This month, I worked really hard to post more pages to my webcomic. It still needs more readers! As usual, I post it on dreamdb.com and on Tapas:



The number of episodes on Tapas is smaller because at one point I decided to bundle pages into one big post, and there are at least 10 pages actually missing from the story. Still, soon there will be a hundred of them and I will be closer to killing Homestuck >:-B

Look at the previews for this month:





GOD IT TAKES SO LONG TO DRAW THIS. Quite a lot of pages are also animated. WHY ARE YOU STILL NOT READING, JEEZ.

Just because the process is tedious and a lot of technical stuff is left behind the scenes, I started posting about it on Patreon.
A couple of friends have kindly subscribed already:



Anyway, here's what I wrote in January:



You should follow me on twitter to get these updates sooner twitter.com/dreamDBmirror
Or even join my Discord discord.gg/8pxhMUp. I post sneak peeks on there while I'm drawing new pages.

Ok, this is real. This is happening. dAhub has closed and there are only two other accounts that I know of who give points:  dailygiveget - a very slow but reliable points account, pointznow - nice dAhub clone, sadly not many people use it. Also, I found that both these accounts don't perform checks for a few critical, in my opinion, things.

So, I decided to make my own bot. Basic things that it will do:

• operate as a points account and respond to commands in comments
• feature donors
• give points for watches and favs

Here's the plan:

I just started, so not much, but I will be updating this journal with new achievements.

 done   planned   working on this   needs fixing 

 Log in
 Give points
 Give llamas
 Fetch latest donations
 Create, read from and write to a user object
 Replace old usernames with new ones
 Count earnings
 Think through "balance" and "refund" commands
 Perform checks for: activity, account age, if widget is installed.
 Send llamas
 Get latest watchers for every donor

API stuff:

 Connect to APIs
 Fetch comments
 Write comments
 Fetch and parse latest faves for earners
 Fetch and parse latest friends - can't do latest, will have to get ALL.
 Update profile with current list of donors
 Send notes to donors
 Calculate "non-watchers" when people comment "done".
 You can send a note to the bot and it'll calculate who watches you without seeing your activity.
 Fix: can't figure out why sometimes access token is refreshed normally and sometimes I have to re-authorize completely due to refresh token being ｄｅａｄ.

 𝙱𝙴𝚃𝙰 𝚃𝙴𝚂𝚃𝚂 𝚆𝙸𝚃𝙷 𝙾𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚁 𝚄𝚂𝙴𝚁𝚂
 𝔾𝕆 𝕃𝕀𝕍𝔼

Updates:

Aug 17.
I've figured out how to login to DA and give points which is the most important step, since without it everything would be impossible. Also, I tried so hard, I busted a blood vessel in my eye.   

Aug 18.
Doing some really basic shit. Coding skeletons for data tables, coding basic functions.
Found a way to send points so they show up in a donation widget.
Started working on processing latest donation info. 

Aug 19.
Successfully connected to API. This is also an important step, because everything that's listed above in "API stuff" section depends on it. There's also a lot of small stuff that needed testing, had to figure out how to automatically refresh access tokens, etc.
 Today things went much slower because I'm constantly being distracted by dog and mum, also bad health stuff happened so I had to sleep for half a day   But I told myself I have to finish at least one thing on the list above every day. So today was still good.

Aug. 20
Ok so I sat down and decided to summarize everything before I start coding complicated things.
And it's not even the full version, goddamit.

*cough* JPEG *cough* but I can't really spill all the secretz, eh?
Anyway, there are some very VERY tricky things I'm stuck with right now. Basically, I'm trying to write down every step of how this bot would work. Currently, I'm trying to work on logic behind finding which favs and watches to pay for when you earn points. Deviantart's insides are structured only up to a certain point and the rest of it is a WIBBLY WOBBLY MESS, so I'm trying to be creative and work with what we've got.

Aug. 21
Started writing down code that processes comments and caches some permanent user data, like IDs. Soon (maybe tomorrow) we can try to ask this bot for llamas, and it will be a llama giving bot instead! lmao

Aug. 22-23
Sorry, no updates for now, as I am still stuck in a stressful and time consuming process of job hunting

Aug. 24
Back to work. The bot can actually send llamas now if you leave a comment on its profile. Also runs some checks and processes user data while it analyses comments. For now I'm running the script manually, so it's not responding on schedule yet.
Also, I'm experiencing some issues with refreshing API access token. Somehow refresh token is always dead. Idk, I'll check this thoroughly tomorrow.
:bademoticon: 
upd: tests with users work perfectly so far  

Aug. 25-26
Writing code which processes notes. Made a really neat feature which lets you note the bot and it will calculate which watchers are absolute bastards and do not watch anything from you, which watchers have turned off your works and journals for some reason. This will help me calculate the same upon processing user activity as a sort of donor protection against point hoarders.
The chunk of code that processes users seems stable, so now I can confidently move onto the most important bit: keeping track of donations and donors. But that's for tomorrow.

Aug. 27 - Sept. 2
Sorry guys, ladies, and other folk. I fell a bit sick and couldn't walk for a couple of days, one of my eyes hurts as well. So, I can't really do anything right now, other than get some rest and recover.

Nov. 14
You may have noticed that the work has been paused. There are multiple reasons for that but I promise, I have not dropped this project.
DeviantArt finally has announced it's new design called Eclipse. So far I haven't seen anyone with that design (it may be only on user-side for now?), but I've joined the waiting queue to test it out. I've noticed a couple of features in it that may significantly improve the inner workings of the bot. But some other features are under question now. Anyway, can't do much but wait for this. In the meantime, maybe I'll finish a few things that don't require profile page usage.

p.s I find it super goddamn ironic that the eclipse site is slow and often loads only half way for me. I hope the devs won't break DeviantArt completely    

Support the development of this project

I will need to pay for hosting when this becomes available to public, since I won't be able to have it running on my computer.
 donate to my ko-fi or  sub on Patreon

My activity feed is behaving weirdly. I posted a few updates before I realized they all disappear.
Please, if you can see those updates in your notifs, can you send me link to them so I could delete a few?
Ok, nvm, I found all the unnecessary ones by hand and deleted them.
Does anyone else have this problem?