Thank you for the thread! Lots of valuable feedback here :D

The HA avatars standing on top of everything is a long standing bug, it's on my list!

I made changes last night to the sidebar (to make it more clear that it is collapsable) and to the composting page based on your feedback. We have pretty good control over being able to choose how much fits on the screen for mobile, tablet and desktop. So it's just a little tweak to say, show 4 gourds per row instead of 2, or whatever the limit was.

Places we are in total agreement:

1. Header: This is currently a mess, but one I tried to avoid by using out of the box components from one of the libraries we're using. It ... doesn't exactly fit our need, so I'll just need to write this myself
2. Inventory I just added a note that I recommend continuing to use your regular inventory page for now. A lot of the functionality hasn't been built (feeding to pet, reading to pet) but some vault and wardrobe related work has been done. I might focus on this primarily next week and get it over the finish line, since it has a bunch of moving pieces. One of the reasons I haven't completed this is we have over 1,000 items that have "custom code", e.g. code that Amber copies and pastes between new items. We should never be runnning code that is in an item field, it's such a security risk, and so I need to somehow get those 1,000+ items working, without needing to move them over by hand. Some of this (collections) are already done!
3. I'm going to need more examples of how it looks terrible on mobile. I agree on the header, and those little counting components could look different on mobile but I can 100% promise that page would look way worse on the legacy kumos site! Other areas of that page, like the item display are (IMO) much better on kumos mobile than they would be on the legacy site.

thank you for this! i thought i’d replied earlier, but apparently not 🙇‍♂️ totally agree—there’s a lot of middle ground we can hit that builds on what we’ve got now.

over the past few weeks, i’ve been working with a designer friend who was recently laid off from her tech job and has been freelancing. we’ve landed on some ideas that feel really aligned with this, but getting it all coded (while juggling new features like MM) is no small task.

now that MM is live (and all the underlying functionality too—like melody’s npc agent and shop-buying mechanics, which required fully implementing user shops! there’s a bare-bones version here that isn’t linked anywhere yet, but had to be built to make the system work), i’m refocusing on mobile-friendliness, new themes, and getting everything to feel like subeta.

on a side note: i’ve been following this complete css course, and it’s been super insightful for these kinds of updates. if you’re into front-end or css, i highly recommend it—it’s been shaping a lot of the discussions around design and functionality!

oh, i meant to respond about profiles!

my plan is to do a similar conversion to what we did last time—though i’m guessing most people here won’t remember that 😅. the current user profiles are actually the “v2” profiles, and one of the very first examples of drag-and-drop templating on the internet (predating even zynga’s similar system!).

i started working on pet profiles but didn’t get too far. what you see here on my pet eradication is a “port” of the v1 profile to kumos. it retains the legacy styles and adds a “THIS IS A LEGACY PROFILE” note in the corner. there’s still a ton to do, but the idea is to handle user profiles the same way: you could switch to the “new” profiles (which i have so many plans for!) or stick with your legacy profile, and it’ll render correctly.

i’m so excited to dive deeper into this stuff—it’s exactly what i want to focus on rn 😭 but there’s so much foundational work to get through first 😭

item hovers are on the site! if you go to any page, they should appear when you hover over an item. if they don’t work right away, a quick refresh usually fixes it. there are some bugs rn that can cause them to misfire, but they’re definitely there and show info. clicking on an item will also take you to a page with even more details, like wearable info.

the current appearance bug is a tradeoff for site speed, but it’s being worked on! as for the HAs, they’re 100% still here—they’re a core feature of the site. not having them in the sidebar doesn’t mean we’re phasing them out or anything like that! hope that clears it up.

i totally get where you’re coming from! adding those widgets is definitely doable, i just haven’t had a chance to tackle all the legacy ones yet. i’ll see if i can get an avatar one wired up for you today 💖

I'm not sure if you noticed, but I did finally push out a fix for the luminaire theme on Kumos! If you scroll to the bottom of the page and use the dropdown, you can select Luminaire (it's the bottom one!) - I need to move that toggle to a place that makes more sense, but I haven't built out the "preferences" area yet.

1. the dark mode themes are going to fight me to the end 😭 I'll work on brightening those up, they were way too bright before. Will continue to tweak (and open to suggestions! i am not a theme maker by trade haha)
2. CustomCSS will be back for everything! it'll just be much, much easier to edit colors and general vibes (rounded corners, colors for success, etc) than it has been in the past.
3. That's a great question. I'll see if I can get it up in the cosmetics section or something this week, I have no idea how it'd pick up the changes otherwise 💀

You shouldn't need to click the 👁️, it should look

like this

while you're

typing normally??

