The state of the bot: July

Melmsie
Dank Memer
Published in
4 min readJul 29, 2018

Hey there meme lords, going to be doing these each month to give you a look at the bot and how it’s been performing, as well as where it’s headed in the next month. Let’s get started…

Statistics this month

Servers joined: ~101,000
Servers left: ~55,000

New support server members: ~3000
Messages sent in support server: ~999,500

Commands Ran: 27 million
Most popular category: Memey (3.4m commands)

Current bot statistics

Development this month

Development this month has been interesting to say the least. I’ve taken on perryprog as a contributor to help with my workload, and it’s been nice having someone else work on the bot. However, this last month was still slow on updates.

A very slow month for development

I’d like to have 1–2 more contributors help out to speed up development, however I haven’t been very lucky with finding any that are on the same level as us AND will be active enough to be useful. If you know anyone looking for a JavaScript project who isn’t a complete noob, send them my way! Dank Memer has millions of users, and looks great on a resume. As you can see, I could use someone else to help talk over part of the programming responsibility. My free time to work on the bot is declining more and more, and I’d hate to see development come to a full stop.

The commit graphs since the beginning of this repo

Plans for the future

First and most importantly to me, is making sure premium users are getting the perks they paid for. I’ll be tweaking tiers, updating Dank Memer Pro, and adding new rewards for patronage.

Next on the list is getting the next (and final?) currency update done. The three items you see right now are only a tiny part of what the shop will be. I’m currently planning on ~15 shop items at various prices that will each serve a function in the bot. Along with this update, I’ll be making some QOL changes to current commands (such as extending the trivia time limit).

After those, I’ll be focusing on improving the meme functionality of the bot. For one, I’ll be adding new sources of memes to the meme command to help give a little more variety. I’ll also be looking into a way to have more than the top 100 memes each day. (Top 500?) I’ll also be removing the meme generation command and replacing it with a “meme editor” on Dank Memer’s website (Long term goal).

Finally, I’ll be adding/improving the current utility commands and moderation commands. Currently everything is very barebones, and does the minimum.

There are also some things I’d like to add that you’ve been asking for, that I cannot do on my own. I’ll NEED some active developers to help me with these. I want to add various different languages into the bot that can be changed per server. I want to add a “clean mode” for people under 18 who want a purely SFW bot (no bad words, no nsfw, no insults). I also want to add a lottery system to the currency, but I definitely can’t do that one on my own. And also maybe I’m getting a little sick of currency commands…

Addressing user’s concerns

Lately I’ve gotten a lot of direct messages from users expressing their concern that Dank Memer is going in the wrong direction.

“What happened to it being a meme bot?”

Dank Memer always has been, and always will be a meme bot. It’s primary functionality centers around the meme command[s]. However, users often don’t want 4 different bots in their server to do moderation, fun stuff, music, utilities, etc. So I’ve decided Dank Memer will add “multipurpose bot” commands, but with a memey twist. Every single command should be memey or sassy in some way, and if it isn’t, let us know and we’ll change it. Dank memer is unique in being the first meme bot, but now we’re even more unique in being the meme bot that is more than just memes, but is still just as memey.

Dank Memer will also never be pay2win. Yes, donors get a ton of perks that help them “win” at currency, but you’re forgetting that currency isn’t the main focus of the bot. It’s a small part of it, and far from the most important in our eyes. You have to understand that hosting a bot this large can cost hundreds of dollars, so we can’t afford to just hope someone gives us money for it. We have to have some sort of incentive, and to us, giving extra coins or shields in currency is better than locking commands behind a paywall. If you have any better ways for us to monetize some part of the bot to be able to make enough money to host, please give us the ideas. We’re always open to hearing new ideas, and we’re always open to bettering ourselves and the bot.

In Conclusion

Dank Memer is doing great. It’s getting added to a ton of servers, it’s still being developed, the support server is active, and we’re having fun. Are you? If not, you have permission to message Mel#0004 (myself) and let me know what we can do better. Otherwise, I’ll see you soon for another update!

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Melmsie
Dank Memer

Developer/Owner of the Discord's favorite meme bot