Monthly Status Update - April 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 ~$10 from last month and our rolling balance decreased by about ~$40.

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

AnimeThemes.moe Development - The Wiki Release

We are running down a shortlist of final issues that we want addressed before deploying this release. As such, we have a few announcements:

1. Deployment will occur May 30-31

For those that may not know, the staging environment at staging.animethemes.moe is intended to build and test new features for the application. Once validated, the changes are to be applied to our production servers at animethemes.moe.

Because this release contains a large number of changes, infrastructure included, we anticipate that there may be some interruption of service. We will communicate the need for any downtime.

2. Future Development Timelines

We will reserve one to two weeks to put out any fires post-deployment, and then 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.

Currently, we anticipate audio-only mode for June or July with list integration to follow soon after.

3. Feedback

For this final month, now more than ever, we need your feedback to help us identify any issues you're having with the app. Please reach out to us on the subreddit or discord if you find anything. In particular, we are modifying our search configuration and could use a list of search terms that are currently producing poor results.

Also, we are still in need of wiki editors to help us backfill missing data and validate our admin panel configuration. Please reach out if you are interested in helping us fill out our database.

For future efforts, we anticipate much shorter development cycles. Thank you for your patience everyone!

animethemes-server

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

Video Streaming

Video will now be served from nginx instead of php. This should improve performance of streams and the app itself.

Admin

Our admin panel library upgraded to a new major version and release series for which a new license purchase was required. A good deal of this month's development was dedicated to configuring the admin panel for ease of use.

• Use built-in filters rather than custom filters.
• Allow resource polling.
• Allow resource preview modals.
• Use built-in action log rather than custom audit log.
• Allow inline creation for many to many relations.
• Apply animethemes-web colors and logo for custom branding.
• Apply reasonable subtitling for all resources to distinguish in relation and search contexts.
• Add new lenses for attributes that are now manually filled in (Videos without Resolution).
• Backfill anime action: attempt to set anime relations from third-party APIs.
• Allow nested types to be managed in global, search and relation contexts.
• Notifications for soft deletions.
• Address n + 1 queries.
• A lot of cleanup.

API

• The rate limit has been bumped from 60 to 90 requests per minute.
• The max page size has been bumped from 30 to 100. The default size remains 15.
• First improvement to search payloads for anime.
• Create backdoor for client to more freely access the API without limiters.

Misc

• Route definitions are discovered via controller attributes.
• 2FA now has to be confirmed before activation.
• API tokens now expire after a month.
• Support DB queue.
• Some authorization fixes for nested types.
• Removal of video reconciliation job to prevent side effects.
• Add grill image facet. Grills can now be added in the admin panel and fetched from the API. If you have a good png with a transparent background of your favorite grills, send them our way.
• Allow video reconciliation against a specific path.
• Routine bumping of dependencies.
• Update framework stubs.

animethemes-web

After last months announcements, the wiki client saw a great increase in usage and so we got a lot of new feedback. Thanks to that we could implement some improvements.

Notable changes

• You can now view more information for an anime's themes directly on series, studio, season pages and in the search.
  • All anime cards can now be expanded, so the above view works for all anime, even with ones with fewer than three themes.
  • Anime cards now prefer to show the first OP and ED instead of the first two OPs.
• Added links between artist groups and their members.
• Grills are now fetched from the API.
  • You may see some new grills on the home page now. Feel free to submit your favorite grill on our discord to get it added as well.

Other changes

• Added sub-headings to the table of contents on document pages.
• Added buttons to the home page for series, studio and page index.
• Changed target of index buttons on home page to the actual index pages.
• Moved index pages from /index/... to /anime, /artist, /series and /studio.
• Recently added themes displayed on the home page are now only fetched on the client-side. This means they will always show the most up-to-date data.
• Fixed wrong order of anime on year pages.
• Fixed local storage getting filled up with unnecessary data (this was reported by a reddit user).
  • If you make use of your local playlist, I recommend you to go to your playlist page and click the "Refresh" button. This will refetch every theme from the API and free up a lot of space on your local storage. If your local storage fills up, the page might stop working.
• Fixed missing cover image on summary cards if title is too long (noticed by along).

Technical changes

• We now have a new deployment strategy which lets us push updates to the client without any downtime.
• All data fetching is now done through the API. This means we don't have to implement specific transformation logic twice.
• The rebuild time was increased on all pages to reduce API requests.
  • For resource pages: 5 minutes => 1 hour
  • For index pages: 1 hour => 3 hours
  • Later we want to make use of on-demand revalidation, which means that pages only get rebuild if data changes. This will also make changes appear on the pages right after they were made.
• Disabled revalidation on /year, /dev and / (home page). These pages are now fully static. This also means that we had to remove the page count from /dev.
• Added the developer mode which displays when a page was last build at the bottom of the page. Holders of a revalidation token can also manually rebuild pages.
  • You can enable the developer mode on your profile.
  • The revalidation token is currently only for mods as this feature is only meant for edge cases.
• Disabled pre-fetching on all links.

animethemes-api-docs

Work has begun on backfilling recent API changes and write endpoints.

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

No updates. 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 was updated 2022-04-01. 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

Wiki deployment!

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!