As thoughtful as it is - crowd-funding or donating for new programmers isn't a viable option to revamp and fix the core functions of Subeta. We've hired them in the past for games and side-features, but the core of Subeta (forums, achievements, etc) includes hundreds (if not thousands) of pages, hundreds of database tables, and hundreds of millions of rows within those -- it's a massive and complex system. That isn't easy to teach or learn. Keith, Grace, and I have been working here for many years and we know the scripts and functions of Subeta like the back of our hands.

It boils down to an issue of time. We all, as in programmers and staff, want a better Subeta. We don't enjoy fixing bugs, rewriting old scripts, or rebuilding systems - we want to build exciting features, games, plots, and fun things for players to do. But it's a balancing act of keeping all of the old functions working and bringing out new ones. Features like the wardrobe, achievements, and forums have grown in ways that we would have never imagined when they were first released. That drains the system, and as critical parts of the site - we don't have the option to build those out in a parallel dev universe (like we can with brand new features). Those need to be worked on in real time and issues will, unfortunately, be realized in real time, too.

We really appreciate all of the patience and support in this. If there was an easy fix, we would have done it by now. If it was as simple as taking Subeta offline for a week and hammering out all of the bugs - we'd consider it. But it'd really take several months time and God knows how much money to turn Subeta offline and rebuild it from the ground up. We don't those resources or the time. Please have faith that we are trying our hardest to improve the site.

We are reading this board. We have not given up and we DO care. It's the weekend, our management staff tend to work weekdays, which is likely why you haven't had much staff input as of yet.

As Creative Director, I'm not sure which questions I could answer for you. But I could try?

- We're doing okay right now. We're not about to close up shop by any means, but we still have to make enough to pay our entire staff every month, as well as things like servers and taxes and everything else that a business costs to run. It's hard! There are a darling amount of you that are loyally putting money into the cash shop every month (or even just every now and again) and you guys are keeping us able to carry on providing content and things for the site. BUT there isn't enough to hire more programmers right now, or shut the site down for x number of weeks in order to be able to work on coding entirely without the user load. We can only continue trying to fix bugs at a constant rate, and get just as frustrated as you guys about them. I'm not kidding here - you think this doesn't drive us insane too? We're not just switching off the computers and saying TO HELL WITH IT! We are constantly talking in our staff chat area thing about the problems and how to resolve them. Some of the annoying ones like the double posting are really tricky because the programmers have to figure out how to replicate them first. We test and test and we think we fix something, we post 'this should be fixed!' and then it happens again and we pull our hair out some more and try again.

The cron, too. We try another fix for it, but then have to wait until midnight to see if it works properly, and when it doesn't we try again, and will keep trying until it's properly fixed.

- We all have multiple projects on the go all the time, because there are so many things going on during the year. The art department will be half working on one event, half working on another, but also be doing side projects and SBQ lines and pets and cash shop items and items for the token shop/BHH/blue building/quests/games - there are SO many areas of the site that people are expecting things from that we have to be working for practically all of the things all of the time! I imagine it's the same for programming. They revamp one thing, and have something else on the go at the same time. During Peka-Boo, our programmers were tied to the event project and that became more important than anything else. Right now, they are totally focused on fixing the problems and bugs cropping up to do with the forums and achievements - I believe has been working on some forum related things that he will be posting about soon. It's hard to talk about them all when you're trying to figure everything out, and when the precious time you have is going into working on things right up until your shift is over. When there is a big update to be made, he'll make it!

- I just checked a few times, it took about 15-18 seconds for the pet page to load, whereas it takes about 3-6 seconds to get my inventory to load! It's never timed out for me, though. Oh gosh and look they all need feeding poor babies. I do not know about the cap's removal or raising, I'm afraid! I am not anywhere near it, myself, and I know the battle department are working on something very different and interesting right now, so I can't give you any real answer about that :(

- Hmm - well achievements were brought forward because there had been a problem with adding new ones. Keith worked on that one and we really needed achievements to work around the time of Peka-Boo, because events and achievements kind of go hand in hand, so we did ask for that one to be pushed out when it was at a point in which it was working. As is par for the course, even though it worked in testing, when applied to the site and the users on it it went a little differently! But we kind of have to just go for it a lot of the time - if we keep holding back it gets to a point where nothing is EVER released. I think my driving instructor said that to me once, 'Just take your test now, jump in the deep end!' I failed 3 times before I passed. I'm not sure what this tells you but why not throw in a nice life anecdote in the middle of my terrible explanations of things?!

