History of Ragebot
Startup
Ragebot started with a guy named Rayg who saw a need for a utility bot for Kik groups.
His vision was something easy to maintain that could get rid of the annoying thot bots automatically, along with other tedious administrative work that could otherwise be automated.
He found out that there already existed an open-source API that he could use for the purpose, but the API was very rough around the edges.
He had to spend a bunch of time improving things before it was usable.
So he got to work on Ragebot in the start of January 2018 and got the bot working.
Rayg went on and added a couple more convenience features to Ragebot.
Other people saw the bot and they wanted it as well, so Rayg implemented the friending feature so that anyone could freely add it to their groups.
The hobby project started becoming more and more popular, more features got added and Ragebot started coming together.
During the next half year, the bot was growing slowly but steadily.
At the time, the only way to get support for Ragebot was PMing Rayg.
This was not very efficient, so somewhere between May and June he created the Support Group, #rage_bot.
Around this time, the "usage" command was also implemented.
Because more people were using Ragebot, it meant that more captchas would appear - which was problematic because Rayg had to do them all on his PC and that meant a lot of waiting time where the bot wasn't working.
So he developed the Doctor app and crowdsourced it so many people from the support group and elsewhere helped do the captchas.
The app broke at some point, so he had to develop a new version of it (version 2).
In the beginning of August, Rayg met Nyxie and she joined the support group.
They grew quite close on a personal level, and they shared their passion for the bot.
Nyxie got very involved with the project, but she estimated that it would be too much work for just two people.
The bot grew in such a speed that neither of them had imagined.
They needed a team.
Nyxie begun looking for people who could become a part of the Support Team.
She watched for people with certain traits; the type of people who'd make many inquiries and at the same time actively help other users with the bot.
It didn't take her long to find a handful of people that seemed to be what she was looking for - but she needed some more time to determine if they were the right choice.
She kept in touch with the people over PMs to get to know them better and to update them about Ragebot things.
Development
At the time, we had already been through several Ragebots - starting with Rage_bot, then Rage_bot2, Rage_bot3, Rage_bot5, Rage_bot7 and then Rage_bot12.
The bots would get banned frequently, and when that happened, the bots would leave all groups and in most cases they would lose all the data (rules, substitutions, settings, etc.,) in the process.
Everything would have to be set up from scratch with a new bot.
At the start of August we were using Rage_bot5 - but that account got banned 8th of August so Rayg set the next one up (Rage_bot7).
Unfortunately Rage_bot7 got banned less than 24 hours later on the 9th of August, so Rage_bot12 was then put in use.
Ragebot was now on its 12th iteration, it inhabited several thousand groups and things were going smoothly.
The project as a whole seemed to be growing pretty fast, but it didn't take long before it was realised that the bot could only handle about 5000-6000 groups before it started lagging horribly and captchas appeared constantly despite many people helping out through the crowdsourced Doctor app.
There would be double, even triple captchas appearing one after another every few minutes, plus a whole bunch of temporary bans.
Something needed to change, and fast.
Around the 16th of August, Rayg got an idea - but it would take time.
The idea was that if the burden of all the groups could be spread out between many accounts, it would no longer overburden one single account.
But it would require a lot of programming to convert to a distributed system that could share the database and at the same time was scalable.
We would start out with 20 accounts, and then create more when it became necessary.
All the accounts would need to be linked to the Doctor app, too.
Rayg worked hard, and Project_Rage was brought into the world.
On the 20th of August, Rayg and Nyxie formed the first Support Team (they named it Insiders Team) from the people that Nyxie had selected and filled them in on the Project Rage plan.
In the meantime, she also made a much needed new graphical logo for Rage and set about changing the support group - it was quite chaotic at the time - into a more well organized technical support group for Ragebot.
The brand new support team was just getting off the ground.
A few days later by the 22nd of August, the first couple of groups started using the new Project_Rage.
After a bit of testing, we disabled many commands on Rage_bot12.
When people triggered the commands we had disabled, Rage would tell people that Rage_bot12 was getting discontinued and to say "upgrade" in the group chat to swap to the new system.
Saying "upgrade" would make Rage_bot12 invite one of the new Project_Rage accounts, promote it to admin and then leave the group chat.
It didn't take long before almost all groups had swapped to the new system.
The new system was much more stable, and there was no longer an issue with lag and constant captchas.
As the bots still got banned frequently and the growth was pretty persistent, we would continue to add more bots to the system.
Eventually, the growth meant we had to buy more servers, and what initially was just a small hobby project started becoming a financial liability.
So by the 2nd of September, we opened up for donations to help cover the server fees. The donations helped a bunch.
We launched our website on the 7th of September - at the time it mainly had the FAQ along with a list of the Ragebot commands, a page for the Doctor and a donation page.
