I'm aware that people are going to have different perceptions of what they think I should be doing, and I'm going to fall short in some area or other for someone, but I'm not sure what you in particular, , are wanting from me with this board?

I spend a huge amount of my time both drawing and managing my team. I reply to posts when I'm pinged, I sometimes hint on suggestion boards that we like what's been suggested but I don't like to outright say 'Yes this is happening' everywhere, I like to have the items appear and for people to be pleased. I've recently been creating user suggestion or feedback boards for things that I actively know users and the art staff can work together with to create things that are both wanted and loved. I've been working with my team on correcting old items based on feedback boards given.

I often post as Subetateam or as NPCs. Every pet release is actually me. Generally anything to do with pets is me. I've been working on Pet Spotlight, pet overlays, things like that. The last few times I've tried being conversational with users I've basically been told that's not what they want, and that my time should be spent fixing things. So I've been doing that!

If people would like to talk to me about the art, or discuss anything then I am happy to. I keep an eye on Site Feedback/Revamp Feedback and the suggestions forums mainly to answer where I think I'm needed, but if I'm not pinged I could miss something that is deemed important. My primary function is behind the scenes - just because you don't see me posting, doesn't mean I'm not there most of the time!

Alex hasn't been proper staff for... ever? Last I knew he was left marked as staff in case we ever needed a hand in a pinch/something he coded/etc. But no, he isn't officially staff and has moved on to bigger and googlier things.

When we post as SubetaTeam or NPCs it doesn't mark the account as active, we usually only ever need to log in for that to update a HA or something.

We do the best to coordinate time off, but things do happen. For example I had a lot of work to do this coming weekend since I graduated last, but my grandmother died and I'll be gone kind unexpectedly now. We do everything we can to always have someone on-call (remember, Amber can do a fair amount of programming now, too), but having someone staffed 24 hours a day is not realistic for our site.

Well I will 100% own up to not being here since like Thursday through yesterday because I've been volunteering (something I'd had planned for a couple of months, so, no, Keith's problems with all his spotty internet and such weren't going to stop me from doing it). But if anything had come up that needed my attention I'd have made time for it. And, trust me, the UAs and Amber and Ariel have no qualms about coming to me with things that are a big deal even if they know I'm taking some time off. I have legitimately worked from my phone walking around Epcot while my mom complained that we were supposed to be on vacation.

Honestly, if I didn't trust that my coworkers would come to me, I probably wouldn't ever feel comfortable taking time off. The fact that I know they will if they need me is what makes it okay for me to step away for a few days at a time a couple of times a year.

- I'll talk about art with ANYONE :D But yes, seriously, we have offsite apps and task managers where we do most of our discussion and work. Everything has been running pretty smoothly lately, I'm happy to say (art department wise). Some lovely things coming soon :D (I'm personally just doing a little update to the Riverside and Veta maps :D)

- I'd love to give more hints (like above!) as to what's being worked on, but I also really just like the surprise! Plus so many things change prior to release that I'd hate to be all 'look at this new thing we're working on!' and then that thing totally changes and people are left wondering on it. Like the bird watching feature - that almost got released around Vesnali, but then I felt like it wasn't quite right yet and we pushed it back to this month and added a whole new dimension to it.

My "last online" status isn't really much of an indicator - most of my work goes on via a dev on my computer, linked to a database on my computer. When I feel good about the amount of progress on a feature it gets uploaded to my keith.dev site, where other staff members (and sometimes users) can test it.

That means I can spend days working out of Asana (our task management software) and slack (our staff member chatting area) without touching the site. I get all of my bugs via Asana (where they are prioritized by most important to least important) and that's where I communicate with and the UAs on fixing user bugs, which I do mostly via directly working in the database, not on the site. We plan our site features and events in Asana, upload images to it, etc.

A lot of my time recently has been spent working on battle features (including the recently launched and then relaunched scroll library) and setting up new servers using HHVM which has required rewriting bits of older Subeta code (mostly items that use custom code, and instead switching them to functions) so that we can reduce our overall server bill and streamline our web servers. Those kinds of things get done without ever touching the site. I've also been playing with trying to restructure the "beta" (aka: way overdue) wardrobe into emberjs which means significantly less work in the long run but a TON of work making it happen in the short term. These are things that take a lot of time and testing on a personal server, and you won't see the benefits of for awhile (if ever in the case of the wardrobe because ember is HARD)

(Also - Alx hasn't worked for Subeta in 4+ years.)

