TLDR: I'm not going to be posting bots in the foreseeable future - not deleting anything (nor will I ever delete anything).

Full yap ahead.

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Woof. Hey all. I didn't see this one coming on the 2026 bingo card, but I think I'm going to stop posting bots to Janitor - potentially permanently though I loathe making such promises. In retrospect this has been building up for a while I suppose, but some useless context and personal history below.

HISTORY

It's been over 3 years (3 years!) since I joined Janitor, and I've been making bots for even longer, as far back as Aisekai was still a thing (don't flog me mods, it's long dead now). I originally became interested in this hobby for, ahem, less than wholesome reasons, but along the way something surprising happened: I found myself routinely wowed by other people's character ideas and particularly their intros. There was a particular bot on a now-dead site that really drew me in. It was steampunk themed, and it so beautifully intoned the descriptions of smells of burning grease and thumping pistons that I swear I was in the workshop itself. I must've read that intro like 20 times over months. And I wanted to write like that.

Something that might be surprising given how much I ramble now is that I had/have never been a writing guy. I'm more of a math guy. I got Bs and Cs in writing throughout my schooling years and was even diagnosed as 'twice exceptional' (gifted in math, struggling in writing - all bullshit) in my youth. I was pushed towards STEM, I have a degree in statistics from graduating about a year back, and I currently work a day job in data analytics. Writing was almost discouraged by my parents and teachers, and I had definitely internalized being bad at it.

Bot making was a perfect storm of low-pressure, amateur-level writing for people of all skill levels to try their hands in. I could read stuff that was low quality and riddled with typos or stuff that was 'holy shit wow' from the same page! I went from chatting-only to dabbling in creation to getting super into making OCs, and along the way I got swept up with other novice bot makers and aspiring writer-y types. I actually joined the JAI discord way back when for the classic reason: my bots wouldn't stop speaking/acting for me and I wanted to fix them! I ended up meeting some very cool people though, and while I'm barely involved with the community anymore it was a fantastic learning experience.

Back then botmaking was just a wild west, and there were all sorts of ideas and guides coming out from people with varying degrees of understanding of LLMs, from formatted lists to alichat to meta instructions and all kinds of other nonsense. People actually ironically touted Boostyle as a gold standard! ("shy" + "kind" + "etc") That's insane to think about! I was trying things and testing things and learning SO much in everything from writing prose to formatting cards to how to be creative, and I got to see other people's ideas and their worlds too!

Obviously I've progressed significantly since then. I'm not a masterful writer by any means, but a look into one of my older bots and one can see how far I've come. (Seriously. My old bots were awfully written.) Which brings me to now...

STAGNATION

At the risk of sounding elitist, bitter, or just downright mean, I believe that the botmaking community has regressed in recent times, likely due to growing mass-appeal and what I suspect is a larger-than-you-think population of minors. It's not even that the average bot author has become more novice - (that's totally fine, everyone starts somewhere.) - but more so I think misinformation and lack of standards leaves the newcoming authors with no concept of what 'good' is anymore. Misinformation has always been everywhere in this community, but it's really exploded as of late. More than that there is an ease of access and a lack of quality that comes with it: I see bios full of vague purple prose written entirely by ChatGPT, bots with copy-pasted 20,000 token lorebooks that explain what every act is, or bots where I have to scroll down past a Great Wall of lingerie pics just to find the chat button. At some point even the ideas themselves have begun to blend together, though that's the rose-tinted glasses, I'd guess. (It's not like there weren't 5 billion CoD Ghost bots back in the day.) Still... it almost makes me miss the simple 300 token smut bots that used to be everywhere.

Don't get me wrong: People are allowed to enjoy what they like, but increasingly I've felt like this is no longer a space that I want to be a part of. And that's not to say it's like this everywhere. There are still a lot of EXCELLENT creators around Janitor whose works I mostly admire from afar, but over time many have left to other sites, retired entirely, or just started posting farther and fewer in between. I get it. Shit happens and humans are only human, but I used to be able to consistently find novel and interesting bots from digging through a couple entries. Now it takes ages.

In fact, I haven't benefitted from the community in a long time, and the social media-fication of Janitor or the fracturing of a billion different creator discords certainly haven't helped things. I used to get to share intros or talk about worldbuilding or read other people's drafts, and now I've pretty much tuned out entirely. It leaves me with the feeling of stagnation, of wanting to be and knowing I can be a better writer but not knowing how I can get there. I'm not sure my answer lies here at Janitor.

TEDIUM

I'll be blunt: I no longer make my bots in Janitor, nor do I test them on JAI. I run them locally, test them locally on local models, and then begin the awkward process of uploading to Janitor. Sometimes this goes swimmingly, other times lorebooks drive me up the wall. This is in stark contrast to when I used to make bots for JAI on JAI, and I didn't know wtf a proxy was. And to be honest my ideal end user is just downloading my bots to tweak and use however they see fit (something Janitor makes it VERY hard to do.)

Also did you know Janitor has a built-in unchangeable advanced prompt that comes before your own prompt? It looks like this:

<SYSTEMNOTE>Fictional roleplay. You are the Character and NPCs. Never act, speak, or decide for User Persona. Always follow OOC instructions and system notes.

Writing: Third person, show don't tell, vary vocabulary, avoid clichés and literary flourishes. Use concrete descriptions and direct language.

Character: Stay authentic to personality, flaws, and backstory. Characters can lie, resist, disagree, or have complex reactions like real people.

Pacing: Detailed responses with rich dialogue, actions, and thoughts. End mid-scene, no summaries or epilogues. Maintain forward momentum.

World: Generate events, introduce locations and NPCs naturally. Keep the narrative organic and unpredictable while progressing the plot.</SYSTEMNOTE>

...And while most of this is inoffensive, it's a bit paternalistic and really in line with a lot of the overreach I feel has become the standard for this site. The 'third person' particularly irks me on account of, you know, my entire catalogue of first person bots. So yeah, somewhere along the way Janitor went from "uploading here for people to chat with" to "uploading here for people to download", and the fact that I'm burning extra time jumping through hoops when Janitor isn't even a particularly user-friendly download hub is unfortunate to say the least.

Ultimately it's not that big of a time sink, maybe ten-fifteen minutes to write a bio? (More if I have to port a lorebook), but after long enough it becomes more and more tedious.

HIATUS

So all good things come to an end, I guess? It's bittersweet. I have genuinely enjoyed my time here. It's not all bad news though. A few highlights:

- My current bots are staying here forever* with open defs. That said, if you like any of my bots, I encourage you to make copies of them for yourself. (*I've seen the banhammer on semantics before, and I don't consider anyone immune.)
- I'm not dead or buried! If you want to chat feel free to reach out either here or on discord. I'm not extremely active, but I'm always up for a good yap sesh.
- I'm not quitting writing and won't quit making bots either. I still love this hobby and intend to keep at it, even if I've been struggling at improving for the time being. Who knows? Maybe I'll share my work again publicly someday.
- I WILL be continuing to stalk a few creators I like here, who, afaik, have not jumped ship. (I still need to steal my ideas from somewhere.)
- Feel free to AMA.