Before I get into the changes, I want to address some of the conversation happening in the Luminaire launch news post.

On the move to Kumos: This is happening, and it's going to keep happening. The legacy site runs on aging hardware that's expensive to maintain and increasingly difficult to change safely. I know nobody loves this situation—I don't love it either—but it's where we are.

On Kumos feeling different: I hear you, and a lot of the changes below are direct responses to that feedback. But I also want to be upfront: I'm not building a 1:1 copy of Legacy. Partly because this is a good opportunity to improve things, and partly because—selfishly—I can't spend my 30s recreating exactly what I built in my teens and 20s. That's not creatively sustainable for me or for anyone else working on this. We're going to move forward, and that means some things will change.

I'm hoping to use these changelogs to communicate more frequently and openly about what's happening and what's coming. They'll be informal, and ideally, more regular.

Layout & Design

• Themes overhauled: The themes page now matches Legacy, and all themes have been updated to better reflect their Legacy counterparts within our new design system. Behind the scenes, new CSS variables make these much easier to maintain going forward.
• Navigation tweaks: Header height has been slightly increased, and the navigation tabs have more depth—closer to the Legacy look.
• Less padding everywhere: Removed excess padding and container space in the sidebar and widgets. Still planning to add a background element here, but haven't landed on what yet.
• Postcards are back: Individual layout postcards have returned!
• User hovers improved: These now show much more information, matching what you'd see on Legacy. I've also added a slot for holiday flair (like trees 🎄), and they display better inline throughout the site.
• Item hovers improved: Updated to match Legacy, plus additional information we can pull thanks to Kumos's architecture. Now includes direct links to Account Search and Shop Search for quick lookups.

Forums

• 🖼️ Image uploads: Finding a place to just upload an image for a forum post is getting harder across the internet (we've all seen what's happening out there). The new unified text editor now lets you upload images directly—up to 1MB per post. Please don't try to upload the Bee Movie.

Account

• **Account Search moved to Kumos:** Now searches across your account, vault, wardrobe, shops, galleries, trades, and collections all at once. This was straightforward to build because of how Kumos is architected—the same foundation that powers the "show items you own from this user's wishlist" feature on trees. Everything builds on top of each other, which means adding new search locations down the road will be easy.

Performance

• 🐛 Critical bug fix: The site was polling your events every 10 seconds, which was overloading our workers and causing slowdowns. This is fixed, and you should notice a significant speed improvement (I certainly have). Also reduces CPU/GPU usage on your end.
• New cache server: Migrated to a dedicated cache server, so the web servers can focus on serving pages instead of juggling multiple jobs.

🎄 Luminaire Trees

• Tree Building: Fully moved to Kumos! Rebuilt from scratch using native browser drag-and-drop (replacing 10-year-old libraries), and now designed for both desktop and mobile. Building a tree on your phone should actually be pleasant now.
• Tree Gallery: Browse public trees and see if you own items on that user's public wishlist. (Make sure to set your tree to public if you want it to appear here!)
• Gifts Given: Moved to the tree area and now actually loads properly thanks to Kumos caching.

Other Changes

• Unified text editor: All <textarea> components across Kumos (news comments, forum posts, etc.) now use a single markdown editor. This means formatting may look slightly different between Kumos and Legacy, but it should be pretty minor.

" Please don't try to upload the Bee Movie." Keith, you should know better by now than to taunt us like that! Really, change is never easy, but we'll adjust. I love how open you are about what you're doing, it makes it easier (at least for me) to understand changes.

Thanks for keeping us in the loop!

I notice the themes being updated the first thing ever T0T I've had a problem in kumos ( where the themes didn't load and everything was white with white, I opened a topic even and today I entered and see COLORS FINALLY I'm happy to have the colors back

And also, you added two dark themes, which is cool for people prefering dark mode. Only insight for this is, morotideand darkside themes are like too much similar I think

Ooh this is awesome! Thanks for these QoL changes, they're much appreciated.

A couple questions/suggestions:

• Any chance you could increase the limit on lumi ornaments? If you're trying to use the single mini lights, 50 is not very many!
• The Shadowglen theme has some text contrast issues; e.g. the text colors for options below the forum posting box.
  • 

(check out that image uploading!! love it)

Awesome! Thank you for all your work!

doubled! and i'll take a look at those contrast issues 🔎

The fully drag-and-drop tree decorating feels like a dream. Thanks for all you do!

It'll take time to get used to kumos because to me, it kinda feels blank and empty? Maybe it's cuz the layout I have on Legacy isn't available here but I'll get used to it eventually.