Those things are in Asana, and are being worked on. There is progress on the wardrobe (and I just said I'm reworking it to work with Ember, that isn't what it uses now :)) and sometimes other things take priority. Auto fill is important, but if there is a critical bug that gets moved to the top of the list, it takes priority.

A lot of those bugs aren't even seen by most users, they're the kind of things that block accounts, remove access, and are things that the UAs need help with. It sucks, but they are more important.

- Impending summer event? What is this impending summer event you speak of? :x :x :x (secrets, we has them)

- I still play the game, but I work a lot more hours now. When I've talked to users they want so much more from me than what they used to, which I am not saying is unexpected or wrong, but I often feel that my presence in a colloquial sense is unwanted, so I've gotten a little quieter. I wish I could chat like I used to be able to! I've instead just been putting my focus into getting the art department's quality up and creating things for the users to love. I don't know, maybe eventually I'll develop tougher skin or I'll do enough to have the users happy having me around again, but at the moment I'm working on caring about this beloved site from a quieter perch. (But I will always be there to talk if people want to c:)

(Also, anon person - thank you. That was very much appreciated ;__;)

We actually haven't ported anything over in awhile. We're still working on the bootstrap branch (and can probably push it, I decided to instead keep both libraries and slowly move to bootstrap instead of just trying to rewrite all of the CSS on the site to match it). Bootstrap is just significantly more kept up than our existing library (semantic-css) and also has a lot more external and tool support.

As far as the javascript library, right now the wardrobe is using ... nothing. It's written in jQuery and just a bunch of AJAX calls which is fine for a smaller page (pages like achievements) but when you get into something as complicated as the wardrobe with so many moving parts, I think that generally it'd be better to let something like Ember do the heavy lifting, especially because the people building it are much, much smarter than I am in building these kinds of applications.

^. ember is just better written than anything I'll write. It's also complicated and written for entirely new sites, not to be sort of tossed into a site like Subeta on top of other stacks. It'll require having a page that only has your account information and not the sidebar (like the beta wardrobe now) because those things (old javascript) will interfere with Ember. It'll be much faster and easier to edit in the future, though, and Ember gets patches done to it on speed and data handling weekly, unlike code that I'd write that we'd push and probably not touch for awhile.

So the benefits to the users (and to the programmers who have to work on the wardrobe in the future) is MUCH greater than the cost of maybe trying to make it work and spending a week or two fumbling and decided that it isn't going to happen. Unfortunately if I have to make that call (and I have had to make that call a lot of times before) it means that I don't have anything to push.

Battle wasn't "pushed ahead" of other things. Battle was something we'd been working on for awhile (especially the instant loading) and we felt like it was a good opportunity to work on all of it and get it out. A lot of people who battle frequently are really pleased and happy they got that focus, and are one of the parts of the site that feel the most frequently ignored. The spotlight moves around the site and that time it didn't land on something you use that time.

I'm going to keep an eye on this thread but I hope that we've explained the OP well enough. We're working really hard on summer stuff now, so we have less time to respond to threads :)

- yes! That was something I/we tried for Peka-Boo last year, and I've been wanting to add those sorts of little touches to Subeta to make it more 'living'. This month it's obviously a mixture of Riverside, Veta and Peka, and...well there are a few other touches to be made to these maps and one of the maps that lead off from them... basically, I love the idea of actually having a visible night and day on Subeta, and all the potential it entails :D (Eventually I'd like to set up the times of the world so that night hits at different times for different areas, but just getting the visuals up first is pretty fun!)

FWIW I say this to programmers on a near daily basis and get an earful of why it isn't an easy fix a lot of the time. If being behind the scenes has taught me anything, it's that things are often not as easy to fix as you'd think.

It's also a matter of making it work now. It already has issues with the size of wardrobes, it has problems if you have multiple sorting options selected, and it has problems if you move in / out of panes over 30 minutes, it'll break chrome and run out of memory, which is obviously not ideal, haha.

So I could obviously finish up the new wardrobe with the code that it has now, but it wouldn't work very well and that isn't something that can just be fixed. :/

Taking the site down doesn't actually resolve anything. We're working on the same things if it's up or down.

I realize this is a hot topic and it's easy for tempers to flare, so I just wanted to drop a reminder to please avoid insulting or targeting other members/posters and discuss the subject matter rather than the individual discussing said subject matter.

Otherwise, keep on keepin' on! Constructive feedback and productive discussion are always appreciated.