End of Year 2025

Another year has come and gone, and AutoMod perseveres. It has been a big year for the wider Stoat platform, what with the rebrand, launching of new apps, and assorted new features.

I’d have liked to have done more work on the bot over the year, but commitments and circumstances out of my control limited me somewhat. That isn’t to say nothing got done though, and the bot is now in a much better place than it was at 2024’s conclusion.

Reviewing Changes

The year started with a reintroduction of the purge command, which had previously been removed due to a breakage upstream in Stoat itself.

In February, I launched this site complete with a full set of documentation. Several commands, including the logging command, got full overhauls. We also hit 100K users in AutoMod’s cache!

In May, the role command was added, the filter functionality got some significant fixes, and the ability to bulk add items to and remove items from the filter was added. May also brought about AutoFeeds, a syndication feed bot that supports RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds, which I proceeded to test off and on throughout the year.

In July, I launched this AutoMod blog, hugely improved the infraction command’s output, and overhauled the nickname command.

In August, AutoMod’s cache hit a significant 150K users.

Throughout the year, I also engaged in some ongoing efforts that weren’t user-facing. Many commands were modified to make them more accessible to screen-readers, and more intuitive for all users. The bot’s architecture was tweaked to make it easier to develop and host, and Redis was switched out in favour of Valkey following Redis’ change in licence.

These changes brought about significantly improved stability, and there were plenty of tiny alterations made to fix niggles and address upstream changes.

A lot of these changes went a long way in terms of making the project reasonable to work on and set a good foundation for the upcoming year.

Financials

This year, AutoMod cost $150.15 AUD to run. This number is entirely hosting costs and doesn’t factor in my time or labour, nor the registration fees for the domain ‘vale.rocks’. Throughout the year, the hosting costs slowly trended upwards as a result of fluctuations in the exchange rate between the Australian Dollar and the Euro, which is the currency chosen by the server host Hetzner.

Google Finance Australian Dollar to Euro exchange rate:

In return, I received a total of $54.40 AUD in AutoMod-directed user support, which means that AutoMod cost me $95.75 AUD out of pocket to run this year. If you’re so inclined and in a position to do so, your financial support would be much appreciated.

Looking Forward

As it stands at present, AutoMod is protecting almost 6,000 servers containing some 65,000 channels and over 179,000 users. At the start of the year, these numbers were roughly 4,600 servers containing 47,000 channels and less than 100,000 users. This year has been a boom for AutoMod, and the current counts are pretty significant. I’m grateful for everyone who uses and trusts AutoMod to protect their communities.

Back in August, I created a project roadmap for AutoMod to enable more focused, deliberate development and to ensure that efforts align with community expectations. I’ll be adhering to this roadmap into 2026 and updating it with further items as they occur to me or are requested. Beyond the roadmap, I also intend to get AutoFeeds into a full production state ready for general usage.

I look forward to continuing my efforts to refine the bot, adding the features that you request, and making Stoat a more stable and secure place for all.