April 24, 2020

Dear users,

With today's release, we are changing quite a few things with the way Kanka runs in order to streamline certain processes, engage our users more fully, and continue this wild journey that we are all taking together.

To begin with, over the past few months we've occasionally teased the idea of moving away from Patreon, and today that becomes a reality. We have changed to billing for subscriptions directly in the app using Stripe, which will handle all payments and sensitive information.

Before we go further into the patch notes, I just want to say a word to our beloved Patrons: without you, nothing that we have accomplished over the past two years would have been possible. Your support and dedication to Kanka has allowed us to grow together, and we do not take your time or loyalty lightly. Those who wish to stay on Patreon are welcome do so and will continue to enjoy exactly the same benefits as our new users who go through our in-app subscriptions. The code behind Boosted Campaigns and bonuses will stay the same, no matter which system you use to support us!

However, for our new users, we will be sunsetting all current pledges on Patreon and the various syncs between Kanka and Patreon.

As for our other major change, it covers Newsletters. We feel that our ever-growing community deserves to be better informed of what we’re up to, and we want to make sure that all of you are aware of community votes and the way that we continue to improve Kanka. Before any of you worry about being spammed, I want to be clear that you will never receive an unsolicited email from us, in compliance with GDPR.

New Features

Subscriptions : you can support Kanka, get Campaign Boosters and other bonuses directly in the app! The new subscription page is available in your Profile page, and a link has been added to the menu bar.

Payment Methods and Billing is handled by Stripe. Your credit card information never appears on our servers, be it through logs or database data. We only save the last four digits of your card to remind you visually which card you've currently set up. You can either select USD or EUR as your currency to avoid being hit by stupidly high fees by credit card providers. We will try to add more currency options in the future. You will be billed directly when you subscribe, with your card being charged automatically each month. We will look into providing an option for a yearly subscription in the near future. Subscribing to Kanka will directly give you access to the assigned Discord roles (related to the Third Party App feature). You can cancel your subscription at any time, which will keep your subscription active until the end of the current billing period. As usual, cancelling your subscription doesn't delete any of the data you input in your campaigns, so if you subscribe again in the future, your data will still be there. 3D Secure cards are supported!

: you can support Kanka, get Campaign Boosters and other bonuses directly in the app! The new subscription page is available in your Profile page, and a link has been added to the menu bar. Abilities are now available for all campaigns.

are now available for all campaigns. Third Party App : we've added a Discord integration with Kanka. You can set up your Discord account linking in your Profile > Apps page.

: we've added a Discord integration with Kanka. You can set up your Discord account linking in your Profile > Apps page. Community Votes : we've added Community Votes directly into the app. This will allow us to build more complex voting options in the future as our user base grows.

: we've added Community Votes directly into the app. This will allow us to build more complex voting options in the future as our user base grows. Newsletters : in your Profile settings, we added a Newsletter segment, where you can now subscribe to our various newsletters! You can also subscribe without being logged in our having an account simply by going to the Releases or Community Votes page and subscribing with your preferred email address.

: in your Profile settings, we added a Newsletter segment, where you can now subscribe to our various newsletters! You can also subscribe without being logged in our having an account simply by going to the Releases or Community Votes page and subscribing with your preferred email address. RSS Feeds : we've added two RSS feeds for those who wish to stay up to date with Kanka using the RSS protocol. You can add the following urls to your RSS reader: https://kanka.io/feeds/news.rss https://kanka.io/feeds/community-votes.rss

: we've added two RSS feeds for those who wish to stay up to date with Kanka using the RSS protocol. You can add the following urls to your RSS reader:

Improvements

Abilities: added a new Charge field on abilities. This is to emulate 5e's "usages before a short/long rest" abilities. You can either input a numerical value, or something like "{Level}*{CHA}+{STR}" which will use the attributes of those names the ability is attached to!

field on abilities. This is to emulate 5e's "usages before a short/long rest" abilities. You can either input a numerical value, or something like which will use the attributes of those names the ability is attached to! Quick Creator: when other entities with the same name exist, they will now be listed below the warning.

Campaign: a new "UI" tab has been added to the campaign form, with the option to disable family names from character tooltips on your whole campaign.

Entity Create/Update: a new "Save & Copy" option was added in the entity workflow actions.

Entity Create/Update: a new "Ctrl+Shift+S" shortcut was added to trigger the "Save & Update" action.

Notifications: the way notifications are handled in the browser have changed. Previously each tab went and requested the server individually, which caused a lot of requests during sessions where people have 10-15 Kanka tabs open. Now a single shared process between all tabs is shared to reduce the server load, while increasing the frequency of how often the app checks for new notifications.

Datagrids: the bulk buttons will now always be shown, and only be clickable when at least one element of the datagrid is selected. Also improved performance on the datagrid page load.

Improved performance for boosted campaigns.

Improved performance for the Entity View > Permissions modal.

Bug Fixes