NabBot Slash Commands Release

Published on June 28, 2024

Hello, Nab lovers!

We are very excited to announce that we are finally about to release the new version of NabBot.

TL;DR: New version is releasing. We will now be using Discord's Slash commands.

As announced previously, we have been working on the migration of NabBot from Python to Kotlin for the past two years (with many breaks and real life situations causing delays). This is now coming to a close, with the release just around the corner.

Test sessions

We have now hosted two test sessions, where users from our Support Server could join our test server and help us make sure the new NabBot is still working as intended.

There, with a lot of your support, patience, and effort, we could already detect many smaller issues, and even bugs on the current Python version! We also got some feedback into desired features for the future, even though we focused on just identifying and fixing bugs in these sessions, to avoid delaying the release even further.

What is new?

Slash Commands

At this point, avid Discord users are probably used to other bots out there using these for quite a while. For those who just focus on NabBot, the Slash commands are Discord's official way of having bots interact with users and servers.

We are adopting this standard, and so all users must adapt to the new reality. But do not worry, it should not be scary and for most people it should be more intuitive, with some features coming directly from Discord, like:

• hints for the command parameters
• suggestions for auto-completion in commands and parameters
• permission handling at the command and command group level (i.e. better, more detailed permission handling system)

With this in mind, all commands have been affected:

• Read our Application Commands page for information and comparison between the different approaches
• If you are actually interested in a detailed list of all command changes, take a look at our changelog

Respawn System

In addition to the migration into Slash commands, the Respawn System was reworked. Some of the most significant changes include:

• Respawns are now customizable, admins can create, edit and remove respawns for their server
• Managers can move users straight to the top of a respawn's queue
• Respawns can be blocked/unblocked, disabling them from being used temporarily
• Admins can customize specific respawn settings, like configuring different hunt duration and queue size per respawn

As the recent performance of the Python version of NabBot has been very unstable, we will be very cautious and focus initially on stabilizing and understanding any pain points after the migration, before considering addition of more features into it. However, the new system should give us a bit more flexibility and open up more possibilities, so if you have ideas or feedback, send them our way.

What's to come?

Again: we are still listening! We have said this before and repeat: all of your feedback is heard. We are aware that we might not that fast to react and implement requested features and changes, but we keep taking notes and have a private backlog where we keep track of the most interesting or most requested topics.

Thank you all for your patience, understanding of our situation and development pace, and specially for all your love and support throughout the years. The community's benefit is what motivates us, and we aim to continuously make NabBot your "friendly neighborhood" Discord bot.