Happy 13th birthday, Flashii!

Once again, I'm fashionably late, just a week ago! Woohoo! But you know what they say: everyone was thinking about you on your birthday, but I'm thinking of you today! It took me for the semester the start up again to have the peace of mind to sit down and actually write this little post, despite having pretty much all time to do it before then, human beings are funny creatures. It's probably better I postponed it anyhow, since a bunch of things happening in a short time, not the least of which being the active Dutch userbase and I getting to meet nook in person. I put the bar quite high in terms of post content last year... in case this little introductory blerb is the only thing you can be bothered to read, which once again would be your loss, thank you for your continued use of the site! For the rest of you, I will try my best to live up to last year's anniversary post.

As I review the changelog for the past year, there's a few things that stand out to me. The first of which being the fact that there's once again 20+ pages worth of content. That may not sound very significant, especially with the "once again" sprinkled in there, but it reminds me of the period between 2020 and 2023 where I was largely burnt out on working on the website, or really anything relating to programming for a good while there, and I was really worried if that would be it at the time, just sort of maintaining what already exists and hoping it doesn't rot away too hard. Luckily, that state of mind is in the past, but it did instil me with a level of insecurity about getting an appropriatement amount of things done within the year.

One of my bigger projects last year was finally realizing my dream of having Satori's commands be written entirely using Lua scripts. It took a lot of fighting, but it's a thing now! Eventually I'd like to move away from the C# programming language entirely for that project, especially since these overhauls did introduce some amounts of instability... but with the actual commands already being written in something portable, the bar for doing that has been significantly lowered. Along with that rewrite, I'd also like to release some sort of simulator program that should make it easier to contribute to the Lua scripts for Satori without having to connect it to chat and everything. Something for which I'd love to give you an ETA, but that'd shrimply be unrealistic.

Another thing I noticed while looking at the changelog was the fact that there's other names in there again! Something which Satori being switched over to Lua scripts is partially responsible for. Neeko was the first to take advantage of it by adding a bunch of additional aliases for other goofy LLMs in the @gork plugin, followed by solstice doing the same, Sword and ikagi providing Spanish and Dutch equivalents for the French invocation that was already there and reemo wrote a plugin that provides a bunch of commands for converting between various units! snoozin also provided an initial implementation for smarting scrolling in chat, rather than the binary on/off toggle, it tries to automatically toggle depending on whether you've scrolled up or not. It's not perfect but it's probably the best someone could've done with the tools available (the chat client's codebase is still pretty stinky overall) and I greatly appreciate his effort. I want to make it easier and more realistic for people to contribute to the various codebases in meaningful ways, currently it's still pretty non-trivial to get a lot of Flashii related software running, which is a bar I'd like to lower as much as possible, namely through stuff like the aforementioned simulator, but a lot of that requires additional work that I can't really get around to yet.

Looking at last year's anniversary post it also seems like I hadn't fully moved all the Flashii ID stuff into the main website yet at that time, I didn't even realize that's something I checked off the list just last year! On the public API side things are coming along pretty nicely. Nothing is really stable yet and I don't really have a whole lot to share in terms of when which parts of the site will be accessible through it, but what I do have to share is that API application registration will open up sometime this month (February)! Again, there's not a whole lot you can do with it yet, but there is a fairly complete OAuth 2.0/2.1 implementation along with some amount of OpenID Connect, so it can be used as an identity provider, much like what it's already doing for Patchii (a software forge/Git hosting service powered by Forgejo that you can use today) and some of my other side projects. It's not super exciting, but it'll be convenient for those of you writing alternate clients for the chat. Within the realm of service authentication I also have something else planned that will likely make szy (and myself, to be honest) happy, which will drop shortly after application registration is up.

Now to slightly pull back on the nerd shit to something most people will actually be able to see and experience. The thing through which you would be doing the application registration through is the overhauled website Settings page I have in the works, which will be launching sometime this month (an ETA I will actually be able to follow up on). It's structurally based on a cancelled redo I was in the process of doing way back in late 2019 before burning out on things, it significantly cleans things up and should hopefully be nicer to navigate (and to extend, for myself). The initial version of it will just have feature parity with the existing settings page, aside from the app registration stuff, but new options will definitely be added throughout the coming year.

One of those options I have planned being the ability to change your user name colour to whatever you want. I haven't decided yet how this will work in its entirety and how user roles will be communicated in lieu of that, not that they really indicated anything anymore in the first place with some people already having an override, or whether it will be something exclusive to Tenshi/supporters, or what the settings panel for changing it will even look like in the first place, but given the lack of importance moderator status really has in this community I think it'd be nice to open the user name colour up as an additional way to express yourself and to dress up the chat sidebar with more variety.

I will be skipping the "list of things I'd like to get done this year" this time because they rarely actually happen, and for the most part I'd just be carrying forward last year's list verbatim. Though, like I already kind of mentioned, I did cross "Merging things back into the main site" off the list! The rest still has to happen and if "Rewrite the BBcode and Markdown parsing by hand and make it as consistent as possible between the forum and chat" doesn't happen before the 14th anniversary post, I'd like to request for someone to throw me out of a window.

With all that said, I'd like to thank you for reading! I doubt I managed to beat last year's post in terms of length, especially because I cut the checklist thingy, but it's not a competition! I have NOTHING to prove!! Again I'd like to request that if you have any suggestions for what else the news section could feature to fill the section out a little more to please share your ideas! Also that if you have any other sorts of feature requests, or bugs you ran into that you'd like to report, or any other community matter, to please create or contribute to a topic in the appropriate forum section or to let me know directly.

Most of all, thank you for your continued use and support of Flashii! It still wouldn't be here without you :)