FYI - We are reading these threads and take all of this feedback to heart. A lot of assumptions here are correct -- it's kind of a death spiral situation. The less people who are looking for a site like Subeta (no matter the amount of changes we could be able to make to it) means less income. Less income means that we have to make cuts, either on engineering or on art or on support. Each of these teams is running a skeleton crew now.

Our options are:

1. To sell. Sell to a company that we "hope" would be kind and take care of Subeta the way that we always envisioned, and keep on our incredibly talented staff. If I thought this were a possibility, I'd sell to that company tomorrow and ask for none of the sale to go to me personally. I'm long past being Subeta's "ideas guy" and pushing for the most innovative things to happen, and I understand that. I'm mostly here to keep the wheels on the bus, make structural changes and infrastructural changes, and decide our future technologies and train up on them.
2. Have a patreon or a kickstarter or some kind of bug fundraising event. This could be sent out to old users who might have nostalgia for the site. The concern here is that people would transfer from buying things on Subeta to backing us on either of those sites, and so we wouldn't really be gaining anything, and instead we'd be shuttling 20-30% of the income to those sites to run those services. We could actually lose money.

We're really considering the feedback on this thread, and take it seriously. I want Subeta to keep running forever for all of you (and have paid out of my own pocket in the past year to make that happen) and be a sustainable place.

I REALIZE that this post sounded very dire -- which it isn't. We're mostly able to operate through the year, and have our "on" seasons and our "off" seasons. I'd love to come up with a way to spread those out through the year, so if something like Pateron or our own custom built "monthly charge" system works like that, that'd be great.

I think we could expand gold accounts to encompass this, and have it feel more like you're pitching into help the site vs just getting a set of features.

also yes the forums suck. that's my fault, i had no idea what I was doing and consistently had never built big systems full of text. I've been looking into moving us to a discourse based system but integrating that with our existing user base is... not easy.

This is lame, and I hope that you know it. The people who work on Subeta are employees who are given time off because they do a very difficult job. Each employee has a number of vacation days a year (just like at any other company) and they can use those to take paid vacations. It's called taking care of your employees.

Honestly - we'd budgeted for it, and then had to divert funds to paying server costs and a larger than expected tax bill (a state decided that they would like us to not only collect sales tax on our sales, but also charged us for 5 years of not doing that, even though it wasn't the law).

Unfortunately things like this happen when you're working on a razor thin budget, and we have to be able to quickly make moves.

I'll again just point out that for a long time I was the most expensive person on payroll, and haven't been paid by Subeta in at least two years. I'm still doing work, but it's not worth it for me to take funds from those other things.

We areeeeeeee still really working on the teahouse. We're in this weird inbetween state where we're implementing things via laravel and react, and learning how to do that well, while still making QoL updates on the site itself. It's weird, and hard, and is a place that we've been in a bunch of times (mostly my fault) but we have a real plan for the teahouse now are have been working on implementing it.

is planning on posting a more in-depth post of some things we have planned, but I want to quickly say we are def looking at this board and discussing things (like cash shop things!).

Some things I’m working on (and have strict deadlines for myself this time!!!) over the next month is addressing the game pay out for a lot of games. If you follow site updates, you’ll see I’ve updated coin machine some and fishing. I’m working on getting all the games up to being worth it. In some cases, like fishing, it means adjusting some code on the back end. In other cases, it’s changing the sP pay out /item payout.

After talking with , I’ve realized that I’m horrible about not wanting to push things out until they’re 100% where I want them with all the cool features I have planned, etc. I’m talking [b]Item Menus[/i] specifically. So I’m going to push out the base part I’ve done, and slowly add more changes and features throughout the month. I think it’ll work better on projects like this that aren’t holiday/plot based. I feel horrible when I promise something on site update and don’t get it out in a timely matter because i’m like OKAY BUT WHAT IF I ALSO ADD THIS!!!

I want to personally say, I appreciate y'all a lot. Some of you, I might butt heads with a bit on things, but I'm always happy to see y'all are just as passionate about Subeta as we are. I'm just as invested in making sure this site sticks around forever as you are -- after all, I've spent more of my life on Subeta than not. Which is wild.

As mentioned, we appreciate your feedback and have been discussing it all week. We can acknowledge it's true we all have an issue with being a bit too ambitious at times, and it leads to problems with timely follow-through. I want to talk a little bit about what's upcoming and how we are planning to address your concerns.

We are working on a few changes to the home page that you see when you're not logged in, with the goal of getting on the same layout as the rest of the website. We are also going to change the sign-up bonus to something substantially better than 5,000 sP. These changes will go out on Tuesday. It may not be the final version, but as mentioned, we are going to try and deploy things more incrementally so you can see and benefit from changes even if it's not perfect yet. There is always time to improve it further after it's out.

We've already discussed several ideas for sprucing up our off-site social media and even off-site advertising once the new home page is done, but due to various legal and practical reasons we can't share more about those plans right now. We think an updated home page + increasing off-site reach will be a big help!

In the programming department, and I are re-evaluating our priorities, and I will be shifting a larger percentage of my time to working on the new pet profiles system as we've deemed this to be one of the highest priority projects - one that is also blocking progress on our mobile layout. You may hear more about this from me in the near future. Unfortunately, this means other lower-priority projects will be delayed, but we think this is the best way to balance my time. I will still be doing bug fixes.

I know there were also some concerns about various UA department tasks brought up in this topic. In case you missed it, addressed these ">here:

She had also ">previously posted this in response to concerns about rule changes taking a long time:

(If you missed these - Just a reminder we have an Admin Post Highlights page in addition to our normal Admin Posts page where you can catch up on all the admin updates you may have missed.)

:) That's something that's being discussed.

We've actually talked about it, and we don't actually want to hold on to the unique naming system any more. There are a lot of great points raised here, and we really agree with a lot of them! (It's late in my work day, I'm not going to quote them all, but user retention, tribute pets, modern petsite habits, name hoarding are the ones off the top of my head)