Updates about missing rewards (Patreon)

A couple rewards haven't been being fulfilled by me, and I want to apologize for that and also offer explanations that might get a bit technical as to why. But if you are waiting on a personalized thank you video, audio updates, or merch discount codes, I want to explain why those haven't been coming out.

Thank You Videos

The reason why the thank you videos haven't been going out is two-fold. Firstly, I'm really bad at remembering to do them. That's fully on me. I have a reminder setup in my phone to do them, but I'm never in a quiet, private space when my reminder goes off. It's hard to find a private space in quarantine with three people occupying a small apartment. But still, that's fully on me.

The other reason is a bit more technical. I use a largely automated system to do the thank you messages. All the thank you videos are unique to each person, but the system helps streamline alerting me of new patrons that I need to send the videos to. It's an integration between Patreon and Bonjoro linked through Zapier. Basically, Bonjoro is the service that lets me record short thank you videos and send them to people's emails. Zapier is the service that links Patreon and Bonjoro together so when I get a new Patron, Patreon tells Zapier, and Zapier tells Bonjoro. Well, I didn't know this until today, but Zapier was not properly communicating with Bonjoro. So any new Patron who started supporting me within the last 2 months did not actually go through to Bonjoro.

In short, if you became a Patron 2 months ago or less, I never got a notification to send you a thank you email, and I don't super know how to fix it without manually emailing everyone a thank you video, which would be incredibly time-consuming.

So I'm profoundly sorry for that technological error that caused this. I wish I knew earlier. I only caught it because I was recording thank you videos today and Bonjoro was like "You haven't gotten a new patron in 67 days" and that sounded very incorrect since I know a few of you joined from my Scooby video. I've fixed it so new Patrons will get thank you videos starting today. If you REALLY want one and haven't gotten one, let me know in the comments and I'll try to send you one as quickly as I can. Apologies for that.

Audio Updates

This one is quite simple. Firstly, I'm making fewer videos so there's not much to update on until scripts are finished or scenes are shot. But also, since quarantine, I've not been around my usual audio recording setup. I have to walk about a mile to go to the office just to record and back. Kind of a hassle. I'll do better about text-based updates in the meantime.

Merch Discount Codes

This one is more just a "I thought this would be easier than it turned out to be" sort of thing. The way that my merch is setup is that I don't have access to really and of the back end on DFTBA. I can't control pricing, set discount codes, or even see how well things are selling without going through 1-2 people to do any of that. It's an incredibly cumbersome system. The original plan was to do a revolving code that changes every month so only current patrons would know it, but again, that involves lots of messages and emails to other people to set up every month and it's annoying.

So at the very least I will try to setup one singular Patreon discount code and just trust that you won't share it with anyone, deal?

I'm sure there are other things I have missed, but as always the support you give here goes into the videos themselves. I know they are few and far between these days, but I'm working I promise!