Thank you for 1,000 stars!
How I accidentally became an open-source maintainer.
At 14:46 on Friday, January 31st, 2025 (UTC), exactly 300 weeks after I started the project, Discord Tickets finally reached 1,000 stars ✨ on GitHub! But does it really matter?
How significant is this?
A thousand isn't a huge number, but for stars (in my opinion, and apparently GitHub's), it's the difference between big and small. Having too many stars for the badge to show the exact number is a status symbol, instantly making the repository more attractive to potential users. Of course, more stars don't always mean a repo is better than alternatives, but it seems that even GitHub uses a thousand as a threshold of importance:
A bit of perspective
I've been anticipating this milestone for a couple of years and even (quite accurately) estimated it would happen about a week before it did. For me, the previous most significant milestone was reaching 100 stars, which took almost two years to achieve.
Two years for 100 and six years for 1,000 sounds like a very long time, and it is compared to most large GitHub repos, but this one is different. Discord Tickets has evolved and passively grown from what originally was a 3-day throwaway exercise; it was never meant to be big.
I would have been happy with just a dozen stars when I started this project, and I hadn't even dreamt of receiving 100 stars until many months later. Why? Let's look at how Discord Tickets began...
How Discord Tickets started
"I had no use for a ticket bot and no intention of ever using it. In fact, I still don't."
Over the years, many of you have personally thanked me for creating this bot, expressed amazement that it's free & open-source, and a handful of you have even asked me why. I really appreciate these comments, but I have to say, my favourite wasn't even directed at me.
This screenshot from just a few weeks ago is of the support server for ticketsbot.net, the second-largest Discord ticket bot (behind Ticket Tool), which recently announced it is shutting down:
Why did I create it?
Aside from research and assignments, most software shared on GitHub was created because the developers wanted to use it themselves. This makes Discord Tickets an unusual project, I had no use for a ticket bot and no intention of ever using it. In fact, I still don't (although I probably should, my DMs are out of control).
The Eartharoid/DiscordTickets GitHub repository (which later became discord-tickets/bot) was created on the evening of May 3rd, 2019.
I was 15 years old, came home from school, and started talking to an online friend called Jelly, who was just starting to make a bot called Ticket Manager. I can't remember why – if I thought I could do better, or just wanted to see how much I had learned from creating my Christmas Countdown bot 6 months earlier – but I decided to try creating my own.
I spent most of that Friday night and the weekend coding. By 10PM on Sunday, it was mostly finished. I made a few small changes over the next few days, including moving the log functions into my first npm package, leekslazylogger, which is still used in the bot and many of my other projects today.
And then... I just left it. No announcements or advertisements, and I don't recall sharing it with anyone. I wrote the code (mostly) in a weekend and then moved on.
I hoped that a few people would find it through Google, find it useful and leave a star, but I don't think I expected to maintain it besides providing basic support.
Why have I continued to maintain it?
I think I initially maintained and supported it because people were interested in something I made, asking questions and eventually requesting features, and that made me happy. It started as fun and has become more of a chore since 2020, but it's now 2025 and I'm still going.
My Christmas Countdown and Discord Tickets bots are both on version 4; I have completely rewritten them three times for the simple reason that they sucked. I didn't learn to code through courses, I just tried to make things without really knowing what I was doing or understanding the languages. Every time I create something new or rewrite a project, I learn something new, I use that knowledge in the next project, and the cycle repeats. These projects taught me programming.
I'm still maintaining Discord Tickets because I can still learn a lot from it. Version 4 is good enough that I only want to rewrite half of it, instead of its entirety, but I still enjoy adding new features and the public instance forces me to think about scaling now.
There are some big updates coming in the next month or so and I'll talk more about Discord Tickets' history in an upcoming release announcement. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.
Why is it still free?
Maybe I'm stupid. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For a long time, I didn't think it was good enough to sell, and I originally couldn't even if I wanted to. Although it's still not perfect, I think it's good enough to sell now, but I'm happy with it being open-source.
It's not all about stars
Discord Tickets has come a long way from its beginning and this milestone marks that, but it's not the only indication of its success. In its almost 6 years of existence, over 100 people have contributed to the repository. Even if most of them only updated a few translations, I think this number is equally significant as 1,000 stars.
From the beginning, this project has always been a fun learning exercise, my playground to try new things. Without it, I'm not sure I would have chosen a software development career.
Thank you not only for the stars, but for using, sharing, and contributing.
