Hi everyone! It’s only been three weeks since our last update but I wanted to take the opportunity to write this “break” article to discuss the end of ParksBot. ParksBot was the first project Cory and I created way back in February 2020 and was what resulted in the beginning of Alium Software (formerly Potatoes Development).
It was a Discord bot that showed users the live wait time and status of an attraction at several theme parks including but not limited to Disneyland, Disney World, Disneyland Paris, and Universal Studios. The bot didn’t come out at the best time, considering that theme parks would close for over a year only a few months after its release. However, we stuck with the bot and improved it over time. The bot gained a few parks and had to be rewritten several times due to its information sources (APIs) modifying how it delivered information.
We also suffered for a long time with lousy reliability, as we had hosted on a free site called glitch.com until it began charging for better use. We had switched to a laptop that sat under a wifi router, but the bot would randomly shut down and would require one of us to manually access the computer (either physically or remotely) to reboot it. Its original logo was created by a friend of ours (hi Ben!) by putting together random images online.
Was it perfect? No, but we still carry a lot of sentiment for the bot. If it wasn’t for it, we wouldn’t have been forced to create a team on glitch.com (which we had called Potatoes Development originally as a joke) or drum up the conversation of creating other projects together. We created events, Minecraft servers, games, social media platforms, and basically any project that came to our mind. Just a few months after ParksBot’s making, we created the first prototype of Project Stardust. Almost 20 projects later and 2 years later, we arrive at where we are today.
Today, we delivered server maintenance to the primary Alium testing servers, which also was used to host ParksBot. We had decided several months ago that we would shut it down whenever we did our next major server maintenance. Around a month ago, we realized it was finally time to complete the server maintenance that would end ParksBot.
ParksBot ran its final command today, August 6th. We decided that just like how it started, we would end it with Splash Mountain’s wait time. Thank you to all 61 servers who continued to have Parks Bot in it at the very end. We appreciate your support all these years.
We apologize that the “Progress Report” is less of an actual Progress Report and was rather a last goodbye to ParksBot. Normally, we would not have made an article only three weeks after our last, but we wanted to do a special one for the end of the very first project that we had released under this team.
Project Stardust is moving along smoothly and remains on track. While we’re ending the last thing from the previous era under Potatoes Development, we are extremely excited about what’s coming next. We’ll be beginning internal private alpha testing on Project Stardust within the coming weeks. We’ll be back with more updates on Stardust’s progress next month.
See ya soon!
Aiden
