The future of Craig
Added 2021-12-05 16:20:02 +0000 UTCIf you're following the Craig support server's announcements, you know that I am trying to find a replacement maintainer for Craig. There are three possible ways this can go:
(1) The ideal is that I will find a new maintainer, and for patrons and users, nothing will change except perhaps that some long-standing issues will be fixed. If this happens, the Patreon will be moved over to that new maintainer. This could theoretically happen as soon as January, but that's unlikely. If this scenario occurs, it will have to happen before April.
(2) Craig may be left volunteer-maintained but leaderless. If I can't find someone to actually replace me, I will accept submissions to Craig's source code to keep up with Discord's constant issues, but will not maintain it myself. If this is the case, I will make it abundantly clear on the Patreon page that this is purely to pay for the servers, as I am not maintaining Craig, and that Craig is at considerable risk. If Discord breaks something and no one steps up to fix it, Craig will simply cease functioning. If the Patreon dips below the cost of running the server for, say, six months in a row, I will cancel it and Craig. (2) is an extremely tenuous situation, and it's near certain that Craig would cease functioning within two years. (2) could, in theory, be a stopgap to (1) if no one volunteers to take over before April.
(3) If I can't find a replacement maintainer and nobody voluntarily helps with the immediate issues that need to be addressed by April, Craig will cease functioning at that point due to changes made by Discord. If this is the scenario, I will extend my offer of transfer to Ennuicastr in some way I have not yet decided, and then cancel the Patreon.
Maintaining Craig has become unhealthy for me, and all of the problems stem from Discord, Discord's busted bot API, and Discord's toxic userbase. I didn't intend for writing Ennuicastr to coincide with abandoning Craig, but writing Ennuicastr brought into sharp focus the fact that everything annoying about Craig is Discord, Discord, Discord.
My decision to step down as Craig's maintainer is final. This is not a question of money, it's a question of mental health.
Comments
Hey, just popping in to say thanks for all the work you’ve done. I’m sad to hear that Craig might be coming to an end, but I’m wishing you the best, mate. Look out for yourself, and I’m glad you’re trying to take care of you.
Guillermo
2021-12-17 21:28:21 +0000 UTCAs a new patron, this is a real bummer, but entirely understandable. I coordinate online communities in the digital space, and the demands of an engaged community can be incredibly draining, even for the most well-behaved community. I can also relate to having a dependency on a pirce of software that is unstable, developed by an organization that isn't paying attention to how their development decisions impact your project. I wish I could have been supporting the Patreon sooner, not for any other reason than Craig is such a useful thing that I would like to know that more of my money was ending up in your pocket.
troy hewitt
2021-12-14 11:58:06 +0000 UTCIt's totally understandable but still sucky for the users. I use Craig weekly and another friend does as well (we're both in each others). I don't know of another way to record an RPG session. We tried ennuicastr but none of us have the upload bandwidth for it and it we had trouble muting background noise as it's not attached to discord. I love ennuicastr in theory though. Just need everyone on better internet and manual ability to mute.
Dwight
2021-12-07 19:57:26 +0000 UTCgoddamnit discord get your shit together - well I guess I will be checking out ennuicastr soon enough
Ross Payton
2021-12-05 19:06:02 +0000 UTCI'd be sad to see it go, but I understand if the project maintenance has become unreasonable. As a YouTube channel with multiple members, when all of us record together Craig (and Alister) were the ideal solution to create backup recordings in case anything happened to anyone's original footage. And it has saved us many times over the years. ♥️ -Ash
Stumpt
2021-12-05 17:04:26 +0000 UTC
