Legacy Shops Retirement Plan!

EDIT: For those who don't know what a legacy shop is, legacy shops are older shops created before the updates we made in 2016. If you have a legacy shop, it will show up with an exclamation mark symbol next to it in your shops list to make it clear. If you joined the site more recently, you should have nothing to worry about. :)

We understand that removing items from legacy shops can be a laggy, frustrating affair - and that's the fault of crumbly legacy code, not you! To solve this, we've created a new tool to streamline the process of transferring items out of your legacy shops.

Found here, the new "Move Items to Vault" tool will transfer items into your vault - into any vault category of your choice. Simply click a button to start the transfer; it will happily chug along behind-the-scenes, and you'll receive a sidebar notification when it is done. Once the items are in your vault, they'll be easier to access and deal with, and you can take your time sorting them from there :)

Without further ado, here's a mini-FAQ on how this works and what you might like to know:

How long will the transfer take to finish? This is hard to say, and depends on several factors such as the size of your shop and how many other shops are being processed at the same time. The item transfer itself is very fast; In testing, a legacy shop with over 22,200 unique items finished transferring in about 30 minutes.

Once I click "Move Items", how can I tell that the transfer is working? You will be able to see the items appearing into your vault.

What happens when the transfer is done?

• Any profits in your legacy shop till will be added to your on-hand amount.
• The now-empty legacy shop will be deleted.
• You will receive a sidebar notification informing you that the transfer is done!

Won't these big item transfers cause the website to lag? Transferring everything at once would definitely break the site, so your items will be put in a queue and processed at a controlled rate (every few milliseconds). This happens behind-the-scenes, and the rate is controlled so that it cannot put too much strain on the website.

You should not experience increased lag while this happens, since it will not be happening on the webpages you visit. You may experience increased lag when accessing your vault while the transfer is in progress, because of items getting continuously added into it.

Is there a risk that I will lose items if something goes wrong? We've put several failure checks in the code to anticipate and prevent this from happening. For example, if an item fails to get placed in your vault, it does not get deleted from your legacy shop; the transfer attempt is cancelled and the code tries again a few milliseconds later.

With all that said, click here to check it out! A link to this will also be added soon to the usual Legacy Shops page and/or the navigation bar for easier access.

Legacy shops will be officially retired in April, 2020. We will announce a more specific date as soon as we have it. On that date, the Legacy Shops page will be taken down. The Move to Vault tool will remain up until further notice, as a way to remove items from your legacy shop.

At some point AFTER that date, we may schedule downtime to migrate remaining items out of legacy shops. We will make sure to give ample notice if that happens.

For those asking what a legacy shop is: In 2016 (three years ago!) we made some major updates to our user shops system. Legacy shops are all the shops that were created before that update and still running on the old system.

If you joined Subeta after those changes, you should have nothing to worry about :)

If you still have any legacy shops, you'll know because they will show up with a "caution" symbol in your shops list, the page for them looks totally different and you can't change the items prices, only remove items.

These FAQ sections should answer your question :)

Yes, and yes :) The transfer happens in the background, so you can keep playing the site as usual while you wait for it to finish.

Hm... I'd really like to work with you to figure out what this issue is, because the vault shouldn't be so slow, and I'm not able to reproduce the issue even with larger vaults. I don't actually think it is related to the number of items in your vault, because there are larger vaults than yours that don't have the same problem. Would you mind opening a ticket (say that Bug told you to send it to him), and I will work with you personally to figure out what is going on and what I can do to fix it :)

As for the Fragmentizer, we know that one has frequent issues when crunching a large number of items. We understand it's a serious problem so we've been working on a way to address that as well. It is not a quick fix but I'd like to at least let people know it's something we're taking seriously and trying to figure out a solution for.

Unfortunately not, sorry.

Oh dear, yeah. It is a known issue that the pagination stopped working one day. We apologize for that inconvenience.

This is an example of the old code crumbling more and more over time, and it's part of why we are pushing to finally retire it D: We have not updated that page in ages, but as the rest of the world moves on and the rest of our code becomes more modern, this older code just... breaks in unexpected ways, even though no one touched it. And it's always very difficult and time-consuming to fix.

I know this may not help much, but I'd like to reassure you that your item data will stay safe even if something unexpected goes wrong with the transfer. There are multiple checkpoints in the code to make sure that item data is deleted ONLY IF the transfer was successful. In an unlikely worst case scenario that the transfer isn't able to finish successfully, it's still impossible for it to delete any item data that shouldn't be deleted.

