Sooo Patreon banned my bot. Probably just done automatically and not out of malice, but still, she’s banned and I can’t have her perform tasks for me using that site.
See, normally services like Patreon have what’s called an application programing interface(API). It’s protocols for interacting with the outer layer of some other software. A service like Patreon would usually have an API that gives you some secret keys, similar to a password, that lets you communicate with its servers to get information you should be privy to and to perform functions you could do as a user, but via your own software communicating through those protocols.
Yeah well, Patreon doesn’t have that. 6 months ago, after I first made my bot, they did introduce a basic one, but it doesn’t do nearly as much as my bot does(…did), so it isn’t usable for me and LEWD.
I can’t, for example:
1. See past confirmed payments, only the current pledges. This means if someone paid me money, but aren’t currently pledging, then later link their account, well I just can’t see them in Patreons API at all and see that they have a confirmed payment. Woops?
2. There’s no payment total, only what their current pledge is (whether it went through or not). This means I can’t credit people for all they’ve contributed with the Patreon API like my bot has been doing with the credit total on people’s account.
There’s some other things, but those are the show-stopping issues that make it unusable as far as doing what my bot did to give people access to the game and to credit them appropriately.
Because my bot couldn’t get any information on my patrons, she just set the pledges to 0… I went ahead and set these all to “5” for now so all that had a $5 pledge or more go through previously can still play on the test server, at least.
I’m not sure how long this went on. I was just notified of pledge amounts not showing up right on patron’s accounts a day and a half ago. So it does seem that the ones that paid last month might not be affected, but obviously this sucks for the new ones.
I’m not sure on an ETA on when/how this will be resolved. I messaged Patreon’s support, and the easy and quick resolution would be for them to whitelist my bot.
If they don’t and I have to wait for them to improve their API… I have no clue how long that’ll take since it took 2 years for them to introduce the very basic API they have now. But who knows.
If neither of those happen… I might end up having to finish up getting my own payment services finished sooner rather than later. This is a pain because I wanted to, you know, focus on actually making the game right now. I also probably wanted to stick with Patreon even after I added other ways to contribute because I think it’s convenient for a lot of people to use and they might not want to pay directly to my site, you know?
