Good day! We'd like to update you guys with Nox Bot's current state of development and roadmap. This is going to be a long read! :D
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First -- let's talk about the challenges we've been facing that ate up a LOT of our time. Facebook is now pushing out what they call the "New Pages Experience" (NPE). Some of the APIs that we've been using have stopped working with pages who migrated to the NPE, even though it should work according to FB documentation. Even Stream Elements and some other 3rd party services have had issues with it, and the same goes for us.
Though we already implemented an initial workaround, it only addressed the part where Nox Bot could hook up successfully to the livestream chat for keyword matching and processing. Timed actions or messages are still not working but rest assured that we are still cooking up a workaround. One of the reasons it's taking time is because we do not have any pages yet that can use the New Pages Experience and could not test directly.
Another challenge we're facing is the performance of Facebook's Server-Sent Events (SSE) that Nox Bot uses. Since the beginning of April, we have noticed a much slower update rate from their end and even some comments not being sent to Nox Bot especially on very busy live chats. This means that Nox Bot may also be less responsive or may not be aware of some chat messages at all since it didn't receive some of the messages. This was already raised to the Facebook Developer Team and is under investigation but no ETA yet for the resolution.
To avoid future problems with their SSE, we are trying to shift to a different integration point with Facebook. We will be focusing on this first so that the arrival of messages are more reliable than before, and this will also enable the catching of reactions from viewers.
Addressing the issues above will be given priority to ensure that Nox Bot works even more reliably since its features are mostly centered around catching live chat messages (and in the future, react events).
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Next -- let's talk about the loyalty system. As of January, we have launched the alpha version of the loyalty system and since then, we got tons of feedback with varying preferences!
Though there are different modes that people want it to be (EXP, currency, metrics, etc.), we ultimately decided that the current "loyalty points" will remain as is -- a cumulative value which tracks user activity. We will then instead add a new currency that users can earn alongside their loyalty points and this will be spendable later on in the expansion (see more details in the roadmap image). This took a lot of time to finalize because it isn't easy to shift to a different operating mode coming from how it was originally designed. So instead of reworking it entirely, we will just build on top of it! :D
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Finally, we have updated our roadmap to reflect the priority changes due to recent challenges and also considering the importance of the features to be rolled out (see featured image at the top of this post). Minor features are not listed there but several surprises that aren't visible here will be released with every update as they get completed.
We also gathered votes for the suggestions and ranked them. Some of the cool suggestions are pretty much limited by the availability of Facebook APIs at the moment, and we also have a lot of stuff listed that's just waiting for a new Facebook API to make it happen. These things will be implemented when the relevant Facebook API for it is opened up to developers. :)
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That's it for now! Thank you for all the support and we'll continue doing our best to make Nox Bot better with each update! :D