Unfortunately, those categories will not carry over, sorry.

The Move-to-Vault tool will remain available after that date, until further notice. Eventually, we may schedule downtime to automatically transfer whatever is left over. In that case, we will either automatically transfer them into user vaults or come up with a different solution - but inactive users will still keep their items somehow. We won't delete them in any case :)

No. If you have a legacy shop, it will be really clear because there will be a caution symbol next to its name, and it will look totally different from your other shops if you visit it. (The caution symbol is a triangle with an exclamation mark in it.)

Good thinking! Done. Thank you <3

I thought about this, but it ended up not being feasible, because the newer shops have a smaller limit on the number of items you can have inside them. A lot of legacy shops have many times over that limit of items in them, and the overflow could get messy and have more risk of error.

I understand you're feeling really frustrated about all of this, and that's valid. It is a difficult situation and I wish it were smoother and easier too. Legacy shops have been a bit of a thorn in our side as well, for a while now. The code is really old, and as the rest of the world (and the rest of our code) modernizes, legacy shops keep breaking in unexpected and sudden ways even though no one's been touching the code for them - for example, the issues you mention with being unable to see or sell items from your legacy shops. Nothing changed in the code to cause those issues, but it is just crumbling apart and cannot be practically maintained any longer, and this is why we're pushing to finally retire it.

We also understand how frustrating it is to have to move everything over, especially since it isn't possible for certain information (like prices and categories) to be retained. We are trying really hard to make this as smooth as possible, given the limitations and that some things are frustratingly not possible.

For instance, I know it's messy to just dump thousands of items into your vault. That's why I added an option to be able to choose a vault category to transfer the items into. You can create a new vault category and have the items be transferred into that one, to keep them separate from your special/holiday items. Then you can sort items from that vault category into everywhere else, such as your new shops.

Thanks for your questions and concerns. I hope this was able to address them <3

No change on this right now. It is still a possibility for the future :)

Quick debrief on the downtime just now! :)

There were a lot of transfer requests coming in - a little more than what our server plan was allowed! We took the website down for a little bit and performed a quick upgrade. It went smoothly and we brought the website back up. No data was lost; the transfers simply paused during the upgrade/downtime and they are now back up and running again. We should be good now after this upgrade, but we're still monitoring ready to respond quickly in case anything else comes up. <3

Yes, everything will be moved. Again we are very sorry about this and I understand the anxiety.

For some people they cannot even see the first page because the shop is too large to load. We have tested on a massive shops like that, that didn't load at all, - for example, the one mentioned in the first post was super large and it still moved all 22,200+ items successfully. It will take a bit of time but nothing will be deleted without making absolutely certain that it's made it into your vault first! And you will be able to watch the items trickle into your vault if it helps with peace of mind. <3

I'm here now to look into your report now. Since you've also made a ticket, let's continue this there. (I'm working with the UA who has your ticket.)

I think there was a misunderstanding here. It wasn't possible for us to give a warning before the site went down yesterday because no one foresaw it. The error happened unexpectedly, crashed the website, and maintenance was required to bring the site back up. When we're able to give a warning, we always do (for example, we always make news posts when we schedule downtime)

No, I meant let's continue in your ticket. You can put the information you have there there. It is just to help us resolve things more quickly and it will help us understand what happened. I'll grab your ticket in a bit since the UA who has it is off for the day. <3

I know you're feeling really worried right now, so I just wanna reassure you real quick that it will be okay! I think the data is stuck in limbo (not lost), but we have it safely backed up either way. So worst case scenario we can get it back from the backups. I hope this can give you some peace of mind while I look into it!

Sure, file a ticket and I can double-check for you. You and can be reassured that so far, we have not confirmed any problems with items being lost.

Unfortunately, making those shops unlimited at first was part of what made them so inefficient. Thus, while increasing the limits on current shops is not out of the question, they will always have limits. We would like users to use their vaults for unlimited item storage.

I understand what you are saying. I'd love to find a compromise with you given both of our limitations. Could you let me know where you'd like your items to go, and let's see what solutions are possible. EDIT: Same to :)

I've gone ahead and done added this functionality to the vault, for you and anyone else who would like it. You can now find vault categories in the "move to destination" dropdown at the bottom of the page, listed after your shops and galleries, so you can bulk recategorize items in your vault.

Thanks for reaching out. I'm going to post an update about this soon. And no, it will not be April 1st. I'll give at least 2 weeks notice before the date we choose.