Monthly Status Update - April 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.

Our operational expenses increased by ~$10 and our rolling balance remained roughly the same compared to the end of January.

This will be the final adjustment month with an increased individual contribution from staff. We will reset our baseline for funding forecasting next month.

Please consider supporting us on Patreon. 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 continued our focus on integration testing for the playlist release in our beta environment.

Our integration testing is a closed beta that includes our Patrons as participants. If you would like early access to our playlist features and involvement in our development efforts, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

An open beta will be announced at a later date.

animethemes-server

This month, we have focused on migrating to the latest major version of our framework and tackled some items related to integration. The full set of changes can be reviewed here.

Note: para was away for a good chunk of this month for health-related reasons.

Additions

• API: adding missing include paths for client integration.
• API: infer pivot fields as allowed relations [breaking].

Maintenance

• API: infer direct relations from resource schema to avoid explicit registration in subclasses.
• API: reduce boilerplate in controllers.
• API: track insertion latency v2.
• Initial upgrade to Laravel 10.
• Migrate feature flags to Pennant.

animethemes-web

The closed beta continues strongly with three new beta releases this month. I’ll summarize the most notable features here. Keep in mind that although the playlist features are exclusive for patrons for now, the new video player is available to test for everyone here: https://beta.animethemes.moe/wiki

Video Player 2.0

• The mini player is back! When a theme is playing in the background you will now also see the video in a small frame. You can also move it around the screen by dragging.

• A new overlay was added to the video player. Here you currently have two buttons:

  • With ⚙️ you can switch between Video and Audio mode or chose a different theme version.
  • With the other button you can switch into fullscreen mode.

• A custom fullscreen mode was added. It includes the bottom player bar as well as the overlay mentioned above.

• If your keyboard has special keys for media playback like ⏮️ and ⏭️, you can now use those to go forward and backwards in your watch list.

• You are now able to queue themes into the watch list. This only works on playlist pages for now. There you can click on the menu button and then choose between "Add to Watch List" and "Play Next". Later this will be possible from various places.

• Switching between audio and video mode now retains the playback position.

• You can now close the video player when it's in the background by clicking on the X in the bottom right.

Shuffle Mode

• The "Play Random" button got replaced by the new Shuffle button. When you click this button a random theme will start playing like before and your watch list will be filled with other random themes.
• When you reach the last track in the watch list, a new set of random themes will be automatically appended.
• Together with auto-play you can effectively watch anime themes forever ^^

Other changes

• Thanks to the contribution by MonCaptain there's now a "back-to-top" button on the index pages, e.g. https://beta.animethemes.moe/wiki/anime
• The default Gravater profile picture is now different depending on your email address.
• Playlists now use hash ids, you may notice that the URLs for the playlist pages changed. If you have a bookmark you may need to update it manually.

What’s next?

The next beta release will be released in the beginning of May and will include these new features:

• Reordering of playlists:

• Editing playlist details, like name or visibility:

• One of the last missing pieces to the new video player, the volume control:

animethemes-api-docs

No changes

animethemes-batch-encoder

• v1.1.0 has been tagged and released, adding some quality-of-life config options. Thanks, Kyrch!

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

No updates on Project KuroPon, our source file hosting solution. We are still researching offerings that will provide us with a more reliable box. 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 2023-04-01. 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 2023-07-01. 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

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!