May 20 Platform Update — Founders Hall picker, Founder badge, role sync

What''s new — May 20, 2026

A big batch of fixes and quality-of-life upgrades shipped today across the platform, chat, dashboard, and Discord.

✨ Founders Hall — pick your own slot

On vpzone.tv/founders you can now click any open slot to reserve that number for yourself when you sign up for VPZONE+. Existing founders keep their slot numbers — nothing was renumbered. Anonymous slots (founders who opted out of public display) now show up as a placeholder so the wall stays gap-free instead of looking like empty seats.

⭐ Gold Founder badge in chat

The first 100 VPZONE+ supporters now get a gold ★ Founder badge next to their name in every chat message, sitting alongside the existing VPZ+ badge. If you''re in the Founders Hall and don''t see it yet, just refresh the page.

🎯 Goal progress — fixed

The follower counter on the dashboard was showing `0/20` instead of your real follower count if you hadn''t reached a tier yet. We tracked it down to a server-side function that was short-circuiting before computing your stats. Fixed — affected 342 channels. Refresh your dashboard to see the right numbers.

💎 Discord role sync — no longer overrides

The new Founder role was wiping the Streamer and Verified roles on Discord instead of stacking with them. That regression is fixed, and the auto-sync job now runs every 15 minutes on schedule. If you lost a role earlier this week, it came back automatically this afternoon — no need to ping a mod.

The Verified Discord role also now mirrors your Verified creator tier on the site, not just an admin flag, so reaching Verified tier earns the role automatically.

💰 Earnings dashboard — currency-aware + auto-payouts

Two fixes on the /dashboard/earnings page:

- The dashboard used to display every amount as CAD, even for legacy USD subscriptions. Now each row shows its actual currency — USD for pre-May 19 subs, CAD for new ones. - The 31-day hold release is now wired to a daily payout cron that automatically transfers your matured earnings to your Stripe Connect account. Previously the worker existed but wasn''t being triggered.

🔗 Four new social link options

Under Settings → Social Links, four new platforms are available alongside Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and the rest:

- GameFolio - Sticks.gg - Blaze - Rumble

Fill them in and the icons show up on your `/u/<username>` profile page.

🛠️ Chat improvements

- The `!so` shoutout command now correctly handles usernames with capital letters, underscores, or special characters — no more "user not found" errors when the target name happens to contain SQL wildcard characters. - Streamer tip: if your viewers are seeing playback stalls or "Try Again" prompts, check your OBS Keyframe Interval — set it to 2 seconds for stable LL-HLS playback. We saw this pattern in the chat logs and it''s the single setting that fixes the most playback complaints.

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Thanks for the bug reports — keep them coming in `#bug-report` on Discord. 🫡