Release: v9.1-beta

Today marks the long awaited release of v9.1-beta, the first major version release since the failed v9 launch on TypeScript. This also marks the launch of our new website! We hope you enjoy.

NOTE: Some things, like languages, are unimplemented for now. All database settings have been imported besides automatic daily verse settings and those related to API.Bible versions.

Changelog

This changelog borrows from v9’s, as it wasn’t public long enough to be noticeable.

• The entire codebase has been rewritten and restructured into C# on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.
• The bot will now reply to command and verse messages, instead of just responding.
• Commands have been massively reorganized and made more intuitive, click here for the new command documentation.
• Many commands have been renamed, like how +verseoftheday is now +dailyverse.
• Daily verse automation is easier than ever to setup, see +dailyverse set for more information.
• Servers can now set the bot’s prefix by using +formatting setprefix.
• Added a stop option to paginated commands.
• +stats is more useful on the whole.
• +random true will now provide truly random verses, as opposed to +random‘s pre-determined pool.
• Added a rescue avenue, where commands will work regardless of prefix or preference if the message starts with +biblebot, see the command documentation for more on that.
• You can now reference the Bible over multiple chapters, like John 3:36-4:1. Character limits still apply.
• Verses will now truncate leftover text in order to not exceed the character limit.
• Poetry rendering has been fixed and will look like any other verse text.

Remarks

While v9’s launch was horrendous, reverting to v8 may have been worse. The Great Outage of 2021™ (as we’re calling it) started on May 13th, where a simple restart became the reveal for our infrastructure being insufficient. Since then, we’ve had a great degree of instability and we had to change our development strategy. Instead of following our normal development cycle, I did the Great Rewrite™ (we’re calling it that too) in about 20 days.

We’ve decided that with this release, we’d be moving our infrastructure to something more reliable and scalable. As of v9.1-beta, we’ll be providing our services using infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services, where we hope to continue to provide an exceptional service to all of you.

I appreciate all the support, both emotionally and financially, as we’ve gone through this turbulent couple months. It means a lot to me, and all of us here at Kerygma Digital.

Keep us in your prayers.

Seraphim R.P.
Executive Director