I do want to point out one thing with the tree builder, for some reason I cannot see the Red Tree Skirt on the new one. I'm not sure if the image is broken or because there are presents under my tree already. I can see the one in the post but just seems to be missing.

holy cannoli, that's a lot! and maybe it's a placebo effect but the issue i was having with the images being all squinched seems resolved. i feel guilty for mentioning, with the herculean workload mentioned above, but neither the widget sidebar nor news sidebar appear for me in kumos, even after tinkering with the "customize sidebar" option under the navigation tab (i'm making an effort to acclimate to over here i swear) also, inventory on kumos- there's no option to sort by timeline (understand it won't be 1:1 legacy-ness, but...), & when i switch from grid to list, the item images break. i'm using opera on an old iphone if that's at all useful. thank you for all your hard work, and taking the time to explain it. appreciate it bigly!

thank you! I think there's a bug though. It looks like I can place up to 100 ornaments now and it looks fine as I place them, but as soon as I leave the page it goes back down to 50 🥲. I spent a lot of time getting my 100 ornaments just right, a bit of a bummer to then have half of them disappear!

No promises. We'll see! Big fan of the more broad account search, that's for sure. :o

I have to admit, the tree gallery complete with wish lists you can compare to an overwhelming hoard you may or may not have in your vault is pretty badass.

However, I still believe that out of all Subeta holidays to be chopped to pieces, Luminaire should have been the last one to be touched. It has always been the one community-unifying, grand finale we have waited for all year long. The disappointment is palpable. Some of my closest friends haven't even bothered with their trees.

You should know that you have volunteers ready and willing to help behind the scenes. I might be the only one talking about it here, but I am not the only one talking about it in other places. You are not alone... especially when it comes to the vitality of Subeta. It is your "sandbox", but it is our home.

I see the hard work you -- and everyone -- are doing behind the scenes and I appreciate it. I said it before and I'll say it again: that Subeta still exists is a miracle. It's a straight-up miracle, as someone who once worked in this industry, most pet sites are born and die because they aren't financially feasible to run unless you nickel-and-dime the players like a gacha game. That's just how it is; that's how it's always been. Subeta's always been early to adopt change and push the boundaries of what a petsite could be, and the reason that's slowed down... is partially because of money, it's true, but also because changing literally anything on the old site, like Keith said, runs the risk of the whole thing coming apart at the seams. Subeta is in a do-or-die situation, and if things don't change, update, and modernize, the site will literally not survive. Subeta is going to die if Kumos cannot live.

And it sucks in many ways. A friend once said the sight of me trying to roll-back UI changes was similar to watching an animal in a trap trying to gnaw off its own leg. I DESPISE when Application or Website looks Different on a level that borders on pathological. New Website is My Enemy, and I agree that Keith could do more to make the sites look and function more similarly to one another (I know the pop-overs might be a pain on mobile, but listen.......... we need them,) and I'll be the first to say the Width of Kumos is annoying and my enemy (is it possible to give a few options similar to the cozy/compact settings on discord? A bit more work, but letting us constrain the width of the webpage voluntarily would help with readability.) I also feel that the light themes all having a white background is lame (PASTELS, GOOD SIR,) and the dark modes need more contrast in UI elements compared to the superdark background. It's not perfect and it won't be for a while.

However,

Subeta is one of the only spaces on the internet I still consider some sort of home, so I support these changes and smooth down my hackles. There is an adjustment period, and right now we are caught in the middle of stylistic suck and huge swathes of the site being completely unavailable from one site to the other. It's a pain... it's annoying... but it's a growing pain. It's temporary. It will get better, bit-by-bit, as Keith is able to rewrite (or just code a new, better equivalent to) the old systems underpinning the site. As more big features are rewritten, it will go faster too- once one major system is changed, moving similar features over gets easier, gets faster. It's going to get better and better with time, but we have to trust the process of that growth. And once everything has been caught up, once it's all put together and functioning cohesively, do you know what that means?

WE GET NEW FEATURES BABEYYYYYYYY

But more importantly it means Subeta finally has a chance to live, not just survive, and maybe even to grow. Right now it's infeasible to try and set up any onboarding ("welcome to Subeta, here's how to play!) for new users, not with the site spread out across two separate websites and in a state of total dysbiosis. It's why I've held off on trying to get friends to join for now -- you only get one shot to make a first impression. The only reason Subeta is still "playable" to us is the fact that we live here, and many of us grew up here and saw it changing over time. Newcomers do not have that luxury -- and as much as those of us who've kept this site going for all of this time are valued players, EVERY game needs a healthy mix of new players coming in to survive.

It sucks. Things are rough and have been for a long time. The thought of trying to maintain Subeta as it is fills me with a sort of nervous laughing dread; Keith built this thing in bits and pieces over 20 years and as a result he's the only one who can dig it out of the mire. We have to trust the process... thankfully, I truly feel that Subeta's in good hands. Keith's, yes, but the artists and the community who've stuck around all this time -- they do just as much to make this place into a home as the guy writing the code.

That doesn't mean we can't be vocal when things suck! Me @ Keith: WEBSITE TOO WIDE, CONTRAST SOFT, READABILITY BAD. But I think there's a way to express that more beneficially for the site as a whole -- not because the people here are being annoying or bad at expressing themselves! But because giving actionable feedback is a Learned Skill that takes time to develop and isn't... it's not really an intuitive way to express oneself at all and it took me time to wrap my head around the syntax, personally. For example,

"Consistently, In Feature, When Doing X, Thing Y Does Not Z."

