FrontierNav Report: October 2018

Changes in October

FrontierNav is now open source! I've spent most of the month planning this switch over and thinking about what it means for the project going ahead.

By virtue of being open source, I'll be more open about priorities and plans. There's an Issue Tracker for feature requests, planned changes and bug reports. I've also written some documentation for people to get started so that they can make their own code contributions.

You can find the code repository on GitHub.

Regaining Momentum

Now that Summer's over and things are starting to settle again, I can start putting time into FrontierNav. Even if it's just a few hours here and there, I'm slowly picking up momentum. This just feels like an annual flow now, so maybe it's best to accept that Summer is always going to be a season to rest.

Payment Model

I paused Patreon funding for the last 2 months due to the lack of progress. I'll be starting it back up from this month onwards again.

I've been thinking if I should change the payment model from "monthly" to "per post". So instead of pausing the Patreon manually on months I haven't made progress, maybe I should just charge for the monthly "FrontierNav Report". If I don't post a report, I won't charge for the month.

However, it looks like Patreon doesn't allow accounts that have "Charge Upfront" enabled to switch back to the "per creation" model. That sucks.

Being Upfront about Costs

Since FrontierNav is now open source, Maybe it's best to also make its finances more open. Moving over to something like Open Collective is an option. Though, that may exclude certain contributions since it's a different community to Patreon... Maybe have both? Either way, to apply I need the repository to have over 100 stars so it'll have to wait.

AniDB has an interesting way to manage its Patreon funds. Similar to Open Collective, they track their expenses publicly and only charge their Patrons when they need more funding (by making a post). But again, unless if I make a new Patreon account, I can't switch to "per creation".

Next Steps

I'll carry on sorting out the open source processes. The biggest one is to improve testing. I've relied on my memory to make sure everything still works as expected, but that only works for so long and doesn't scale to multiple contributors.

Also, I'll look into adding Xenoblade 2: Torna and sort out the design around adding new games.