Programmer Status Report

For the past 2 months, we've been prioritizing foundational work on Subeta v2, as well as re-implementing the Custom Wearables system in v2 with significant improvements. This work has taken nearly 100% of our focus; the good news is that we're on track to finish it by mid-December! Bugfixes (and other work) have been mostly on hold while we work on this; once it's completed, that will free up bandwidth for other things again.

Our priorities after that will be:

☕ Hair Salon! This will be our first priority! We've spent months playing whack-a-mole with the Hair Salon this year; fix one issue, and another pops up. Our plan now is to rewrite major parts of the code behind this, taking what we've learned from these issues to replace the current code with code that's robust, well-designed - and free of the current Hair Salon's endless bugs! We're aiming to complete this work by February.

☕ Planned Cash Shop Subscriptions features: that is, adding the ability to change payment methods, upgrade, and downgrade subscriptions without needing to cancel and re-subscribe. We are hoping to completely this work by some time in January :)

☕ Pet Profiles v2 - We haven't forgotten our promise for the new Pet Profiles system; after we've finished the two goals above, pet profiles will move into priority again. It is too early to give a timeline for completing this, but I'm looking forward to resuming work on it! There are so many cool new features planned for this, you will love it :)

While I have your attention, here are a few mini updates regarding various bugfixes, bug reports, planned features, etc:

☕ Site Layout-related Bug Reports These are not going to be fixed anymore, since we are working on a new site layout - so it doesn't make sense to spend time fixing the current one. (The only exception is if some new error occurs that makes the site unusable.)

☕ Minigames A few games, like Stargazer, have been glitched or taken temporarily offline. These are still on our radar; most of these need to be coded anew, so we'll rewrite them when we can find the time/resources to do so. No ETA on these; just wanted to mention that we do intend to address these and bring back the ones that have been down!

☕ Broken Avatars / Broken Wardrobe There is a new megathread for if your avatar is a broken image, and/or if the wardrobe is completely broken and unusable for you (like it's just a blank page, an error, etc) - here: Megathread: Broken avatar image, and/or wardrobe completely unusable

☕ Filled Wardrobe Achievement Please see this staff update about the broken Filled Wardrobe achievement if you haven't yet: https://subeta.net/forums.php/gotopost/64976448

☕ Subeta V2 Feedback Forum Have any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns about the new version of Subeta we are building at new.subeta.net? There is a forum category where you can voice your thoughts here: https://subeta.net/forums.php/forum/2297/ Please be sure to read the stickied post so you're aware of the participation guidelines in that forum.

Finally - you're more than welcome to ask if there's anything not mentioned above that you'd like a staff update on, and we'll answer what we can! However, please be aware that - unfortunately - some answers will be along the lines of "that's on backlog" or "we've had to pivot to something else for now".

All right, that's all for now! I hope everyone is excited for the upcoming changes to the CW system - and for Luminaire!!! <3

If it wasn't working correctly, could you please remind me what the problem was? I thought the bug report on ornament garlands was the only one we didn't fix last year.

(Also, thanks for the note about the CW link- I fixed it!)

At the moment, we have support for day mode and night mode. It is too early to give any guarantees, but we would very much like to provide color customization options and site themes! So, too early for promises or concrete plans, but we definitely intend to try for this down the line.

Ooh I gotchu. Yes, staff are in support of the suggestion! Better gift blocking options would be great. We haven't posted on the topic because we... just have not had the bandwidth to really look at the suggestions forums for a while. (2020 has really ...been a year.)

By Luminaire this year - unfortunately, no, not with 1.5 hours to go. It might be something we can do during the holiday, but no promises. The thing with gift blocking is that it would be faster to implement if it were more straightforward. As it is, there's like 4 different ways to gift people and if we have options to block non-friends, block anon, block all, etc - to all of those gift options - it just gets complicated real fast. At the same time, I see not everyone would like these to be consolidated, so it's likely this is something that would take more user and staff discussion (which means more time, alas) to figure out exactly how it would work.

Yes, that's still on our radar, but we're not certain yet what we want to do about it. Something we've been discussing in the backend is the suggestion to retire it: Retire "Richest User"?

Good points were brought up both for and against retirement on that topic, and people seem to split in opinion, though the bulk of the discussion happened 3 years ago so I'm not sure if any opinions have changed. However, we came across a new consideration we have to factor in, which is how much strain this ranking calculation can put on the website.

At one point in the past few years, we actually temporarily disabled the richest user ranking because we were trying to pinpoint site lag bottlenecks, and it turns out that was a huge one. Every time you visited the ranking page, it would have to do this MASSIVE computation, where it adds together the sP on hand, sP in vault, and shop till sP (so it has to look in the database to see what shops you have, and get the till amount for each one) - for every account on the website (there are hundreds of thousands of accounts, literally) - and then sort all the numbers, then count how many are richer than you - and this was happening any time anybody visited their Dashboard.

