Hi all! It's been a while since I've posted updates here. Most updates have been provided over on the CallToAr.ms Discord server, but I wanted to give a more formal monthly update as to where CallToAr.ms is at and where it's headed.
A quick reminder that you can get these monthly high-level updates by subscribing to email updates. You can also support CallToAr.ms development over at Patreon!
Community Support
Communities have always been a key piece of functionality that I've wanted to have. It's the key part that allows for selective invitations to go out to people who you may not even be friends with but still want to engage. This is important for large communities like World of Warcraft guilds or Eve Online corporations. Sometimes you need to summon your team as fast as possible, and community events are one of the ways I want to provide that.
Your community should be customized to fit your community as best as the organizers want, and so one of the ways I plan on monetizing CallToAr.ms is to provide additional options and functionality for communities. Think of this as similar to Discord's Server Boost. Changing the hero banner or the community icon will be in there.
The initial version of communities allows anyone to create a community and anyone to join an existing community. Obviously there are reasons why you might want to create a closed or hidden community, and that is absolutely coming!
Better Notification Support
A lot can happen between your visits to the site, and so I want to build in a way of tracking notifications you may care about. The activity feed is a nice way to see what your friends are up to, but having a single place you can look to for actionable items is important.
The technology side of this is progressing well, but unfortunately a lot of new features are being held up by getting this in. After all, how do you invite people to your community without getting them an invitation? If you're the one receiving the invitation, you want to have a place you can find those invitations if you don't action it immediately.
The hope is to leverage this new notification setup to handle notifications for everything, including the event invitations, friend requests and all that jazz that CallToAr.ms is currently sending out. One notification platform to rule them all!
Live Coding Sessions on Twitch
Okay, I'm cheating a bit here with the March update, but I wanted to squeak this one in.
Today was the first time I did a live coding session of CallToAr.ms broadcasted live on Twitch. It was a great experience, and I'll definitely be doing it again. During the 4.5 hour stream communities got the ability to have their information changed as well as a bunch of the work required to implement community invites. Working live with others watching was a huge motivator to buckle down and focus.
With that in mind, live coding will definitely be happening more often now over on Twitch, probably every 2 weeks on Saturday afternoons, but perhaps every week if I'm feeling up for it. Talking for four hours straight is tiring, but it was a ton of fun.
That's all for this month. We'll see you next month for more updates!
