A Year in Review
2019 has been a great year for Bots on Discord. This was our first full year out of beta, and so many things have been released. I’m so proud of how far my project has come, and I hope it continues to grow and be the best Discord bot list for everyone. Now, here’s a look through everything that’s happened over the year for Bots on Discord.
March 30th — Design 2.0
The first big update of 2019 was a complete redesign of the website. The original website was basically just thrown together and looked ugly and amateurish. The redesign gave us the clean and organized website we all know today. This update included a lot, so to save me an hour of typing, please read the post above to see the changes made in the update.
April 1 — April Fool’s
For April Fool’s this year I went for something design-related, since the new design update just came out. Here’s a screenshot of the front page and search page from that day:
Sadly, it seems I never took a screenshot or archived the bot pages.
April 11th — Metrics
I released a small update that, aside from breaking everything for a bit, added analytics to the site. This gave me a tool to see how people are using the website. Here’s a sneak peak into some of the things I (anonymously) track.
May 5th — Approvers
Another log-awaited update, this upgraded the submission and approval process. First, it added support for approvers, so I could bring on more staff without giving them the powers of a moderator. It also added the ability to resubmit bots without losing your data. This is one of our unique features that distinguish us from the other popular bot lists. Along with re-submissions it also added records to bots, so staff and owners can see all actions ever taken on a bot. The last notable addition was that owners now received DMs when actions were taken on their bot by staff.
June 6th — Lists
Speaking of distinguishing features, this update added another never-before seen feature: Custom Lists. With this, everyone can make their own bot lists and share it with others. This provided a way to share a set of bots all at once, including a description with them.
Another hidden addition of this update was the admin panel. This allows me to change the content on the front page with a simple page on the website. No code or database changes needed. It also allows me the post announcements the same way.
July 1st — A Guide to Designing Your Bot Page
After being fed-up with all the terrible and low-effort bot pages I spent a lot of time writing this guide to help people design better pages.
July 4th — Acquiring a New Domain
After months and months of waiting and hoping to be lucky, I acquired ondiscord.com. We still use the ondiscord.xyz domain, since we’ve used it for so long that it feels right now, but you can use the .com domain interchangeably.
July 7th — Various Updates
In an effort to reward well-made bots and give them some visibility, I created the Staff Picks program. This update added support for it on the site. Three other notable things cam with this update: The ability to view archived bot pages, the ability to show a vote prompt on your bot page when linking to it, and support for an approval guide where bots could be tested.
August 1st — Staff Picks for July
The first edition of Staff Picks was released.
August 8th — New Search
Another of the big updates for 2019 was the upgrade to search that came in this update. I switched from simple searching to using Elasticsearch to search bots. This allows people to more easily find bots, as search before this only returned exact description or name matches. Searching for anything without already knowing the bot was very hard. The old search also encouraged keyword stuffing in the description, since it didn’t search the whole page and all descriptions.
This update also updated markdown, notably with container elements. In an effort to make lists more visible to users and easier to use, I also added the ability to add bots to lists from their bot page. Tips were also added, and the about page information re-written.
September 1st — Staff Picks for August
October 5th — Public User Pages and Placeholders
After being ignored for a long time, I finally released public user pages. I also added another admin feature that lets me create placeholder bots. This allows me to add bots to the list that many people are looking for, but that the owners don’t care to list themselves. I also made some visual improvements with the continued rollout of new bot cards, and improved notices on bot pages. This update also added a Terms of Service for Bots on Discord.
October 6th — State of the Community Survey
This was something that I wanted to do to possibly help bot owners know what users want, and to better understand how they use bots. I collected responses from 235 people, and I think it turned out pretty well. I encourage you to read the post above to see what kind of insights it provided.
November 1st — Staff Picks for October
November 26th — Readability Improvements
The containers, notices, and announcements on the website were always a bit hard to read, especially yellow. After reading some articles on color design for websites I finally improved the colors used for these on the website.
December 24th — Reviews
The last major update of 2019: Reviews. I had planned to replace votes for a very long time. They were never a good system to achieve our goals. They were never that good for good bot owners either. With reviews (another distinguishing feature offered by no other popular bot list) this replacement finally happened. Reviews allow good, well-made bots to achieve higher visibility than larger bots that aren’t as good. Previously, the larger or more exploitative bots could get more votes even without being “good”. They didn’t really represent quality. These reviews also allow people to get a better idea of what a bot a bot is like before adding it, and allow owners to get feedback from their users.
In addition to reviews, this update included some small improvements made over the long development time. These included improved scroll bars, tag descriptions on bot cards (again), renaming “bot body” to “bot overview”, and improved bot requirements.
Thank you to everyone who uses Bots on Discord for supporting me and allowing me to do all of this. Despite all of these releases, my todo list has only grown, so look forward to more in the new year!
