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Introducing our New Look

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Mark Barrett May 6, 2019, 2:14 p.m.

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Hi everybody,

Long time no speak. For the purpose of this blog post I am going to break it down into a couple of different sections. Anyway, lets get started.

Introduction

So its been quite a while since I wrote a blog post on our site, checking back at the old site it says January 23rd 2019. That was quite a while ago. As some of you may know I have been busy over the last, well, 6-7 months with life as I finish my final year in University. That is why I have not had as much time on my hands to dedicate to this application.

However, as summer approaches, so to does the end of the academic year which means more time to develop. The fact that I am finished University actually means I can work on Donation Store full time. This will be the first time that I am able to do this in quite some time, so thats great!

The New Site

So as you may have already noticed, our site has recieved a major face lift. This was for a couple of different reasons. First off, the old site didn't do our product justice. The features sections wasn't as in depth as we would have liked and it was lacking an overall brand that would link everything together. We feel with the new look everything looks a lot nicer, but it also adds multiple new features on the front end that may not be immediately apparent.

First off is the new support ticket system. A lot of time and effort was placed into this so that it could be concise and use friendly as possible.

Documentation is a new feature that is present on the new site. This will hold guides and tutorials both for clients and developers regarding how to interact with and use Donation Store.

The knowledgebase has gotten a bit of a facelift too. This will house all FAQ questions and questions regarding the Donation Store product.

We have added a new client area that is ready for licenses once the release is ready and we have also added our own custom file distribution area for this release.

The reason why the new site was neccssary was because oringinally we used WHMCS for our client area, however as it wasn't really being used until we release and also its features do not meet our needs, we decided it would be best to create our own. This way we have complete control over how it functions.

New Product.. Kinda

The eagle eyed among you will notice that there is a new product on the Donation Store "Buy" page. We call this the "Pro Subscription". We have received a lot of requests from people who want continued suppot and perhaps even more connections that are possible with our current plans. So we have came up with this seperate product that we are offering any Donation Store customer.

Right now the price is "tba" because we haven't gauged the total demand for it and also the costing to us for providing it, however it basically a rolling subscription that allows you to access unlimited ticket support, unlimited updates in the current generation and also unlimited server connections as long as the subscription continues. As our software makes multiple calls to our licensing servers, we cannot financially keep those servers a float for large networks for a single once off payment. That's why we enforce the connection limit, however if you would like to have unlimited connections and the updates and support, you can simply subscribe to pro and one of your licenses will become pro.

With this comes with name changes to our main three tiers. They are no longer, Lite, Basic and Pro, but instead Small, Medium and Large. If you preordered any of the past tiers, they will be moved over to relevent new tier.

With this, you may have also spotted that we are now offering Premium support to users who would like to have some enhanced support channels, most notably a private Slack channel with a Donation Store developer, emergency support, prioritised ticket support and a dedicated account manager. Like the pro subscription, the price for this is also "tba", but again check back in the future for updates.

Finally.. the Main Event, the Release

This is probably the one part of the article everyone wants to read. Well I'll keep it as short as I can. So as I mentioned before I hope to start developing this fulltime in around 2-3 weeks time. Then on I will be spending anytime I do have on ensuring that this application is developed and released to everyone as soon as possible.

There has been quite a bit of research going on in the background over the last couple of months into other games that we will support. As you can see on the new site, we have stopped referencing this as a solution for Minecraft servers as we want to support as many games as we can.

One of those games is Hytale. I have been asked quite a bit about this and the answer is simple. Once Hytale is released and developer documentation is accessible, we will start development into supporting Hytale.

As for the core Minecraft release, I would hope to have it released this Summer. As mentioned a while back, pre orderers will get it 1 week before hand. Also, an update email will be sent around informing about the release date when it is concrete.

Anyway thats pretty much it for this blog post, if you have any questions for me personally, please email me at [email protected], otherwise, for any sales, parternship queries etc, please use our new support ticket system here.

As always, you can join our Discord channel to get quick realtime updates, I'm on there most of the time so I can answer your questions there too. Our Discord can be found here.

Thanks,
Mark
Owner/Lead Developer

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