My name is Zeryther and I am the creator, developer and maintainer of the Yoshino Chat Bot. I have not given an update on this project in a long time and there seem to be many people wondering about the status of this project, so I have decided to write this blog post to give a final update on its status.

What is the Yoshino Chat Bot?

The Yoshino Chat Bot is a project I started back in December 2017 as a Twitch bot for my favorite streamer at the time. I soon realized I really enjoyed creating a chat bot of this sort and focused most of my time on it. In January 2018 I released a Discord version of the bot as well. I spent most of my time in 2018 developing this bot and managing it’s community which was a lot of fun. The bot started to grow a lot and even reached 5,000 joined Discord servers and 200 joined Twitch channels at a certain point, being one of my most successful projects at the time.

For a while a YouTube version was live as well, however managing this one was not nearly as much fun. YouTube’s live chat feature was very limited and I was unable to include any substantial features of the other versions. Additionally it was heavily rate-limited which gave me a lot of headaches. At some point in 2019 YouTube even shut down Yoshino’s API access entirely, without ever giving me a reason for it. This was one of the reasons the Discord version has always been the biggest focus.

What happened to the updates?

Shortly after releasing version 1.7 in 2018 I decided a major revamp was necessary. I was dissatisfied with the code structure and performance, so I decided to re-create the bot from scratch in a version 2.0. In January 2019 I started my first full-time job which prevented me from working on this project too much. This and poor management of the project led to the version 2.0 update being cancelled eventually. I have not worked on Yoshino since then beyond small patches to the production version.

However those small patches were not enough either. The production version of Yoshino was suffering from a lot of crashes and bugs which were too hard to fix because I was missing the time and the code structure was too confusing and poor and an entire re-code would have taken even more time. Eventually the user numbers started decreasing and I stopped managing the bot too much altogether. Multiple Discord bot-lists have delisted the project by now as well.

What about transferring the project to someone else?

There was a time where I considered selling the project to a company which I am not going to name here. This idea was shelved pretty quickly as my communication with that company was very poor and I never received quick nor concise answers. I don’t like the idea of transferring the project to simply anybody either. As I mentioned before it would be easier to re-create the bot.

What now?

I deeply regret this decision because I really liked my time with the project but the Yoshino Chat Bot will be shutdown permanently after the publication of this blog post. The project is stuck where it is now and there is no time for me to manage it anymore, nor do I think it is really worth it.

I am now self-employed with my own company Gigadrive and I would love to start a community management bot project at some point but right now it’s just too big of a project with too little resources available.

I would like to thank everybody who has been involved in this project over the years, as well as all of the people who were still supporting it to the end. I hope you understand why I had to make this decision.

Legacy of the project

The chat bot and web dashboard will be shutdown and are no longer available for usage. There are many other great Discord bots out there, I am sure you will be able to find a great alternative!

The support Discord server will stay available for now. It is largely unmoderated and unmanaged but it’s still the only way to connect to a lot of people I started calling my friends and deleting it would feel like removing all the history of the project.

For now, the software code will not be made public. While it is owned by myself only, I do not think it would serve much purpose. The only versions available are the messy version 1.7 and the unfinished version 2.0. I have seen some people ask me to make it open-source to help them with their own projects but I don’t think you would gain much from this.

If you want to keep up with me or my other projects I would be very happy if you follow me on Twitter. I am still working on a lot of stuff and maybe I will find the time to create a new chat bot at some point.

Thank you for reading this pretty long article and your continued support.

Zeryther
Creator of the Yoshino Chat Bot