I mentioned in the last post I made about how we have to constantly work on multiple things at a time - I don't think it's desperation - more that we were finally able to do these big things we'd talked about for a while, so we went ahead with it? Plus I think pushing big things like this at this time of year is better, to try and get all the bugs worked out before event season starts? And I believe they are all intertwined, the big things. All or nothing situation which has certainly ended up being quite exhausting! But we're plugging on.

Actually, we are kind of training a new programmer right now. has been studying it and is certainly dedicated enough for the job. (Petsite programming is a STRANGE business - a lot of programmers I've encountered, although excellent at their jobs, just don't really understand what we're about here? It's hard to explain. It definitely takes a bit of training and care!)

So happy that touched on it and mentioned ! Petsite programming is different and it's a bit weird for others. It's also kind of weird to think that we have virtual items and a virtual universe and it really does seem different because we are not logging invoices or sending automated newsletters (like other real world applications of programming). But, as many of you mentioned, it's not rocket science and Subeta is not writing revolutionary scripts. Point blank, nothing we are doing is going to change programming for eternity, but that does not mean that there isn't an on-boarding process. As genius as the people are that work at Google, Apple, and Microsoft - there are also intense training months to bring them up to speed on where each company is programming wise. Of course, Subeta is not as complex as Google or Apple, but we do have our ways of going about things. Thinking of my own time (and a lot of people laughed at it initially) - I started fixing little spelling errors and bugs around the site for a month or two before I wrote a script that went live. Fixing spelling errors or little bugs around on the site is an opportunity to read random pages on the site and learn how they work, function, and build a stronger understanding of Subeta. Amber is currently on-boarding right now. We might not have a set schedule of SQL 101 like Apple does but we are not as simple as to approach programmers with a wad of cash and a two week deadline saying "Debug and fix all of this!" Amber studied computer science in school. She knows how to program. Metaphorically, she has that programming toolkit. But it is just familiarizing herself with the way that we write queries, build out new features, and support functions. It's not something you learn overnight and it definitely does not take a PhD's level of commitment but it takes some time bring them on and be able to push out effective changes.

I keep thinking of that sentiment of when you're swimming, and you get worried about the conditions and start having trouble, but if you panic too much you will drown! I think there is a lot of panicking going on here, which WILL lead to terrible feels and loss of confidence in us. I mean, I can see that has already happened, and it's horrible to see. I want nothing more than to have you guys trust us again.

We actually have plans to start a new thing that is very keep-you-in-the-know. A kind of developer blog? So you can see some of what's going on behind the scenes, and the process that is running a website like this! I think that is the kind of thing that could really help you guys connect with us again, as I know we have really lost our old community feel because the site just got a little too big to be able to be able to do that! (Plus, there's a strong feeling of users wanting us to be both professional but also chat with you guys in a colloquial way - it's been a hard balance to achieve, for sure)

Personally speaking - I am not in charge of overseeing the freelancers and I am not sure of the exact limits of their work, but I do know that we have had outside work in areas of game development and layout coding. In terms of outsourcing projects like forums, achievements, etc - those are not unique to Subeta but the applications are unique. We could easily search for an open source forum (there are so many on the internet) and plug it into Subeta. We could even hire someone that could write a brand new one. But at day's end - we'd still need to integrate it with our avatar system, achievements, pings, pets, events, and a million others. That's not something that can outsider can easily do. The issues that we face are not always in the core functions of core features but rather in the ways that the core features interact with each other. If we optimized it so that someone else wrote the core and then we handled the integration, we'd face the same issues that we do, without the intimate knowledge of the core functions (as someone else wrote them)

I'd imagine that there core features are something that we always want to have full ownership (in the sense of seeing it from start to finish), expertise, and knowledge of

