Dear Starlight Academy,
On Friday, May 27th at approximately 7pm Eastern time, development will begin for Starlight Chat, a chat program intended to be self-hosted on the Starlight Academy servers. Your system administrator will be working long hours over the weekend to lay a foundation for this application, and hopefully create an initial development build.
This work is being performed pro bono. Donations via PayPal to the Red Bull and Cheetos fund will be graciously accepted. Please annotate all donations for this purpose with the note "Feed Pepsi".
If the development of Starlight Chat reaches a usable state, a limited alpha version of Starlight Chat will be posted for testing. All users of the current chat software are welcome and encouraged to test the application during its early development. The current chat software will remain live for the duration, and will remain the primary form of chat for the site. During this period, bugs may be reported directly to PepsiCo with a short description and a screenshot. This event may or may not occur the weekend of the initial work.
If Starlight Chat reaches feature parity with our current chat software (chat, history, login system, permissions, avatars, notifications, wordfilters, blacklist, and moderator PMs) then the first Beta test will begin. During this test, at certain hours which will be announced in advance, the current chat software will be replaced with the Starlight Chat Beta so that user bug reports and feature requests may be collected. This period will also formally open the bug report system for Starlight Chat. The timeline for the first Beta test is to be decided.
In the event that Starlight Chat surpasses the usefulness of the current chat software — most likely through shared Xenforo/Starlight Chat authentication, and nickname keychaining for associating multiple characters to one account — and passes quality assurance, stability, and security testing, Starlight Chat will have its 1.0 release announced, and on release date will replace the current chat software as Starlight Academy's official chat client. It is anticipated that, barring any unforeseen obstacles, the 1.0 release will happen around December of 2016.
AFTER THIS POINT (after the 1.0 release)
The system administrator will accept suggestions for advanced features and community-specific features for Starlight Academy, to make the SA version of Starlight Chat unique and especially useful for the SA community. Your requests and suggestions are very important to me, and will be addressed based on necessity, usefulness, and ease of implementation. Some of them might even make it into the 1.1 build of the application, and several should be included in later builds as well. The administrator and moderators have already filed several feature requests, and your feature may already be on the list of things to implement -after- the 1.0 release.
HOWEVER (just in case you didn't get it the first time)
No suggestions for new functionality that does not exist in the current chat software will be accepted, considered, or addressed UNTIL the 1.0 release has occurred. Do not use the bug report system as a tool for begging for your favorite new feature idea.
Again, your suggestions are very important to me and I would like to make the chat application as good, useful, and special as we could possibly have it, but the first thing is to make sure that we don't lose anything in the transition. Please wait warmly for your opportunity to customize Starlight Chat, and in the meantime, I welcome your cheerful participation in the application testing.
Please feel free to post below with questions, comments, concerns, kind words, complaints, or (if you can't read and you really want me to roast you) feature requests.
With Love,
PepsiCo
P.S. Refer all further questions to either myself or Kyros, or this thread. Don't bother the poor moderators. They don't know anything about what I'm doing.
P.P.S. DO NOT call Starlight Chat the name of the other chat software. It abbreviates very nicely to SC or StarChat. That would be like calling me Coca-Cola. And you know how I'd feel about that.
On Friday, May 27th at approximately 7pm Eastern time, development will begin for Starlight Chat, a chat program intended to be self-hosted on the Starlight Academy servers. Your system administrator will be working long hours over the weekend to lay a foundation for this application, and hopefully create an initial development build.
This work is being performed pro bono. Donations via PayPal to the Red Bull and Cheetos fund will be graciously accepted. Please annotate all donations for this purpose with the note "Feed Pepsi".
If the development of Starlight Chat reaches a usable state, a limited alpha version of Starlight Chat will be posted for testing. All users of the current chat software are welcome and encouraged to test the application during its early development. The current chat software will remain live for the duration, and will remain the primary form of chat for the site. During this period, bugs may be reported directly to PepsiCo with a short description and a screenshot. This event may or may not occur the weekend of the initial work.
If Starlight Chat reaches feature parity with our current chat software (chat, history, login system, permissions, avatars, notifications, wordfilters, blacklist, and moderator PMs) then the first Beta test will begin. During this test, at certain hours which will be announced in advance, the current chat software will be replaced with the Starlight Chat Beta so that user bug reports and feature requests may be collected. This period will also formally open the bug report system for Starlight Chat. The timeline for the first Beta test is to be decided.
In the event that Starlight Chat surpasses the usefulness of the current chat software — most likely through shared Xenforo/Starlight Chat authentication, and nickname keychaining for associating multiple characters to one account — and passes quality assurance, stability, and security testing, Starlight Chat will have its 1.0 release announced, and on release date will replace the current chat software as Starlight Academy's official chat client. It is anticipated that, barring any unforeseen obstacles, the 1.0 release will happen around December of 2016.
AFTER THIS POINT (after the 1.0 release)
The system administrator will accept suggestions for advanced features and community-specific features for Starlight Academy, to make the SA version of Starlight Chat unique and especially useful for the SA community. Your requests and suggestions are very important to me, and will be addressed based on necessity, usefulness, and ease of implementation. Some of them might even make it into the 1.1 build of the application, and several should be included in later builds as well. The administrator and moderators have already filed several feature requests, and your feature may already be on the list of things to implement -after- the 1.0 release.
HOWEVER (just in case you didn't get it the first time)
No suggestions for new functionality that does not exist in the current chat software will be accepted, considered, or addressed UNTIL the 1.0 release has occurred. Do not use the bug report system as a tool for begging for your favorite new feature idea.
Again, your suggestions are very important to me and I would like to make the chat application as good, useful, and special as we could possibly have it, but the first thing is to make sure that we don't lose anything in the transition. Please wait warmly for your opportunity to customize Starlight Chat, and in the meantime, I welcome your cheerful participation in the application testing.
Please feel free to post below with questions, comments, concerns, kind words, complaints, or (if you can't read and you really want me to roast you) feature requests.
With Love,
PepsiCo
P.S. Refer all further questions to either myself or Kyros, or this thread. Don't bother the poor moderators. They don't know anything about what I'm doing.
P.P.S. DO NOT call Starlight Chat the name of the other chat software. It abbreviates very nicely to SC or StarChat. That would be like calling me Coca-Cola. And you know how I'd feel about that.