I'm wondering if you're blocking a .css file or something, you should also have a darker background for that element.

And just to double check - if you switch to one of the light-color themes, does the background of the box turn white or does it turn into their special colors (e.g. delphi should be a light blue)

Okay.... something is going on with the theme widget for you. Are you blocking any JavaScript or CSS scripts, and what browser are you using?

It looks like it's tossing you into the autumn theme, but only halfway? you'd have different headers colors in the widgets, and an image in the header at least. Can you go to a page, refresh, and try changing the theme right away?

The other things are great notes, i'll toss them down. i'm obviously working on porting over an entire site, on my own, which means things are coming over in bursts and fits. next time any of those things get touched (likely widgets, i've got lots to add 😰) i'll pop in some of that feedback 🫡

i know that "solve it yourself!" never feels good, but i did want to flag here that i pushed out a beta version of customCSS for kumos: https://kumos.subeta.net/forums/t/939109/customcss-comes-to-kumos

i've included one that removes the image at the top of the page, and i'm sure other useful ones will pop up!

Hmmm... we are using some newer CSS technology - mostly to make the themes work, which would explain why you're having the issue that you're having. Let me research how we can do a nice, pleasant fallback for the @layer keyword, and at the least how we can fall back to something simple.

I'm actually curious - if you'll humor me - https://kumos.subeta.net/account/settings/css/popular If you go this page and subscribe to my "cyberpunk CSS" and then refresh the page, does it make the site dark themed, but more successfully, for you? You can turn it off right away if you'd like, I'm just curious if the way that it sets styles works for your browser. Thank you for helping me get to the bottom of this!

🎉 yay! that at least points us in the right direction. would you prefer a light layout? i can toss one up in there and give you the link to enable it, and that'll at least make the site look normal while you're browsing it.

and get me a starting point for fixing the issue overall, and I can delete the snippets once they're not needed anymore?

right now, your theme choice is saved in “local storage”—basically, a tiny browser database where websites can stash stuff like your preferences so they’re ready before the server sends anything.

when the page loads, the html and js load up. the js goes, “cool, the page is ready—what theme are we using?” and applies it to the tag. this setup works great unless you’re constantly reloading pages. smoother navigation is possible, but rn there’s another bug: if we skip reloading the whole page, hovers (like item/user previews) break.

so, i’m moving theme prefs to the database. they’ll get sent with the initial html, like on the legacy site. this means no more “magic fast” theme switching in the footer, but the data will be in the right place.

tl;dr: i know it’s annoying that it jumps between pages. i’m on it, and it should be sorted in a few days. thx for your patience 🙃

i’ve been building out all the individual pieces! a lot of the groundwork for shared outfits depended on redoing how avatars are represented, making it way easier to interact with them now.

i’ve learned a ton since making new.subeta.net—it launched with the “newest and greatest” tech at the time, but wow… it’s already outdated. what i’m doing with kumos is leaning on solid, standard PHP patterns, a lot like how legacy subeta works. more pages, more moving around, less forcing everything to be instant.

new.subeta.net still has huge potential to simplify things, though, by replacing one of the subeta sites. here’s why:

• wardrobe: big project to move, but achievable. once it’s better integrated into the site, we can reuse those components everywhere (e.g., click to add vault items directly to your avatar). it’ll feel way more seamless.
• cw shops: another big move, but pretty aligned with what’s already on kumos.
• subscriptions: planning to move these over too, with $10 and $20 tiers. also gonna make a bold fundraising push—subeta’s a special corner of the web, and i’d love to keep it thriving. i’m hoping to bring in more illustrators in 2025 to make it even better. 🙏

feeling ambitious, but it’s all coming together. i keep looking around at social media drama on the internet and waiting for someone to make 'the perfect place online', and recently looked up and realized..... i can make that ✨

I think I can tackle that and get it so those stop showing up.

Right now I'm taking a saw to the front page of the forums (ty !) to get them loading faster, and have a little more of a vibrant feeling. I can get them hiding empty categories.

Sorry I left it in that state! We are using tailwind! I've had a lot of problems with it over the years, I feel like it was trying to re-make a lot of browser conventions, but we're using the V4 beta, which undoes a ton of that!

Everything compiles to actual CSS custom properties and is configurable in CSS, and it leans a lot more on web standards. It's a huge improvement imo and I'm glad it happened around the same time that I'm re-building Subeta!

Anyway, part of our build step is to look through all of the code and figure out what we've used (a pretty standard postcss build) and it missed those helpers on the sidebar (m-w-[300px]) so it was... growing to whatever it wanted. it should now have a max width!