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The Future of NabBot

I have been wanting to make this post, to keep NabBot users informed on what is going on with NabBot's development. What is currently being worked on and some insight into recent and upcoming changes to the Discord platform and how this is affecting NabBot.

The purpose of this message is to keep you informed on what is going on behind the scenes in NabBot's development. Even when you might not see new changes being released, a lot is going on in the background.

TL;DR: No, we are not closing.

Slash Commands

You might have heard about Slash commands or seen some bots implement these. Or maybe you haven't, because it is a feature that is still incomplete and it is still being worked on.

Slash commands are a new feature on Discord which simplify the use of commands. On bots where this has already been implemented, you can just type in a slash (/) and you’ll see a drop-down list of available commands, and after selecting one you will be able to see all the possible parameters. This is really useful for complex commands, because you no longer have to remember the order of parameters or where to put commas or spaces.

GallanBot is the development version of NabBot.

Check out Discord's Slash Commands FAQ for more details.

Message Restrictions

A couple months ago, Discord announced some changes related to privacy that majorly affected bots. Bots will no longer be allowed to see the content of messages by default, meaning that the old commands would stop working and slash commands would need to be implemented. This decision caused some outrage in the developers community and ultimately lead to the development of discord.py to cease, which is the library that NabBot uses, so it ceasing to be developed means that the entire code for NabBot needs to be adjusted using a different library.

The deadline for this change is April 2022, so this means NabBot has to migrate all their current commands into this new system by then, which is a big development effort, especially since discord.py was discontinued. If this migration is not done, NabBot will be simply unable to function as it does today.

As this already meant a huge change, it was decided that it is time to rework NabBot and its background services and move away from the current codebase for something with better performance, including a completely different language.

Recent Reduced Activity

If you follow our announcements channel on Discord, you might have noticed that updates have slowed down, and most of the time it’s only bug fixes that are being addressed and no features are being added. This is due to the focus of rewriting NabBot to support the new slash commands. NabBot is a project that is only developed under the team's free time.

Respawn System

The respawn system was introduced to experiment into this field of Tibia and we have received so much feedback about it and we have tried implementing whatever it was possible. However, it is evident that our respawn system needs to be reworked, in order to offer you a better experience. Unfortunately, this has been put on hold, due to the incoming change to Discord that needs to be addressed first.

Web Dashboard

The introduction of a dashboard where you can easily manage NabBot's settings without being limited by text messages has been hinted at on many occasions, but has always been put to the side to prioritize other features such as translations, respawn system and other features. But rest assured that this is something that is still in the plans.

What now?

We will be posting articles such as these to keep you up to date with the going-ons of NabBot.

We are still listening! All of your feedback is heard, and even if we are not able to implement new features right now, we are always taking notes on how to make NabBot better.