CHANGELOG.md

Taliyah Changelog

All notable changes to Taliyah will be documented in this file. This project adheres to the standards set out by the Semantic Versioning specification.

0.7.0 Carbon - Not yet released

This is a major release of Taliyah, culminating over a year of work to completely rework Taliyah and her internal components to allow her to work asynchronously instead of synchronously. This rewrite also required me to rework my lastfm-rs crate to also use async / await, but that didn't take much effort or time. This is such a big release, that I decided to make the jump to version 0.7.0 from 0.5.0. No 1.0 yet, as the bot doesn't have anywhere close to the amount of features I plan on implementing for Taliyah in the long-term.

Main headlining features include:

• A renaming of the project from Ellie to Taliyah.
• Asynchronous support via async/await.
• Several reworks to various commands.
• A shift from the previous SQLite database implementation that used rusqlite to a brand new PostgreSQL-based database using the sqlx crate.
• A migration over to a new TOML-based configuration system from the prior implementation that used the .dev configuration format / system.
• A brand new voice system (finally!), using Lavalink and the brand new songbird crate. (temporarily removed)

Please read on below to learn about all of the changes included in this release. It is a big one, so only read this at your leisure.

Core and Architectural Changes

• Renaming of the Project to Taliyah from Ellie

  • The project has been renamed to Taliyah from Ellie, as I felt the previous name was a little un-unique, and as my take on a Discord bot is fairly unique, I wanted to ensure the project had a more unique name to go along with it.

• Foundation

  • Taliyah has been rewritten to take advantage of asynchronous serenity, which means Taliyah should perform a bit faster.
  • Taliyah has been moved to a PostgreSQL-based database using the sqlx crate instead of SQLite and the rusqlite crate, meaning database requests are now asynchronous as well.

New Features

• Configuration System
  • Moved to a TOML-based configuration system. This allows more flexibility and control than the previous .env system allowed as well as a cleaner overall configuration format.
• Commands
  • Fun
    • Added ascii command. This allows converting text to display in an ASCII font. You can use custom fonts with the command as well by providing a supported font as an argument. You can find more information about this in the command's help documentation.
    • Added printerfacts command. This retrieves a random "fact" about printers. This command uses Christine Dodrill's Printer Facts API.
  • Info
    • Added about command. This displays various statistics about Taliyah, such as version and various statistics about the users, guilds, shards, and channels she can see.
  • Moderation
    • Added slowmode command. This allows server moderators / administrators to control a channel's slowmode setting.
  • Search
    • Added a set of commands that integrate with The Movie Database. This includes commands such as show, which allows retrieving information about a specified television show, movie which gets information on a specified movie, collection which retrieves information about a specified film collection, and cast, which retrieves details about the cast and crew of a specific movie or television series.

Improvements

• Core
  • Added handling when a user only provide's Taliyah's prefix, giving help if the user wants to learn more about her available functionality.
  • Moved the various parsing utilities to their own file, to reduce the amount of clutter in the other utility files.
• Commands
  • channel:
    • Improved the parsing of channels. It now recognizes strings, channel mentions, and generic search strings. This does NOT support trying to search for channels by separating with a space, due to Discord channel names not supporting spaces.
    • Added the channel's category name, if available.
  • changelog: Improved the embed's title to be more informative. Note: Not yet relevant, as this command has not yet been re-implemented in the async rewrite.
  • guild:
    • Roles are now sorted by their position in the Server Settings' Roles list.
    • Added support for displaying the guild's System Channel used for sending Discord system messages.
  • lastfm:
    • Added ability to view a user's top artists.
    • Moved to embed fields, improving the internal code handling of the command, as well as improving the actual design of how the command is structured.
  • spotify:
    • All Commands:
      • Moved to using embed fields.
    • album
      • Moved away from the embed author instead of using the specific embed fields for title, url, and thumbnail.
      • Taliyah now displays the total length of the album specified.
  • profile: Implemented the ability to set gender, location, and pronouns.
• Database
  • Improved the way fields in the profile table are retrieved. The functions that were present in the database utility file were entirely removed and replaced with a single get_profile_fields function, that accesses the respective column via a field function parameter. This reduced a lot of boilerplate that was present, and allows me to have one function to retrieve all fields.
• Event Handler
  • Added handling of the Guild Create Discord event. This allows us to set a server's default prefix when Taliyah joins a guild / server that she does not yet recognize. If Taliyah already recognizes a server, the insertion query is ignored.

