If over 2000 items are donated they're all still in the DC, it's that only a certain amount are loaded into the cache at one time to be claimed. So everything is still in the DC, the code takes care of it without a staff member having to handle it manually.

We also didn't add back in all 40K at once, we went with 5K (edit: Keith had put 10K in there) to test the changes. I'm going to check with Keith about the feedback on names or not or alternatives like that hover, and we may do more then.

I also checked with Keith to make sure I was correct on the 'why 2K'; to even get a precise count for each refresh per user the DC has to search the database, and putting a cap on the amount of items it pulls to count/build the cache is less resource-intensive.

That is part of the caching; basically, someone picked up that item while the info was being sent to you. There is not an easy way to change how that works, unfortunately, for reasons I'm going to go into below as a more general summary and update/conclusion.

The Donation Center is 15-year-old code, and this was not the first time it had issues with volume of donations. Amber or Keith have had to clear it before, or add servers to deal with lag. Both usernames and total number of items were slowing the page down severely, to the point of it being inaccessible at times during particular large donations. But it's a wonderful feature, and we want to make sure it works! So Keith changed the queries in the existing code. This included usernames because that was literally one of the things breaking the page.

There was a clear preference for names or some kind of credit mechanism and Keith did look into trying some solutions from this thread based off of that, such as a hover or a page afterwards crediting the donator or even an anonymous toggle switch. Unfortunately, though, it's not that simple. Right now the "donated" field in the database is a plain text representation of the username, so any method would have to search the user database for username (a more expensive query than by ID), and then show the user hover information, which includes active pet, avatar, achievement data. Changing that, adding anything additional to the page, or putting in more steps after the fact, would require a code rewrite and that would mean updating all of the places that you can donate an item from now to ensure that they're inserted in the new format. This would then involve changes to quickstock and the inventory page...

mentioned even temporary blackouts in features being concerning and that's very true, and a rewrite plus testing for names/credit could potentially introduce that into the core features that everyone uses. That is a messy trade-off for a (very) nice-to-have and the conclusion reached was that, as much as we'd like to be able to implement it, right now it's not practical.

Keith initially put 10K candy hearts in the DC as part of testing changes, and to make up for the 45K that had to be deleted has manually added more in. This is going to be the last candy heart haul from SubetaTeam, and is directly related to the generosity of the community during Survival. Thank you all so much, these candy hearts are because of kind users even without their names shown!

TL;DR: This feedback was useful, and Keith was checking into the thread to see what we could do. This is also useful for being able to know what a new system should include, an anon toggle is a very useful idea. We appreciate people pitching in and love seeing the Donation Center put to use as a way to redistribute items from the community to the community! But unfortunately we won't be able to put usernames back onto the items, existing methods are incredibly database-intensive and the page would most likely break under high load. New coding would require updating other parts of the site and would be a long-term project, but now we know what you would want to see in that. Thank you!