Lucie, our beloved Discord bot, has undergone significant changes recently, and we believe in keeping our community informed. In this post, we'll share the background of these changes, address user concerns, and outline our plans to make Lucie even better. We aim to remain transparent and ensure you can trust and rely on our services.

If you're only interested in Lucie's future plans, feel free to skip ahead to the section about Lucie's future.

Lucie's journey so far

Lucie began as a collaborative project between me (Prozilla) and Bolo. While Bolo contributed significantly to Lucie's early success through marketing and server hosting, I handled most of the development work, creating Lucie's features, website, and community tools. Thanks to our combined efforts, Lucie has grown to serve over 100,000 users and more than 700 servers.

Early on, we worked together to design Lucie's branding, including the logo, banners, and assets. I also developed Lucie's website, a functional dashboard, and documentation to support our users. Despite our different roles, we shared a vision of creating a bot that could make Discord communities better and more connected.

Lucie offers a range of unique features, including auto-translation to connect members globally, moderation utilities with commands for server safety and a ticketing system, and fun and games that reward community engagement and bring people together.

Recent changes and challenges

Over the past 13 months, Bolo became less active in Lucie's development. While he continued suggesting ideas, I often struggled to implement them alone. Tensions grew, culminating in disagreements about Lucie's future direction and funding. This ultimately led to Bolo stepping away from the project.

Unfortunately, during this transition, there were significant disruptions. Bolo removed Lucie from key servers, spread misinformation about our practices, and deleted important files, including design assets and legal documents. These actions deeply affected our team and Lucie's operations, but we've worked hard to recover and move forward stronger than before.

User privacy

One of the claims made during this time was that Lucie infringes on user privacy. We take these concerns seriously and want to clarify how we handle data:

• Data collection - Lucie stores guild IDs to save server configurations.
• Translation data - Auto-translation logs include the content of the original message and the translation for troubleshooting. This is the only occurrence where Lucie logs user interactions and it only happens when a message is successfully auto-translated. These logs are reset every time Lucie restarts, meaning data is kept only temporarily.
• Encryption - Persistent data is stored securely using Firebase Firestore, which employs robust encryption. Learn more about Firestore encryption.

These details are also mentioned in our Privacy Policy, and have been public information since the creation of this website. None of this data is linked to individual users, and we never share it with third parties. Moving forward, we plan to involve the community in decisions about how we handle data, including whether to keep auto-translation logs.

Lucie's future

Addressing your concerns

To ensure transparency and prioritize user trust, our next major update will focus on improving privacy and safety features. We'll create polls in our Discord server to gather your input on these changes, including whether to make auto-translation logs optional or remove them entirely.

Rebuilding Lucie's assets

Due to the loss of Lucie's original design files, including logos, banners and other branding material, we'll need to recreate most of the assets from scratch. While challenging, this gives us a chance to refresh Lucie's look. If you're interested in contributing to this effort, please see the section below for more details.

Changes to our team

This challenging period has also brought new opportunities. We're excited to welcome Julian to our team! With Julian's help, we quickly recovered from the disruptions and restored Lucie's services. We'll also be looking to expand our team, prioritizing individuals who share our vision and commitment to the project.

If you have skills in any of the following areas, we'd love to hear from you:

• JavaScript/TypeScript programming
• Next.js and Express.js development
• Writing documentation and user guides
• Marketing and outreach
• Figma design

Interested in joining the team? Reach out to us via our Discord server!

Final Note

Despite the challenges, Lucie's development will continue, and all our services remain operational. We're committed to making Lucie the all-in-one solution for every Discord server, and we're grateful for your support throughout this journey.

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Thank you for being a part of Lucie's journey. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out via our Discord server.