I can't remember how we changed it; I think we just made it compare vault sP only, hoping that would be good enough (and I think this was meant to be temporary), but this results in inaccurate counts since people mostly don't store all their sP in their vault.

So it just may not be feasible to fix the calculation, and even if we can fix it, it might not be worth the server resources it would strain, just for a single achievement. It is a tough call to make, and there's no final decision just yet - which is why we haven't said anything - but yeah, retiring it might be on the table.

The backups are not live databases, they are database dumps (so just massive files, but not in a form that's easily queried.) To actually query a database backup, we have to actually start a new database server, load the dump into it (which usually takes several hours, since the dumps are quite large), and we pay for that server as long as it's running. Running a backup is very expensive and time-consuming, so we don't use the backups unless we really need to.

The computation already excludes frozen and inactive users, but this doesn't help the efficiency that much. The main bottleneck is just the multiple queries required to check for all the different places you can have sP. That's also why we can't easily exclude people below a certain amount of sP, because to figure out who has less than X amount of sP, we have to still calculate how much sP they have.

The problem with coding a "total sP" is that it violates the rule of "single source of truth" which will definitely cause inaccuracies - if we ever update your sP amount but forget to update the total sP along with it, then suddenly they are out of sync and that causes the computation to be incorrect for everyone. This will happen more often than you might think, even if our code is correct, because random flukes can cause queries to break before executing all of them, etc...

I think that only doing the computation once a month is a fine suggestion, but I'm not sure how everyone would feel about an achievement that you can only get if you manage to rank number 1 at a specific day of the month, and if you miss that chance, you don't get another chance until the next month. And knowing that the ranking on your dashboard is only where you ranked last month. You wouldn't get the satisfaction of seeing your rank go up as you get more sP. So I think this solution would just feel bad for a lot of people.

But ultimately the call we may have to make is that, no matter what hacky solutions/workarounds we come up with to make it still work, it's looking to be more effort/resources than we should spend on a single achievement, especially one that most users don't expect to achieve.

Lol you think we have documentation :'(

Oh I think I see what you mean about the old API subdomain. It's been taken care of now.

[edit] If you notice anything like that again in the future, please file a ticket to let us know!

You can bring reports to our attention by posting them in the Problems & Bugs forums. Please note that if there is no staff reply on a report, it doesn't mean it's being ignored, it means it's a lower priority and programmers haven't had the capacity to respond. We do our best to respond quickly to more urgent or significant issues.

If there's an important issue that you think has fallen off our radar but needs to be prioritized, feel free to ping me to the thread with a reminder. Just please be kind - we only have two programmers, neither of whom does Subeta as his fulltime job. and I work on Subeta in our spare time, as much as we can, and we do not take pay. Your patience and understanding helps us stay motivated to keep tackling things as much as we can. <3

As for master lists, we (programmers) keep track privately on our end. We sometimes do make public ones (for instance, we made one for recent site lag related errors here: Residual Site Down Errors (from 4/13/21)) but please note it takes a lot of time to write these public lists - it's a better use of our time to focus on coding, actually getting things fixed, than housekeeping. Our P&B minimods are super helpful and lovely though, so feel free to ping them ( and ) as well with any questions or reminders; you may get a faster response. :)

The threads in P&B are a nice public list of open reports. If you don't see a bug report for an issue, go ahead and make one. It's really fine! Our minimods will help clean up and redirect any accidental duplicates; it happens all the time, it's expected and you won't get in trouble for it. Duplicate threads in P&B are not a big deal for us. Our minimods can also tell you if something has already been addressed, and in many cases can link you the relevant staff post too.

The problem with creating another separate list is that we then have to spend a lot of staff time and effort maintaining it. We have entertained the idea before, but with such limited resources, we wouldn't be able to commit to keeping it updated. The bug report forums sort of keep themselves up-to-date by their nature, and of course, because our minimods do a great job of housekeeping.

[edit] The list we have in the backend needs to stay private because we post private coding information there, that would, at minimum, pose a security risk to expose to the public. We have also been considering the idea of switching to a full-featured, third-party system (think something like Zendesk), but it isn't feasible at the moment due to the cost (both financial and also needing to set up and train everyone on a totally new system)

I appreciate your passion and desire to help! It's one more reason I love Subeta's community.

As has already been mentioned, the threads in P&B are a nice public list of open reports, and having duplicate reports is not a big deal for us. Our minimods can also tell you if something has already been addressed, give status updates, and in many cases can link you the relevant staff post addressing the issue. So, instead of another public list that takes a lot of staff time and effort to maintain, we are focusing our energy on fixing things and building the new site. The minimods do a great job of housekeeping in the official bug report forums and keeping them as an existing public list, and we're incredibly grateful for all of their hard work!

You can create a user-maintained public list of some kind if you like, but any such list will be completely unofficial and staff will not be able to help maintain it, for all of the reasons stated here and in previous posts. If you do create such a list, we ask that you not post it in the Problems & Bugs forum because we use that forum in order to track bug reports as they come in, and it could create additional confusion for users who are reporting bugs.