Accelerating towards IveBot v4, and what's next

[retrixe]

It's clear I don't have the time to maintain IveBot like I did before, and no one has stepped up to take over the reins. In light of the situation, the following issues have been split out and are no longer part of IveBot v4's scope:

• Unify flag parsing across commands #65
  Personally, moving to slash commands should be a more important priority than working on text-based commands.
• Enable strict TypeScript type-checking rules #64
  This is important, but it is something we can pursue after the v4.0 release incrementally.
• Intent support, gateway v8/v9 #62
  We largely support most intents, however, we still rely on some privileged intents.
• Complete migrating all commands to slash #61
  The migration is already underway for many commands, however, we're still far from making good progress on the issue.
• Manage description/fullDescription differences #60
  This may be pursued in v4.0 during the code refactors too, we'll see how things work out.
• Move /mute to timeouts #59
  In my view, this is a feature request and not critical to IveBot v4.
  We do want to utilise new Discord features, but... yeah. We may also need to look into the ability of users to speak in forums.
• Add /shell (/sh, /ap) #58
  SquidBot already dropped support for this feature (and is incidentally dead now).
  It's a pretty cool idea but it'll take time to build and likely never will be more than a fancy toy...
• Enhance /purge #57
  This is a feature request not critical to IveBot v4 at all.
• Add user badges to /userinfo #56
  This is a feature request not critical to IveBot v4 at all.
• Support multiple databases with drizzle #55
  While this would be a major change, it's not a breaking change and could be delivered in a minor release.
  Using drizzle shouldn't fundamentally break existing MongoDB users.

The primary focus of IveBot v4 now is the code refactoring being pursued in #49

Support for newer Discord features is now out of scope, and the intent is to work on that in future minor releases. Some key issues I can think of vis-a-vis newer Discord features missing from IveBot:

• We've practically done nothing about the username#discriminator change.
• We need to look into how relevant our management commands are in 2025, and how many features are missing.
• Application emoji are a thing now! We should make use of them.
• We may need to look into forums support for the /mute command...
• Do we need to make special considerations for forwarded messages?
• Intent support, gateway v8/v9 #62 may be able to get by better now...
• Super reactions? Do we mess with reactions anywhere?
• User-installable apps?
• Soundboard?
• App monetisation?
• messageUpdate emits full messages now, do we need to account for this?
• Stickers?
• Voice messages?