ASCII ArtStart -

Your privacy is important to us so we wanted to outline exactly what we store about our users and how we use it. Here is the list:

Your username and the email from your login provider that allows us to track exactly which ArtBoards you've submitted. This is very limited and our entire database does not include any passwords at all.
Any changes you make to an ArtBoard. This is based on the username that you create when linking your profile to our site. We then record the time/username and changes made to an ArtBoard any time an ArtBoard is updated. This allows us to add traceability and accountability to the actions of our users.

We've created a handy little script that will automatically pull down from our servers regularly and update your motd in ubuntu for you. Just type this command under sudo to download the script to your server...

sudo wget -O /etc/update-motd.d/40-asciiartstart https://writhem.net/artstart/40-asciiartstart
sudo chmod +x /etc/update-motd.d/40-asciiartstart

...as with any command you find online, you should fully examine and understand what the command does before executing on your server. In this case: we use wget to download the script from our server and then give it executable permissions. The script itself will use wget to get the daily today.txt file from our server and then cache it for 10800 seconds (3 hours) before trying to get it again.

We do, however we currently only authenticate requests via a cookie obtained during the login process. We plan to allow our API to authenticate via a header with an API key in the future, but for now, know that it may be difficult to fully utilize the authenticated requests of our API. That being said, our full documentation can be found here.

Although this list isn't complete, here are the things that are most pressing for us to complete.

Pagination and Search by day. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to manipulate the url just to see the ArtBoard for a particular day? uggh... we agree. That's coming soon!
More login providers. We've already coded some stuff to support Google and Facebook login, but just haven't enabled them yet.
More instructions and scripts for more providers. Maybe even a web-hook platform ... to be determined. Wouldn't it be great to be able to set your Counter-Strike server MOTD to the ArtStart of the day? Maybe your Minecraft server ... the possibilities are endless.
Discord Bot. Yes, we want to give you a bot that you can invite to your own discord server ... the idea is that our Discord bot will post the daily ArtBoard at midnight UTC every day to a channel of your choice. The method he posts might be embedded code, or image... to be determined.
Fun stats. We don't currently track detailed information about hits to the .txt/.html/ .rss/.json endpoints, but we plan to... This will allow us to see how many hits to each endpoint, and what types of systems (all anonymized/summarized of course) are most common. We plan to keep 100% of the data we collect public and transparent.
and more...

Here is a copy of the updates as they were originally posted on the main page. Each named version is included below.
We are currently running version: aas-0_4-20200324

24 Mar 2020: v0.4-"Embed"

Can now export any artBoard as png. This also works to embed the image in your favourite social media client for that day.

05 Mar 2020: v0.3-"Alphabet"

Users can now login via Google. You can link your existing account to your google account from the profile if you wish. Alternatively you can login with either, or both.
A Calendar has been added.
Fully featured approval process has been finalized.
Full ArtBoard History is now visible and integrated wherever you are authorized to see it (ex: your own ArtBoards).

28 Feb 2020: v0.2-"Palette"

Users can now login via GitHub. More login providers will be added in future.
Users can now create their own ArtBoards and submit them for admin approval.

07 Feb 2020: v0.1-"Rocket"

First public version.