Monthly Status Update - February 2023

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.

We experienced an incident that impacted our expenses for the month. This was sustained for some time due to a fault in operational access that has since been remedied. The entire team is now able to monitor and address these issues in a more timely manner. However, as a result, this muddies our relative expense estimates. We will resume reporting on this next month. Excess costs will be covered by staff for this month. We aren't letting Patrons or other donations foot the bill for this mistake.

Please consider supporting us on Patreon or Ko-fi if you have the ability to. Thank you to everyone who has supported the project thus far!

We have also set up a Bitcoin address if you prefer to send crypto: bc1qg682txpazfqhh50uq2xmvh5pn99c95dujd7sy5

If you want another way to support us, we were given a referral link on our DO account. We get kickback if new users sign up and spend $25 USD (You get a $100 credit that expires in 60 days). If anyone was thinking of using this platform for their own hosting needs, please use our link:

https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=38c90f0c46e8

AnimeThemes.moe Development - Playlists Release

This month, we made significant progress on our beta release for playlists. This should be available in our beta environment in the future. We will communicate when this is live.

animethemes-server

This month, we have adopted a sprint cycle for backend efforts in order to have things ready for the client's auth scaffolding and playlist efforts as well as anticipation of future forward development footprint reduction. The full set of changes can be reviewed here.

Additions

• API: Add doubly-linked list actions for playlist track management
• API: Add "/me" endpoint to display currently authorized user's information
• API: Backfill pivot type endpoints
• Add provider-level, webserver-level and application-level monitoring notifications for videos with configurable rate limiting

Fixes

• Testing: Fix boundary issues for billing factories
• Testing: Fix some brittle tests where unique words are needed to prevent failures

Maintenance

• API: Separate select and "render" concerns such that custom logic can be provided to display the field to the user
• Refactor: Use composition pattern for API actions and make current "Query" object agnostic to types

animethemes-web

This month the client made a lot of progress towards the first beta release for the playlist effort. But we also released a new version of the client in production. The following changes were made to https://animethemes.moe/:

• The results for the /r/anime Awards 2022 that were recently announced are available here.
• Support for Twitter Cards was added, meaning you can now embed our videos in your tweets. Just paste the URL of the video page in your tweet and a card should appear: We are glad to see that this feature has already found great adoption, thank you for your support!
• More on the technical side, we replaced our Markdown renderer with MDX. This is the engine that also renders this page you are reading right now. Switching to MDX allows us to do all sorts of new things.
  For example using custom components like this card!
• You may have noticed that we don't display toast notification for announcements anymore. We weren't happy with the solution, so we are trying a new design on the home page and have disabled toast announcements for now.

Onto the playlist effort, there's been a lot of progress and a first beta release isn't far off. You can follow the development in the #client and #playlists channels on our Discord, but here are some of the improvements made this month:

• First draft for a playlist page;
• A new dialog component that will help with actions like creating new playlists or adding videos to existing playlists:
• A new checkbox component that will help with forms, e.g. registering a new user account:
• Progress was also made on the general auth functionalities like logging in and out or registering a new account.

animethemes-api-docs

No changes

Backfilling Efforts

Nothing to report this month.

If you are interested in helping us with these efforts, please reach out. These are time-consuming efforts and we can benefit from having more volunteers here, especially with anison data. Thanks to those that have recently joined to help us out.

Misc

Today, we will be setting up our first seedbox for Project KuroPon. This project will comprise a set of machines that will host our source files. We anticipate migrating our script solution to the database level such that we can produce "build" scripts that can pull from these source file repositories, making AnimeThemes more future-proof in terms of the files that you stream from the site itself. If you are interested in helping out with this project, please contact staff.

Mod applications are still open. We have continued to onboard applicants. Now more than ever with our efforts widening and less of our team being active, we need some help delegating tasks out. Please consider joining the team!

The backup torrent was updated 2023-01-01. The links can be found in the discord and in the one place you should be able to find. The next update will be on 2023-04-01. 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

Continuing work to prepare playlist beta access.

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!