Sup everyone! Sorry for the radio silence here. I was planning on doing an update in July, but some issues (a few I will be talking about here) ended up derailing my plan so I had to wait until August. I also wanted to try for a bit of a larger update but while I am close I am still a bit off from that so figured a quick one would be better then no update. So with that said, lets get into it.
The Bad News: Unexpected Admin/Moderation Changes
A few of you (especially in the discord) may have noticed the @Krodmandoon has been silent for a bit over a month here and @Pork_Soda has been moved up to an admin position. Unfortunately, these two things are not coincidental.
Krod went radio silent around the end of June and we have been unable to contact him since. Originally we thought maybe it was a well deserved break for the 4th but over a month on it has started becoming a bit concerning.
We are still hoping for the best though and that this is just a well deserved break, but for the moment we can not operate without a head mod for this long so @Pork_Soda has graciously volunteered to take up the mantle during Krod’s absence.
If you have been trying to get into contact with Krod on any admin or moderation issue, please make sure you reach out to one of the other staff for the foreseeable future or send all DMs to the @staff group.
The News News: Patreon & Finances
A few people have been asking around about out patreon and the fact that we are below the goal of $2400/month. This was not unexpected. Usually we see drops like this starting around July to August and it will usually continue to fluctuate through the remainder of the year and we usually see it jump back up around December to February.
Luckily due to the buffer I put into the original goal and a generous donation from a user who wishes to remain anonymous, we have a decent buffer ready to deal with the downturn.
I don’t want to pretend its all sunshine and rainbows though. The company I work through went through another round of layoffs (which luckily I survived), but this came 6 months sooner then anyone expected which is not a good sign and still puts my day job on really shaky ground. Along with that adrev from google took another massive hit over this year as they continue to decrease payouts which means we are getting almost nothing from that anymore.
And finially, there is still the problem keeping motivation for contributing to WG up without having to make posts every other month begging for more money.
I already talked at length about it so I am not going to do that here again, but I do have a plan that will come with some changes to our patreon that I think will help out with that as well as help with my general burnout. But, I need to get the main site up first before I start talking about that in detail.
Luckily, I am getting really close to that which leads us to…
The Good News: Updates on the Main Site
A major reason I have been so heads down is after I got the forums and moderation reworked is I have been really busting my ass to get the main site done, and luckily I am almost done! (at least with an alpha version)
After solving a really nasty upload bug last month project management is done, I got real time search back up and running early August, and over the last week I finished migrating & updating the old home and browsing pages. The last major thing I need to pull over and update is the main project page; then its getting the search bar back in and setting up some age verification stuff. After that it will be just a bit of bug squashing, polish, and reworking some broken styling that wasn’t worth me paying attention to yet.
If I can keep the pace up, I should have something good to go sometime beginning to mid of September. That being said the actual live release may be a bit delayed though as I have a little surprise I am trying to organize along with it going live, but I think it will be worth the delay if its needed.
For right now, here is a gif showing the rough home page and browse page working with some of my dumb test data. Visually its still really rough but I plan on cleaning that up best I can before release.
