Monthly Status Update - March 2022

Hello, welcome to this month's status update post. Here I will be sharing what's been going on with AnimeThemes.moe, where we are heading, how to help, and inviting feedback.

Funding

The listing of last month's account balances and posted transactions can be found here.

Our operational expenses increased by about ~$30 and our rolling balance decreased by about ~$5.

Once again, if we continue to receive the same level of financial support in the future, we should not have any issues. Thank you to everyone who has supported the project thus far!

AnimeThemes.moe Development - The Wiki Release

We are continuing our gap-filling and production-ready efforts. Today, we are ready to announce a few things:

1: We are targeting deployment of this release sometime in May

May will mark two years since this effort began in earnest. We feel that the platform has been nearing production-readiness for some time. As such, we will be wrapping up these efforts and begin planning future releases.

Our next priority will be list integration and audio-only mode to achieve feature parity with themes.moe. This was an agreement made with Kagumi at the onset of this effort.

In the meantime, we can always use feedback from the community to help us identify issues or shortcomings. Please contact the mod team, preferably in the development channels on the discord, if you have any findings or can assist in our efforts.

2: The subreddit wiki is retired

Prior to today, the mod team would process new submissions and make updates for seasonal checking by editing the subreddit wiki. On the following night, the staging app would scrape the subreddit wiki for changes.

Starting today, the database will be maintained exclusively from our site. The subreddit wiki is retired.

You can access the AnimeThemes.moe database here.

animethemes-server

This month, we continued to focus on production-readiness and gap-filling API validation. The full set of changes can be reviewed here.

API

Filter types are now validated. Only one outlier case remains for the has filter.

Added support for select clauses for queries that do not perform searches. This should reduce the memory footprint and improve the performance of API requests that make use of sparse fieldsets.

Added extended CRUD API endpoints for write operations. In short, resources can now be managed programmatically if you have generated an API token for your account. This was added pre-emptively for the list integration effort.

Platform Upgrades

Our final blocking dependency was updated and we have upgraded to Laravel 9.

We have also updated the minimum required PHP version to 8.1.

Misc

• Dumo document-related tables for backups & seeding local environments.
• Routine bumping of dependencies.
• Update stubs.

animethemes-web

• Added document pages: /wiki/page
  • This post you are reading right now is one of these pages.
  • These are auto-generated from the "Pages" resource and replace the document pages previously hosted under https://staging.animethemes.moe/page.
  • On desktop devices there's a table of content on the right side, which updates while scrolling.
  • The formatting on these pages is still experimental. If you notice that somethings looks off, let us know.
• The theme group is now displayed in theme summary cards (e.g. while searching).
• On anime pages the theme group is now longer included in the slugs.
• The featured theme background now falls back to the cover image, if the video fails to load (suggested by along).
• Added new multi cover image on series, studio and playlist pages.
• The video page was re-organized.
  • Added "Related Themes" section, which includes other themes from the same anime.
  • Added "Also Used As" section, which shows themes which use the same video.

animethemes-api-docs

No updates. Write endpoints will be documented after the effort is complete.

animethemes-batch-encoder

No updates.

animethemes-webm-verifier

A new effort has been identified that will target a new major version. Work has not yet begun.

animethemes-db-dump

Document-related tables are now dumped. Will continue to be updated weekly.

Misc

Mod applications are still open. Now more than ever with our efforts widening and less of our team being active, we need some help delegating tasks out.

The backup torrent has been updated today. The link can be found in the discord and in the one obvious place you should be able to find. The next update will be on 2022-07-01. Seeding is appreciated.

Please consider helping out with our Encoding efforts. We can always use more help there.

We are still looking to staff at least 25 editors to help us backfill and build out our database. If you are interested in helping out, please reach out to para here or on the discord. We have a detailed description of the role in our #help_wanted channel on the discord.

Next Month Priorities

Continuation of release efforts. The remaining scope of the wiki release has been identified and the last efforts are well under way. Expect release candidates soon.

Wrap-up

Please feel free to discuss anything related to these items or anything else related to the project with us in accompanying social media posts, especially anything we may have forgotten. Feedback on the structure of these posts is welcomed too. Thanks again, everyone!