As for the fundraiser - it's an interesting idea but it isn't really a viable option. We don't think of bugs and errors in the sense of time and we do not put a dollar amount to them. In theory, it is a great idea to organize and manage issues by saying that it will cost X hours or X amount of work and then allocate resources accordingly, but we've seen in the past that such a system doesn't always work out. Sometimes when I work for 8 hours, I program the world, and then other times it's as if I did nothing because a bug took me off course and what should have taken an hour turned out to be three with debugging and fixing problems. If we could say that achievements would cost $6000 to fix, flat and not subject to changes - maybe we'd consider alternatives. Financial support as of right now, and likely throughout the future, is best directed through purchasing CSC

And, of course, that is not saying "we are doing poorly, there are a lot of bugs, so buy more CSC!!" at all. It's just that Subeta requires a certain amount of money to run every month. That number is relatively the same throughout the year - in a way, it is fixed (for the purpose of explaining this). Whether we have the site running at full speed, running with bugs, or offline with the beach photo - the bills will need to be paid in the same amount. As a player, or even a consumer of a product, it's hard to think of the longer term stability when there are issues at hand. It makes no sense to spend money on something that is bad at the moment. There is not one person on staff that is not aware of that concept and that there are users that feel that way. And the reverse is true as well. When the site is running very well and everyone is happy - there is confidence and happiness in spending a few extra dollars. Subeta has been fortunate enough to maintain balance over the years and through the rough financial crisis but that is not to say we are entirely happy with our performance (as no business really ever is). I think it is safe and clear to say that the best future state of Subeta is one that runs without critical errors or downtime, produces great and fun new content, and makes enough to cover the fixed costs, and even have a little extra to cushion for growth opportunities (and for the unexpected)

We don't want to think of $5 right now as $5 for right now. We want to think of it as a $1 for this month and a $1 for the next four months because we are still going to be around in four months. Going back to fundraising - we do not want to rally and promise that for $2,000, or however much, all of these issues will be gone. There is no criticality in the sense that we need a set amount of money to get us out of a hole. We're just experiencing a point in time where we are having more issues than normal. Financial support, and purchasing CSC, shouldn't be for a specific cause as much as it should be for Subeta in its entirety

We will fix these issues and we will move on to continue to create new features. Some of those will have issues. Some of those will have frustrating bugs and issues that are so obvious when they are happening but were impossible to predict. There's no doubt that we will face those. But we will continue to work to minimize those, fix them when they pop up, and move on to new features. There's a long term aspect to staff's work and to Subeta - we've been around for nine years - and we will never have a shortage of perseverance

Just a heads up — I haven’t been able to read this entire board yet. I’m still catching up on quite a few things (I took a few days off to travel back to the states).

I know mentioned (and I think?), I’ve been helping out with programming. I’m currently fixing little bugs around the site and fixing links where they don’t match up or images are broken. Something I just fixed like five minutes ago was the head shots in your forum preferences.

oh god. Some background of my skills — I’ve spent the past six months interning in Israel at two different startups in programming and before that I did 2 years in college studying Computer Science. At my first internship, I spent the time learning AngularJS (a framework for Javascript) working on an interface for a third party website (sup fxstreet). My second internship was spent building a web application (with javascript, some java, and a whole lot of APIs from google and open source stuff) that was a map monitoring air pollution. Both internships, while they both required Javascript, were vastly different things.

That’s how it is for working for anything you aren’t used to. Programming can do so many different things that when you go to work for a new place you seriously are lost at first. Like I said, I’ve been starting out with small things to get familiar with the system Subeta uses. I’m most familiar with Javascript and Subeta is sort of a mixture of it with PHP. The way some things are set up aren’t necessarily how I would do it (because I have a different background from the other programmers on site).

I can tell you guys some of the code is very old and I can understand the frustrations Keith, Mike, Grace have had. My goal is to be able to help them with the bigger things soon.

It really hurts me that Subeta isn’t the best it could be. I, along with the rest of staff, have put so many hours into Subeta. I was recently staying with on my way back from Israel and we spent the entire week I was with her working on Peka-boo. I sat there fixing small bugs, fixing item rarities (so many items guys), and doing anything I could to help her out.

[quote=3. Pings. I have a short attention span and I easily forget everything. I require pings for existing. I need them back. I also need forum groups back if they're not already (they might be).[/quote]

What are all of the problems with pings? I've seen them referenced quite a bit as having issues but I haven't found a definitive source to the issues (I've only recently started to look into forum-related issues)

I know that there were issues pinging from the OP and that is now functional and fixed.

