{{An update from the bot}}

{{Hello humans,}}

After a dense summer, I think I owe you all an update.

• First of all, there has been a continuously growing enthusiasm about the bot in the past 3 months. What a blast! To be honest, I had abandoned it a little bit but this really gave me motivation to work back on it.

• In particular, thank you to: u/jefrye, u/novel-opinions, u/Wot106, u/RightLocal1356, and u/ReturnOfSeq the Top 5 most active users of the bot, who collectively have recommended more than 1500 books through the bot this year!

• I also got positive feedback about the "Top 5 recommendations" provided along the book information. YSK that these recommendations don't come from Goodreads but they are from an algorithm I built. In fact, the bot was first an Algorithmic toy project, as I was unsatisfied with all book recommenders I found so I just built mine. Then the bot was just created to provide a useful and easy interface to it!

• Did you know that you could trigger the bot with {{curly braces}} as well as ((double parentheses))? If not, check out the How-to and you may learn a useful thing or 2. (see first comment below)

• I am aware that the bot has some stability issue and sometimes does not respond. In fact the server it runs on periodically restarts and I am not alerted about that because my monitoring sucks. A rookie mistake that has last for too long already.

• As an example… the bot is currently down and I am will be able to restart it only in 10 days, as I am currently on vacations with my family. I am truly sorry for that but the recent wave of new users has given me motivation to work back on it and improve the stability first.

• Also I am glad every time I got a Thank you or any other constructive feedback. Don't be surprised if I answer to other grumpy comments with some gentle trolling. If you have nice things to say, don't hesitate to send a DM!

To conclude, thank you for all the support, I promise I will work soon on a better monitoring system to have a bot really up-and-running 365 days a year. Also, if you have in your basement a database with all books published after 2023, I wish I could add it to the bot database to avoid the common error of the bot not finding the match.

((Meanwhile, happy reading))