Goodbye

Hello everyone,

I have to announce that after over 8 years in operation, from the 16th of September 2026, StenBot will be officially taken offline. It has been a fantastic ride and starting from a small one-server bot made by Sam to me taking it on and building it into its own project has been one hell of a ride. I have learnt so much about programming and it allowed me to develop my knowledge on databases, server admin, and networking and without it, I wouldn't have the knowledge I have today.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. StenBot has been running by itself for over a year with zero maintenance completed other than the occasional update of dependencies, however, with the recent change to Discord's privileged intents policies, I can no longer offer StenBot as a good Discord bot to the community. The new rules have meant that instead of a bot needing privileged access to data on Discord at 100 servers, it only requires 10,000 users. Now that sounds like a lot, but StenBot is only in 48 total servers (2 of which are test servers). In order to aid StenBot's growth, I added it to servers made for growing bots and these servers worked by adding the bot in directly and giving them a specific channel to interact with. Sounds great, right? Not when each server has thousands of members - the figures add up quickly. On-top of that, Discord only gives you 90 days to submit an application - which I did. However, because it was rejected, I only have 29 days to submit an appeal and the likelihood of it getting approved is near zero seeing as there are so many other alternative options out there and personally, I do not have the patience or time to fight with Discord over something that doesn't even provide an income when I can focus on the real things in my own adult life that do.

Therefore, after a strong 8 years, I have to announce that StenBot will be turned off and unless Discord change their policies, it will never return.

StenBot's code is hosted publicly online on GitHub - https://github.com/bwhybrow23/StenBot. You're welcome to use this to host the bot yourself or you can use one of the many other alternatives out there.

If you'd like your own Discord bot, I'm open to commission requests via email - [email protected].

If you'd like to support me elsewhere, please visit my website where you can find my car podcast, my photography, and also anything new I decide to endeavour in.

You're more than welcome to keep StenBot in your servers, I will not be deleting the physical bot account nor will I be doing anything stupid with the token - your data is safe with me.

Thank you so much for your continued support with this project and hopefully our paths cross again in the future.

Take care, Ben :)