In this case, the era mostly consisted of pain and sorrow, and neglect - this update really could not have come sooner. While we've moved over to a new and fresh version, there are still issues we're ironing out, but it should be smooth sailing within a week or two. This is mostly due to the fact that prior to a few days ago, Discord had stated that, on April 30, 2022, message content would become a privileged intent, Discord has since then moved the deadline to August 31, 2022.

So we planned for release on April 1, 2022. Kind of a reverse April Fool's prank. Although we knew it wouldn't be perfect.

The previous version of Atlas (v8) and all of it's systems went greatly undermaintained, as we were focusing on the next version (vx, the current version), which was built from the ground-up and rewrote several times across several years. As such, we sat at a crossroad - leave v8 chugging along for a month, slowly, but surely, collapsing in on itself, or transition over to vx as soon as possible and work out most of the quirks as it's used. Both, not ideal.

I believe you can guess which road we ended up taking. Regardless, that leaves us here: vx. After years of on-and-off development, it's finally proved to not be some urban legend, rumoured about in our community, but what does that mean exactly?

We'll be covering most of the larger changes here, with a second blog post going over all of the juicy details in the coming week.

Modern Systems, Increased Motivation

The new version was made with maintainability and developer-experience in mind, it's also surprisingly fast, that means subsequent updates will be much more frequent and exciting as we're able to branch out and flex our internal systems like never before.

New Dashboard

The existing dashboard was volatile and prioritised form over function with poor navigation and a design yoinked from Discord.

The new dashboard tries to address these issues by adding a fancy sidebar and a command palette, although not perfect in it's current state - we're aware of some UI/UX issues which need to be addressed and will be taken care of in the coming weeks.

With this you'll find several, once familiar, pages completely revamped and re-imagined.

New Branding

That's right, we're very dark and mysterious now.

Slash Commands

As mentioned earlier, message content would become a privileged intent, which meant normal, prefixed commands wouldn't really be an option for most bots. In Atlas' case, we'd be granted the message content intent regardless since we use it for moderation, but as most bots transition over to slash commands, it would/will eventually become the expected way to interact with a bot directly, which is especially important for new users to the platform.

Although Atlas primarily now uses slash commands, legacy prefixes from v8 are still somewhat supported, though most of the functionality provided by slash commands is lost.

Permission Error

Servers which had invited Atlas prior to a few months ago may notice slash commands not showing up immediately, this is most likely due to Atlas not having permission to do so. This is easily fixed by re-inviting Atlas through atlas.bot/get, this won't affect any of your settings and doesn't actually re-invite the bot, it just grants the appropriate permissions to work as expected. Then, clicking the Sync Now button in the server overview tab

Removal of Music Features

The music plugin and it's features have been discontinued, this was inevitable as music playback would restream content from YouTube, which is against their TOS.

Premium Changes

In the midst of our rebrand craze, we've also rebranded premium to Prime. For no real reason other than it's less generic and sounds cool: "Atlas Prime", makes my spine tingle.

License Changes

No longer will your subscription apply to every server you own, instead a subscription will grant you a number of Prime licenses, which you can then apply to any server. More information will eventually be listed on our Prime page, which currently just redirects to our Patreon page, with an accompanied blog post.

A post will also be made on our Patreon page for current supporters.

Premium Instance

We've also discontinued the, previously known, premium instance of Atlas. This mostly streamlines the transition process when managing your subscriptions, but we had also ran into an issue with the premium bot being flagged by Discord's anti-spam system, which meant direct-message functionality would no longer work.

Level Progression

Something which really had to be changed, previous level progression was unnecessarily difficult and unrealistic: considering ideal circumstances and a user is capable of being consistently active in a server, it would take them just over 2 years to reach the maximum level of 150.

So level progression has been adjusted to make it more forgiving and predictable. Along with the default expression change, Prime users are able to adjust their server's levelling experience to whatever may fit best.

Actions Upgrade

The tag engine, powering actions across the dashboard, has greatly been improved with neat, new features like loops and functions, though don't let this scare you off, the scripting language still maintains an easy-to-learn and powerful foundation.

More about actions and their new (and old) capabilities can be found in our documentation.

Improved Documentation

In the past, our documentation had always been lacking. With vx, we're putting new focus on documentation and have started out by manually documenting tags with examples. We've also included some guides on how specific features work, like {return} and entire plugins.

We're still actively working on the new documentation, so some things are still missing or incomplete. If you are interested, you can view them at docs.atlas.bot and contribute changes at github.com/sylo-digital/documentation by submitting a pull request.

Conclusion

Thank you for taking the time to read through our incoherent ramblings, we know it's been tough, we're working as hard as we can to resolve major issues and most should be fixed in the next few days.

We'll be posting a second blog post, containing a full changelog, in the coming week.