Bug Fixes

• Dispatcher
  • Fixed a bug where if more arguments were supplied to a command supporting min_args and max_args than allowed, Taliyah would log a Dispatcher error on top of the messages already being sent to the channel that initialized the given command. This is now fixed, and Taliyah properly responds when more or less arguments that are required are fed to a command.

Removed Functionality

• Commands
  • Extra
    • The weather command has been removed, due to the impending shutdown of the Dark Sky API in March 2023, due to Apple having acquired Dark Sky in 2019. The command may be re-added eventually, if I can find a suitable weather API to replace Dark Sky, but for now, the command has been removed.
  • Info
    • profile: Removed all social fields except for the Last.fm field. I didn't entirely understand why I bothered implementing those fields to begin with, but they have been completely removed. New profile fields may be added again eventually, but for now I am happy with there only being fields for name, pronouns, etc.
  • Utilities
    • prefix:
      • Removed the get subcommand in favor of just showing the set prefix when a user just runs the prefix command. This cleans up a bit of code, and improves general functionality of the command instead of just showing an "Invalid Subcommand" message when no subcommand is invoked. NOTE: Not implemented.
    • Removed version, in favor of about. about doesn't display as much information about Taliyah's version information that version did, however the about command provides more meaningful information.

0.5.0 Boron - February 9, 2020

Fairly significant update, adding various commands, and vastly improving most other commands. This also includes various bug fixes, but they are squeezed together as part of the various improvements to commands.

New Features

• General
  • Added a GitHub Actions pipeline that runs on every commit that runs cargo check and several Rust formatting utilities like clippy and rustfmt to help make sure that the project is adhering to normal Rust code styling.
  • Added this changelog!
  • Updated several dependencies.
• Commands
  • Added changelog command. Polls the GitHub GraphQL API for recent commits to Taliyah's master branch.
  • Added source command. Sends a message containing a URL to the bot's source code.
  • github
    • Added repository command. Retrieves information about a GitHub repository.
    • Added user command. Retrieves information about a GitHub user.
  • info
    • Added role command. Retrieves information on a specified guild role.
    • Added channel command. Retrieves information about a specified guild channel or category.
  • profile
    • Added Twitch, PlayStation and Xbox user ID support. PlayStation and Xbox user IDs however do not currently link to anything as Microsoft and Sony do not allow profiles to be publicly displayed, and as such this information will be purely for lookup purposes.
  • reddit
    • Added user command. Gets information about a specified Reddit user.
    • Added subreddit command. Gets information about a specified subreddit on Reddit.
  • spotify
    • Added credits command. Shows the credits for a specified track.
    • Added artist command. Retrieves information about a Spotify artist.
    • Added status command. Retrieves the message author's, or a specified users' Spotify status.
  • user
    • Added rich presence support for Spotify and Visual Studio Code.
  • voice:
    • Added a basic subset of voice commands. This includes play, leave, and join.They're not that fully featured due to various issues with serenity's voice implementation, however there are plans on the serenity developer's roadmap to improve / revamp serenity's voice subsystem, so hopefully once it's revamped, this command set will get an overhaul.

Improvements

• Commands
  • guild
    • Improved the way str's are handled, reducing a lot of the to_owned() cloning that was previously done.
    • Added support for viewing the guild's multi-factor authentication level.
    • Added support for displaying "x users, x bots" for Members.
    • Dropped the filtering of channel categories for the channel count and instead provided an additional filtering type for categories that shows up next to the total amount of channels.
  • lastfm
    • Improved the way Last.fm errors are handled, and more errors are now handled, such as OperationFailed.
    • Removed unnecessary logging. Specifically, Taliyah no longer warns when no track attributes could be found for a track, as that is expected behavior for Last.fm tracks that aren't currently being scrobbled.
    • Improved the way album artwork is retrieved, moving entirely to the Spotify Web API for album artwork retrieval instead of going through both the Last.fm and Spotify Web API endpoints.
  • profile
    • Improved the way users are parsed, and Discord user IDs are now supported when looking up a profile.
  • spotify
    • Cleaned up the general structure of the Spotify command system.
  • user
    • Roles are now @'d. They now show up in their beautuiful colored form.
    • Added a Profile field. This just @'s a user's handle silently and allows you to view the user's profile just by clicking the name. Note: This does not work on mobile due to the way Discord handles the embed system on mobile devices.
    • Completely revamped how Online Statuses are handled. This entails various enhancements such as being able to view a user's client status, and see any and all activities the user is doing with the exception of being able to view Custom Statuses, which are not supported due to how they would look with any other activities. At some point, I may look into adding support for Custom Statuses, depending on if I can find a solution I like with regards to this.
    • Just like with profile, user parsing has been improved.