covered in the announcement and the release notes (links at the end). Here I want to look back, from the builder’s side, on the five and a half months since that May post.

Table of contents:

• Five and a half months since May
• Features that came from your feedback
• Checking in on what I wrote in May
• What’s next
• Closing

Five and a half months since May

Shortly after the May post, on May 13, we paused the service once, and on the 19th we reopened it as Phase 2. The headline feature was custom commands.

From there, we added something every month.

• June: BotShader AI preview, a redesign of the dashboard and the official site, AI replies for bots
• July: environment variables for bots, a rebuilt BotShader AI, the launch of ShadeBoard
• August: Blackhole, which stops spam from hijacked accounts; rebuilt settings panels; earthquake early warnings and earthquake information; moving the bot runtime to a data center in Japan
• September: a revamped casino, expanded server protection, the add-on system, expanded custom events
• October: general availability. BotShader AI opened to everyone, plus Twitch stream notification and QR code add-ons (both in beta)

Laid out like this, we’ve built quite a lot. And some of it started with your feedback.

Features that came from your feedback

Earthquake early warnings

“It’d be nice to have something like earthquake early warnings.” That’s what someone told me personally, and that’s where it began.

In August we added earthquake early warnings, which arrive before the shaking, and earthquake information, which arrives after. What I was most careful about was not flooding the channel with notifications. A single earthquake can produce more than 20 follow-up reports, so the bot keeps editing its first message, and updates it right away only when the forecast intensity goes up, or for the final report or a cancellation.

Earthquake information comes as a map image with each area colored by seismic intensity. In September we made that map color in finer-grained regions.

Please treat it as an aid to disaster preparedness, and check official sources as well.

Twitch stream notifications

The other one was “the Twitch feature is a bit awkward to use.” Someone said that about the Twitch feature in another bot they were using.

So I thought: then let’s build a better version in BotShade. That became the Twitch stream notification add-on, which we added in beta alongside today’s general availability. I started with things like letting the “stream started” post be edited after the stream ends, and letting you narrow down which notifications go out.

Both features began with a single remark — “I want this,” “this is awkward.” For the people building something, remarks like that are genuinely valuable.

Checking in on what I wrote in May

In the May post, the reason given for building BotShade was: “We want a place where you can think of an idea, shape it, run it — and have that simple loop feel good to keep doing.” Hearing someone say “I want something like this,” shaping it, and having them use it: I think the two features above are examples of turning that loop from the builder’s side.

Let me also check in on the promises made under “What’s next.”

• Public status: still public at status.botshade.com
• Announcing maintenance ahead of time: both the move to Phase 2 in May and the planned maintenance in July were announced before they happened
• Writing plainly on this blog: honestly, this one fell short. Counting from May, this is only the third post

The aim to be a product without lies doesn’t change with general availability.

What’s next

Being generally available doesn’t mean we stop building. We’ll keep making features, lots of them. I still have dozens of ideas on hand for things I want to do.

I won’t say here what’s coming or when, but when something ships, we’ll tell you through announcements and release notes.

And just like during the beta, a single “I want something like this” or “this part is awkward” is always welcome. Like the earthquake and Twitch features, the next feature might come from it.

Closing

What changes with general availability, and whether current users need to do anything, are covered in the October 16 announcement. The full list of changes is in the general availability release notes. Please take a look at both.

Feedback and thoughts are always welcome through the support page.

To everyone who used BotShade during the beta: thank you, truly. I hope you’ll stick with BotShade now that it’s generally available, too.

Until next time.