Welcome to the SockoBot News!

Today we'll look at the new SockoBot logo, as well as some other logo contributions, we'll talk about the bugfix for the nastiest bug in our code, and finally discuss new features being developed. This was a slower week for our development, as Christmas and New Year's Eve came by, but a lot has changed and I'm still very excited to tell you about our progress!

The new face of SockoBot

A week ago, I've announced a competition with a 10 steem bounty for whoever can make the best logo for the bot. Even though it was during the holidays, we got a lot of responses and some of them were absolutely amazing! You can see the post announcing the results [here].
(https://steemit.com/sockobot/@jestemkioskiem/announcing-the-winner-of-the-sockobot-logo-request)

Just before the competition had closed, @kvds arrived with his contribution. His design and choice of color pallet took away our breath, as we glazed at the new face of our beloved bot. He has now received his bounty of 10 steem, and SockoBot's team is hoping to work with him in the future if the opportunity presents itself.

Even though the winner was clear and decided, there happened to be one contribution that also won our hearts. If not for @kvds, this would 100% take the cake. Please, take a look at what @wens prepared for us here. She has received a bonus bounty of 5 steem for her work.

The bug is no more!

You might remember our post announcing a huge 20 steem bounty for what seemed like a little, easy to fix bug. Many people suggested to use multithreading to deal with discord.py API's problems, and while I was hard at work trying to make it happen, someone submited a pull request with a much easier, better fix, which also made the bot much faster!

It was no other than @mys with his contribution that handled the issue by... refusing to use python-steem API. Turns out, all of the big websites ditch JS, Python and PHP APIs in favour of api.steemit.com. He made use of that, and with a simple json request use made the bot not only magnitudes faster, but fixed the infamous freeze that was stopping SockoBot from ever being deployed to big Discord servers. This solution (along with a new look for our response message you can see above!) has now been merged into the project and is the official solution to the issue. I've now rewarded @mys with 20 Steem and hope to continue working with him on this project.

What's next?

A lot. Now that the holidays are over, the development will speed up and a lot of new features should be ready to be deployed before next week. A lot of them are still undecided, but there's a few we're working on:

• Manage permissions, permitted channels and bot options via Discord commands rather than editing the code. This was supposed to come much later, but we believe it's very important to add this ASAP, which is why we are working on it right now!
• Register for a premium account by sending steem or SBD to our bot with the memo he provides. This is a very important feature for any steem related bot, and we're excited to say the work is also already in progress.
• A command for calculating the value of a given user's upvote. This is a low priority issue, but should also be ready next week.

Thank you for supporting the development of SockoBot!

We're just getting started, but the project is very exciting and we're happy it's quickly moving forward as well as gaining new contributors. We hope to see you next week, in SockoBot News! (Week #2)!

our github repo

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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