This brief description is followed up by steps to reproduce the issue I have encountered. The following is not a real bug report, but I hope that by typing out an example with industry-standard verbiage, it can help others to more actionably express what's going wrong, what they were doing when it went wrong, and help Keith to dial down to the root cause and fix it or change it to be more in-line with user expecations. I am not a programmer, and I can't do much to help Subeta! But I hope this is a gift I can give which shall bear fruit.

Consistently, When In Wardrobe, "Wear" Button Does Not Appear

1. Go to https://kumos.subeta.net

2. Log into website with account details

3. Go to https://new.subeta.net/wardrobe/outfits

4. "Wear" button does not appear in top-left corner of screen.

Notes: Tester did not experience this problem on Legacy Subeta.*

What Was Expected to Happen?: Tester expected to be able to go to Wardrobe and change from one Saved Outfit to another.

By structuring our feedback in this way, it helps frame things in a manner which directly addresses what was expected to happen, what went wrong, and what we did to get to that point (and yes, you really have to start from the VERY beginning.) That immediately helps narrow down the issue variables and streamlines the process of solving bugs! But it can also work for non-technical concerns (such as UI elements that are annoying or things which just aren't fun,) if you think about it in a similar way:

I was doing: X

I expected: *Y (try to be descriptive instead of just saying "to work like the old site",) and it did Z. *

I feel this harms/helps my experience in these ways: A, B, C.

I would/not engage with this feature again because: Various Reasons

You can be descriptive and give your personal opinions! But try to do so through the lens of "this is what I liked (on old site,) this is why I don't like it (on new site,) changing (these things) would help me be more comfortable/enjoy Thing more. (And if something is a genuine improvement -- hello, new tree system! -- it's okay to say that! "I enjoy that Things Changed Like This instead of having to do All The Other Things." Credit where it's due!

Keith, when you drop new features, or test 'em, (assuming you haven't done this already,) I'd suggest setting up feedback forms with a similar structure to streamline extraction of actionable information from them for future use. I appreciate immensely that you Give a Shit what the userbase thinks and feels, and want to bridge the gap between the necessary changes and the User Experience. I also trust your judgment in changing things around to a new system or way of doing things when it makes sense and is necessary for mobile, accessibility, or standards reasons. I know you have Subeta's best interests at heart; I think most people know that, even if frustration and change make us all grumpy from time to time.

Frustration along the way is a necessary evil, but so are these changes. I think it's frustrating, too, how many of us wish we could do more to expedite the process or contribute in some way, even though logistically there isn't much we can do! I am not a programmer or an artist, and money is thin on the ground for everyone right now -- it's hard to see the site we all love going through changes and struggling, especially when it's our escape from real-world troubles. But even Subeta can't persist in a vacuum forever. These novel-length posts are my way to attempt to give back in some small way to a site which is of priceless value to me; by trying to give actionable feedback on what bugs us about these changes (and what we like!,) it's another way we can all contribute in some small way. I hope that it helps someone else to feel empowered to help in their own way, too.

I dearly hope Subeta will be here to celebrate its 30th anniversary, and beyond. And, thank you to anyone who once again took the time to read my nonsense.

Thank you for everything you said -- I agree with all of it, but also, this is not hte first time someone has said something like " (I know the pop-overs might be a pain on mobile, but listen.......... we need them,) a"

and... do you not see them or get them on kumos? have i broken something in a way where only i get these on hover, and no one else does?

I'm getting the popovers on kumos! So it's not just you, Keith.

But, they don't have wearable previews yet, and if the item is on the wishlist, it can't be un-wishlisted in the popover (by me, anyway).

What I would like to be able to do: I have received a gift of an item on my wishlist. (Such as, in this most recent Mysterious Melody, I got three copies of which was on my wishlist. The nice pink heart thing on the popover to show me it's wishlisted is nice. I would like to be able to click that and have it UNwishlist this item that I now have three of but only needed one of. I would also like the popover to show me the preview rather than the item image - I already can see the item image before I did the popover. Show me the wearable overlay please instead. ... well, maybe you already just did this. now I can click that heart and the wishlist outline appears, and then disappears, but it doesn't turn pink anymore. Too bad, I liked the pink, it was very easy to see.

ahh! I can edit now!!! that's brilliant thank you so much for fixing it!

upload thing

my suggestions for popovers!

also, the wishlist / unwishlist does seem to be working in some places (front page) and not others (melody results) ? Is the code different between them?

As for avatars - kumos wardrobe still does not seem to hide the limbs. it's improving a lot otherwise! the bug where items didn't show their image/name in the vertical column is fixed - yay!

About Account Search: Would it be possible to return the 'remove one' option? I use account search when questing and the remove one option is an amazing time saver.

Can we please remove the lavender from the Luminaire theme and use the legacy soft green instead? Luminaire isn't supposed to be LILAC 😣