Update

July 2nd, 2024

The team has been hard at work on Reto since the making of this post. While we’re proud to say the bot is almost feature complete, unfortunately we’ve missed our internal deadline for the official Open Beta release.

While feasible, we feel it’d be irresponsible to launch in an untested state, and there’s still some lingering bugs to iron out before we release it to the wilds. We hope you stay tuned for more news on Reto’s Open Beta release - we’ll try not to keep you waiting for much longer!

The rest of the article below is left unchanged.

You might’ve heard of a complete makeover of Reto, the Discord karma bot, being in the works for a while. This update is codenamed Retool, and it’s been in the works since 2021 - that’s almost three years!

It is essentially an entire new bot, after all. The original Reto, now codenamed Reto Legacy, had been born out of a bot-making competition around 2018, and its code was haphazardly made and not meant to withstand the amounts of people that soon started to use it. After Discord decided to phase out text-commands with their new and fancy Slash Commands system, the inner workings of Reto were starting to show their age: for it to implement Slash Commands at all, it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Of course, that’s not all that’s happened in those three years of development. The scope of the project grew to a highly customizable Karma bot, where you could create your very own actions after reacting to a message. Code completely cleaned up, ways of doing certain things retooled or rethought entirely - the new edition of Reto is both familiar and unrecognisable from what it was years ago.

However, there was another problem looming in the horizon: Reto Legacy stopped working.

Not reliably, at least. The server load was way too big to support the amount of people it had to handle, and a replacement was needed fast. Retool wasn’t exactly done, however, and reworking Legacy into being usable once again would be a herculean task. For months, people were left waiting for the new version of the bot to launch to solve their server-troubles…

And now that most of the bot is fully stable, that date is finally coming.

Retool is coming in Early 2024

We can finally confirm that Retool, Reto’s biggest update yet, will launch no later than July 1st, 2024. That’s our final deadline, and we plan to stick with it.

While we can’t provide a final release date just yet, you can sign up to our Waitlist right here! We’ll only e-mail you once the final release date is revealed, and once the bot is out for you to try.

Join the waitlist

Previously, we’ve teased that Retool Open Beta and Reto Legacy (the current version) will live on Discord as separate bots until the former is ready for everyone. While this was our original intention, we’ve decided that it’d be better to let people use the more upgraded (if unstable and feature-lacking) version, than one that barely works. If you already have Reto on your server, you’ll immediately get access to Retool day-of, with all your Karma totals accounted for. No updating required!

What’s new in Reto?

You’ll be hearing more of what’s new on Reto through this blog, our Twitter and our Discord server in the coming weeks and months. Here’s all we have revealed so far, though:

• 🤖 Slash Commands: Interact with the entirety of Reto using /, and enjoy an automatic command list, options menu, and all the niceties that come with modern Discord apps.
• 🚀 Blazing fast: Reto reacts to your commands and reactions extremely quickly, thanks to its new database system. What used to take thirty seconds now takes a fraction of a second.
• 💞 Reactables: The new umbrella name for Plus, Minus and Pin (previously 10), along with any others you create! Reactables are sets of actions that trigger when you react with an emoji, and there’s a ton of work done under the hood to make sure they’re customizable to an insane degree.
  • 🥰 Emoji improvements: You can now use more than one emoji for each Reactable - and most importantly, you can now use default Discord emoji to trigger them, like the vanilla ♥ Heart emoji! The future is now.
  • 🌟 A fair playing ground: Curators had 10x the voting power than regular users with the 10 Reactable. Now, pin awards no Karma, to make sure leaderboards aren’t artificially inflated with the voting power of mods. (You can change this on your Reactable settings to go to the way it was before!)
• 📌 Powered-up Pins: You can now share up to four images per Pinned Message! And hey, there’s also a nifty button to jump to the original message, too.
  • 🔄 Auto-updating Pins: Every Pinned Message now has a karma total that updates as people react to it. If the original author removes or deletes the message, you’ll see that update in real time, too!
  • 🔗 Chain Messages: If you ever thought a message was hilarious but its humor came from the context it was posted, you can now bottle all that up and add it to the message you want to pin! Right click on the message, go to Apps > Select this message, then right click on another and use Apps > Add to chain.
• 🌠 Leaner, cleaner Setup: Instead of a one-and-done command, Setup is now a wizard! Click on buttons and dropdowns to customize Reto your way - no more trudging through an archaic command list to find out how to enable a certain feature.
  • 📚 Guide: Use the /guide command and Reto will list out what each Reactable does, and other commands to get your new server members started!
• 📈 Improvements to your stats: Profile and Leaderboards have been redesigned from scratch to look far nicer, with a bigger focus on your server’s custom Karma (instead of the Global Karma that used to be the default).
  • 🥇 More elaborate Badges: Now you’ll know why you’ve got those icons in your profile - wear them loud and proud!
• 🧳 Importing data from Reto Legacy - keep the same Karma totals and settings you had, no migration required!
• ✨ And more! There’s improvements to Autoreact (previously Autovote) and plenty more features to come!

What’s left?

But, of course, we’ve still got some stuff left to go before Reto is ready for primetime! In order of importance:

• 🔐 Privacy controls: Reto Legacy includes a whole suite of data exporting and deletion tools so that you control your data and how it’s shared. It’s of utmost priority that all those tools are available at launch!
• ⭐ Starboard Mode (also known as Democracy Mode): In Reto Legacy, only people with the @Curator role could pin messages. If this optional mode is enabled, anyone in this server will be able to pin posts as long as a certain Karma threshold is met - very similarly to how other Starboard bots function!
• 🌐 Discover: We’re phasing out Post Leaderboards with Retool to introduce a new way of exploring past messages. Using Discover, you’ll be able to go through top-voted messages and Plus or Minus them after-the-fact. You can also sort by Score (similarly to Post Leaderboards), Date or see messages from other, public servers!
• 📰 Broadcast and the Newsletter: Mods running /setup will now be able to subscribe to the Reto Newsletter and see the latest updates of the bot on their Best Of channel (don’t worry, it’ll be once every couple months or so). While this was implemented in Reto Legacy’s Holiday Update, all that work needs to be brought over to Retool.
• ✨ Improvements to the Setup process and Guide, Chain messages, Leaderboards and more!

These should all be out by launch day! While the Open Beta period is ongoing, we’ll be releasing even more features:

• 🎨 Customization: From the beginning, we’ve made sure Retool is completely customizable. While there’ll be limited personalization tools at launch, by the end of the Open Beta you’ll be able to personalize plenty of new features, triggers and actions for your Reactables… or even create your own!
• 🥇 Badges: We’d love for these to appear in more places! Eventually, you’ll be able to enable or disable certain Badges in your profile, and see them in places like Leaderboards and Discover.
• 🙊 Secrets! We can’t tell you everything we’re cooking up, now can we?

In other news…

We just launched the new official website for Reto - hey, you’re looking at it right now!

Here’s where you’ll now find the details on Reto happenings. To stay in touch, head on over to our Twitter or Discord server - we’ll let you know when there’s something new to read here!