This was certainly a year of global challenges unlike any other in our lifetime but we hope this holiday season proved to be an uplifting and joyful time for you and your loved ones.
A lot of the things we worked on this year has been behind the scenes; as our work has expanded into Kik territory, this year provided us with many unprecedented challenges and many fires that needed to be put out - however, it has also given us an unprecedented opportunity to make this platform experience an optimal one for its users.
As a recap, these are some of the things we worked on in 2020:
- New feature, "disallow silent".- Created a Covid-19 tracker / chart in Rage.
- Improved overall stability of the bots; this includes an overhaul of the backup systems and various bug fixes.
- MediaLab removed captchas from Ragebot and the bots no longer get banned.
- Status page changes which includes removal of outdated statuses such as "captcha", "banned", rephrased some things for clarification and began only displaying active groups in the group count.
- Implemented exploit detection and created an app and web-based unbricker, along with some Kik patches to fix the issues.
- Besides working on Ragebot, we've started helping with the development of Kik itself.
- "Thot" (spam) bot detection updates. Multiple times every single week, the cat & mouse chase never ends.
- New overhaul of Rage, which is still on-going, along with other things we cannot share with you just yet.
As you can see 2020 has been a busy one for us. A major area of concern has also been "thot" (spam) bots.
So many Kik users have shared their frustration with these bots and we want you to know that your voices are being heard.
The bots have been exceptionally relentless and our targeted detection updates have been consistently countered, sometimes within mere hours. They do this in a number of ways including altering their phrasing or increasing the amount of time between entrance and actually generating the spam in-group.
Despite the frustration this is causing we remain committed to improving the detection algorithms necessary to keep Kik as spam bot free as possible.
One feature we’ve developed this year aims to help with this in two ways: by slowing down the bot sprees and by pushing back against people who join groups with no intention of participating socially. You can read more about this feature here.
As always we want to thank you wholeheartedly for your continued feedback, support and engagement.
A special note of thanks goes out to our loyal user-base and Premium Rage subscribers as well as to those rock stars who helped us spread the word anytime it was needed - you guys are awesome!
To our dedicated Support Team and diligent Beta Testers we have this to say - there is no Rage Team without people like you and we are so grateful to have had you on our side in this journey. Thank you!
We send you all of you good wishes and positive energy for the New Year and hopes that it is a happy and peaceful one. We look forward to keeping you updated as we continue on our mission to constantly improve both Ragebot & Kik.
So let’s all stay safe out there, take care of ourselves and one another and make 2021 an awesome year!
Best,
The Rage Team