Amber and I also just pushed out changes that should stop the pesky "you cannot double post" error. Please let me know if you continue to experience those issues

We'll also likely make a larger announcement or news post about the changes that we've updated this week

Ah, ok! I'll take a look at group pings

Could either of you name a few specific groups? Going to take a look into the amount of users in them/where the script could bottleneck/etc

Thanks for the groups. Will look into these.

As for the HA forums - is it just group pings or pings in general?

Looking over the script, I just found a bug that limits group pings in two forums (Human Avatars and Pets) which had the same forum IDs as the old Advertising and Wanted.

I've updated to look for the new IDs so now Advertising and Wanted will not have pings

Perfect. This should be fixed now. Let me know if it still persists

We should also start to see some improvements in group ping processing. I'm not sure if it is the perfect solution for large groups (with several hundred or a few thousand members) but let's see how this works

Thinking of a few back up plans (batch processing, etc)

P&B is actually screened by and who read through all of the threads and fix out when they can. Some issues are escalated up to us and are categorized as critical, high, medium, and low. Some of these issues, unfortunately, fall into the latter categories and take a bit longer to be resolved. We also have another bucket of reports that are sent in from the staff-side which relate to tickets, internal processing, and related. Put bluntly, it is easy for something to fall through the cracks when it isn't critical or blatantly killing the site.

I know this response might not bring much solace, but we are aware of it. I don't want to sound like a broken record saying that we are working on it, but we are conscious of it and we want to improve our turn around times. Sometimes we (as humans on earth) just do not realize how much time passes between things. Things pop up. Meetings are moved and postponed. And before we realize it - five weeks have gone by and we are still in the same place.

Please don't think that it takes a thread and a large amount of users before we address problems on the site. That's not true. And I think another takeaway from this is that we do not always vocalize the changes. We post on threads and respond to individual tickets but users shouldn't feel responsible for having to hunt down our posts. This also goes hand in hand with that some of the issues that were addressed in this thread (among others) as broken are things that I fixed last weekend, or even two weekends ago, but the fact that none of it was really publicized (and some errors only happen every so often, like pinging 2000 users in a group) that it is very easy for users to think that things are still broken, especially when they haven't been told otherwise. I think this touches the communication points that mentioned.

I posted in another thread earlier today but we are going to post an announcement/news post about some of the bug fixes today.

I just pushed a fix that should make sending group pings to newCW and other large forum groups almost instant. The tradeoff is that it won't send one of those notification bubbles. I'm working on that right now - but for now at least you get the event :)

I'm one of those one that dares to take Saturday and Sunday off, but I'm here now and have done a lot of reading on this board. I'd be happy to answer any remaining questions that didn't get around to, or any follow-ups from that.

Additionally, since I do a lot of the back end work, I can speak to a little more details as to what Rah meant when she said we were doing okay financially. We are essentially breaking even each month, with a lot of hard work. It's been that way for the last year or two, so this is nothing new, but it definitely means that cash is tight all the time. We've reduced expenses across the board to try and make up the difference, as well as the initiatives you guys have seen onsite to try and keep the income where we expect it to be. Because we're so small, we don't carry any large swaths of debt, which is great, but it also means that every cent we earn each month goes into expenses, every month.

As you can probably guess, we target a pretty small demographic of internet gamers. The "pet site" isn't exactly the most on trend content out there, and active user numbers are falling across almost all of our competitor sites. We're being impacted by this as well as people move on (either to another game, with their lives [?!], etc). One of our big initiatives for the long term is to combat this by bringing in new content that has broad appeal - things that are easy for new users to understand, get into, and enjoy on our site without feeling like they need to have started a long time ago. This is also why we typically take a pretty relaxed stance on "retirements" and tend to bring things back around every couple of years - while we want to reward our long-term users for their time and dedication, we also want to be careful that we don't want to alienate anyone new from being successful either.