Later on we added a lot more to the site - including stats of the bots (status) that would get updated daily. This meant that now everyone could follow the growth of Ragebot.
We also at some point added a News section, and the site still regularly gets expanded.
Because the issue with bots getting banned persisted, and people were getting increasingly frustrated with losing their data every time, Rayg started working on an automated backup system.
Every noon CET it would automatically backup all data - so that if a Ragebot got banned, a group could simply invite in a new Ragebot and import the old data.
It took a lot of work, but it was finally finished on the 8th of October. The "backup" command for manual backups was added a bit later on.
There was a lot of glitches at first, and over time it required a lot of tinkering. But for the most part, it worked really well.
People were very happy with no longer losing their data.
New times
Meanwhile, the Insiders team needed to be trusted with many things concerning the new changes and we had refined the criteria for being a part of the team.
But by November 13th, there had already been many issues. Due to internal drama, breach of trust and conflict of interest, the team was dismantled.
Despite this, a few of the people from the dismantled support team decided to stick around and continue to help users in the support group.
Because of their motivation to continue helping even after the team was dismantled, we later decided to get them involved again.
From the dust, a new and better Insiders team emerged.
Though they quickly realized that an expansion of the team was much needed.
Not all time zones were covered and we had gone from being 9 people to suddenly only being 5.
But at the same time we were hesitant with recruiting more people due to the breach of trust we had previously experienced.
So we decided to create a second tier of support that we named "Helpers Team".
By the 22nd of November, we recruited two people for the Helpers team - and despite our original hesitation, they quickly became a part of the family.
It was around this time that Nyxie established a new and nearly automated support group system through substitution trees.
Through substitutions a full help menu was created where people could troubleshoot and find answers through certain triggers and thus make most of the process for support automated.
It made it much easier for the support teams to do their jobs.
The teams proved invaluable and we all became a tight knit family.
Over a couple of months the donations had become fewer and in January we reached the conclusion that the donations we received could no longer cover the expenses of Rage.
We needed a viable solution if we were to continue Rage, and we didn't want to start placing advertisements, that was out of the question.
We considered posting news about requiring more donations to cover the server costs, but that didn't seem like a great solution either.
Perhaps we would have to eventually shut down Rage, but that would mean a lot of unhappy users, and we didn't want to let people down.
In the meantime people had requested having their own bot with a custom name and profile picture, along with more specific features.
As those features weren’t as fit for use for the free bot as they would for a special version, due to higher resource cost and complexity, we decided to offer a premium version of the bot.
This idea meant that we could fill the demand of people who wanted specific, more resource intensive feature, while solving our own financial issues to keep the free bot running.
So we decided to build on the idea that we would create Premium Ragebots and offer them to people at a certain monthly fee.
One of the problems was that if we only had a few people who purchased Premium bots, it would mean that we wouldn't have as big of an audience to help us find glitches in the new features - and we didn't want to provide Premium users with a glitchy product.
So we decided it would be a wise idea to create a Beta Testers Team.
Nyxie set out to find people that could do well as beta testers - it would be a win-win situation.
They would help us test features and find glitches - in return, they would get access to the Premium features for free.
She recruited enough people to create a medium sized team, and filled them in on the rules, conditions and disclaimers she had set up for the Beta.
By the 25th of January, we reached a new milestone. Ragebot was now in 100k groups. In just 5 months, we had gone from 3k groups to 100k.
As the development and improvement of Premium bots progressed thanks to our diligent Beta Testers, the first Premium bot was offered on the 13th of February.
Over time as we added more Premium features, we got contacted by many people wanting to purchase it (despite the fact that it was still in soft launch), and some who'd be interested after the official launch. It was spreading purely by word of mouth (or should we say, tap of fingers) as we did not yet have any information about Premium on our site.
Throughout time, there were also held numerous events to entertain users.
For the 1st of April, we pulled a prank on people - we had prepared a script so that there was a certain chance that when someone triggered a specific substitution, Rage would give another (wrong) substitutions response in return.
And that chance would slowly increase as the day progressed.
Some found it very funny, others were quite confused about why Rage all of a sudden was "glitching", and some were offended.
But overall, the prank was well received and was all in good fun. The script was removed the day after.
During Easter, we had a little Easter Egg hunt where a winner was drawn and given a month of Premium Rage for free.
Since mid-February, a majority of the development was focused on creating more Premium features, although we still added new features and improvements to the free bots.
By 11th of April, we hit the 200k milestone.
Future
This summarized the first 1½ year of Ragebots history, even though many details had to be left out (it would turn into a book if everything was included).
It has been an amazing journey, and we are very excited for what the future has in store for us.
The website is still growing, Ragebot is still being invited into more and more groups and the team that you see here today keeps it going.
We will continue to develop and improve Ragebot.
Thank you to everyone who has supported and helped us throughout time. :-)