Patreon, Discord and more
Jan. 30, 2020, 2:04 a.m.
There is now an official Botfather Discord server serving as a forum. And after testing a "buymeacoffee" button for a while now, we replaced it with Patreon. Furthermore, there are new plans for Botfather version 7.
Patreon
On our ongoing quest of finding a way to fund Botfather, we recently tried a “Buy me a coffee” on our website. Unfortunately, while hundreds of people clicked the button, just one person donated to us (ty btw). Thats fine, but Botfather still needs some funding. However, we want to do it in a nice way. Thats why we just added a Patreon button to our website.
To make Patreon a little more attractive, we added 3 affordable tiers. These have neat perks such as early access to upcoming versions, special Discord ranks and voting power on certain design decisions.
Discord
We had a need for a board/forum of some kind for a while now. From time to time we even get mails about it. Just recently a nice French developer explicitly asked for Discord. We had that option in mind for a while now and after finishing the integration with Patreon our Discord server is live now. Feel free to discuss and chat there with us and other community members.
New plans for Botfather 7
In our last post we planned on completely refactoring Botfather and switch the scripting language to Python. Instead we will improve our JavaScript engine and refactor parts of Botfather step by step. The next thing we want to support is script code splitting using JavaScripts export functionality and a newer ECMA Script specification.
We already switch our building system to CMake, a well known building system that paths the way to open source Botfather eventually. We will start our opensource journey by turning individual parts of Botfather into standalone libraries which will then be made available on Github. Next step would be to rewrite the Botfather GUI and release it to the public aswell (given that we have enough funding at this point).
Edit:
Unfortunately I had no time to maintain Patreon nor Discord, so both links have been removed.