On that note, while we appreciate the sentiment of doing a separate fundraiser, the easiest and most direct way to fund us is to buy Cash Shop Credits - simple as that. Even if there aren't things in the Cash Shop that you're interested in buying, you can sell your CSC in your shop or trade it for things you do want. The greatest amount of your hard-earned money gets to us that way, because the fees we get charged from our providers (Paypal and Stripe) are lower than the fees that crowdsourced fundraising sites would charge. For instance, for every transaction on Paypal, we get charged 2.2% + $0.30 of your purchase. For Stripe, it's 2.9% + $0.30. Kickstarter would take 5% off the top of anything we would raise. By supporting us directly through the Cash Shop, more of your money goes right back into Subeta (which it ALL does).

The other piece of the puzzle for us is bringing in, and more importantly, KEEPING new users. So for people who aren't able to (or don't want to) contribute financially to Subeta, we always ask that you refer new people to play, and to help them learn the ropes of the site so they have a chance to get into it. Now, we understand that the state of the experience for new users is not in good shape, so one of our priorities is improving that, simplifying site navigation and generally making it easier for new users to get the hang of what we're all about. We're working on some changes to the referral system to give you better incentive to try and hook your friends. :)

I hope that gives you guys a "big picture" overview of where we're at - like I said, I'm happy to answer as many of your questions as I can. If I don't have the answer directly, I'll go find someone who does!

One of the biggest things I struggle with in my position is seeing people speculate that we're rolling in dough, that we "have to be making tons of money" for this reason or that reason, and not being able to explain how that just isn't the case, as much as we'd like it to be. We're like any other small business, there are peaks and valleys, and we're hoping that by continuing to work to get better, even if it's sloppy at times, we're going to be able to push through the tougher times. The most important thing I can stress to you guys is that we're doing everything in our power to be responsible with the income we get and to put it to work directly for the site. That will always be my number one priority (mainly because I can't program or draw). ;)

About Kickstarter: This is something I've thought about a lot. There have been so many awesome advancements in technology over the past two years (node.js, meteor, angular, etc) that have made building a website that is dynamic incredibly simple. Unfortunately we don't have access to those technologies because we're stuck in 2008 and have to continue putting bandaids on the backend, rewriting things to the best ability that we can while still using the same essential data structures. When we rewrite something like achievements, it has to be rewritten in a way that it still integrates with parts of the site from four+ years ago.

I've thought a lot about starting a kickstarter for a Subeta V2, with a budget entirely for programmers (that aren't me) and a brand new concept from the ground up to make Subeta a game from 2014 with features that people expect from pet games these days. Breeding, roaming, etc. However it turns out this isn't really possible. We wouldn't be able to transfer data from Subeta V1 to V2 because the games would be so different that people would lose years of hard work on Subeta, and that isn't something we ever want to do. So it's continuing the small incremental changes on Subeta that works best for us.

About Subeta: Game mechanics are something we weren't good at for a long time. Unlimited shops, wishlists, forum groups, FREE BEER, etc, are things that have really hurt the site in the long run. We should have made it so that things in the wardrobe stay there for economic reasons, the same as every other collection. We have done so many things to make the experience better for users that now we're paying for it because "unlimited" never works years down the line.

I think that "alive and well" is hard to define. Flight Rising is doing very, very well (it's a fun game!) and has a lot of really good game mechanics to keep you hooked, but AFAIK the other "pet sites" (wajas, aywas, neopets, etc) have seen declining year over year traffic the same Subeta has, regardless of how strong the community still is.

Ages ago, we talked about the rewrite and how it was going to be a complete redo for Subeta. That was the wardrobe (which is why it's in a frame, it's actually a separate site!) and it didn't work out well. We couldn't be rewriting the site in the background without devoting people to the current site, and it ended up being a huge problem that we abandoned. And now we've got a major feature of the site (wardrobe) running on entirely separate code, which sucks.

With things like the achievements and the forums, that's what we're doing. Those are two things that are actually basic foundations of the site, and "systems" that are used across the entire site. Achievements are called on every page and are used for tracking user progress as much as they're used to reward user achievement.

I get the idea of it being appealing from the users end to "just take the site down" but that doesn't actually do anything. We still have to write all of the code (happens over weeks/months, not days) and implement it into the entire site. Downtime wouldn't have helped any of the recent code pushes (maybe achievements, we could have moved them all over manually instead of having users import it themselves) so it's not something we've really bothered to do.