Kickstarter crowdfunding detection

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Revision as of 08:57, 27 June 2022 by Nai (talk | contribs) (I'll learn how to do this the right way one day I swear.)
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DevTalk has a persistent detection of visual novel crowdfunding campaigns run from Kickstarter. This feature automatically detects new visual novel submissions to Kickstarter, then reports them back to the community news channel and twitter.

Functionality & Intent

The detection of new visual novels crowdfunding on campaigns is managed through a combination of third party RSS feed subscription and screen scraping. Lemon, the bot primarily responsible for outside DevTalk functions, checks a series of RSS feeds for visual novels at the 15th minute of every hour, then reports back her findings to the community news channel and to the official DevTalk twitter channel.

The primary intent of the feature is to share Kickstarter campaigns for communal analysis, feedback and promotion.

History

This feature was implemented into Lemon at the foundation of the crowd funding chat channel, with the inclusion of a Kickstarter Search command and Discord Embeds that included an enhanced amount of additional information, such as current funding level and goals.

Originally, this information was sourced directly from Kickstarter itself using web screen scraping. This collection of Kickstarter data was halted following a change in Kickstarter's policies preventing bots from navigating their site. This feature was discontinued in October 2021. The feature returned in February 2022 using a new third party data source.

Misuse

Originally, the notifications about new Kickstarter campaigns being launched were announced directly in the crowd funding channel. Following a series of complaints of members of the community using it to openly criticize new campaigns and developers, the notifications of new Kickstarter campaigns was removed from the crowd funding channel. This was reattempted in February 2022, when it was removed a second time shortly later and is now only broadcast through the community news channel and the official community Twitter.