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.
The listing of last month's account balances and posted transactions can be found here.
Our operational expenses increased by about ~$75 from last month and our rolling balance decreased by about ~$80.
As stated last month, We did anticipate an increase in traffic for the new season of premieres. With our curent level of funding, this level of traffic isn't sustainable. If we do sustain this level of traffic going forward, we will begin considering reaching out to services producing heavier load.
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!
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
This month we focused on pushing initial changes for the backend of the design to hand off to the frontend through a new staging environment.
This is the location of our new staging environment. We chose to rename it since there seemed to be some confusion about the purpose of the previous environment and thought a less technical name would help.
At the time of writing, this environment supports audio-only changes in the admin panel, API and streaming.
https://beta.animethemes.moe/audio/MadeInAbyssS2-OP2.ogg
For this initial seed, we have chosen to extract the audio tracks from our WebMs to a supported container.
We have also chosen to minimize our storage needs and redundancy by deriving a "source video" for a given video instead of creating a new audio for every video. Source videos are chosen by a simple scoring system that considers the source type (BD, DVD, WEB, etc), overlapping, hardsubbing and theme sequencing. You might not necessarily open an audio stream by modifying the URL of a video stream.
We will be working on adding support for audio streams to the client. This may entail introducing breaking changes to the backend, including the API.
For clarity, this beta environment is primarily for development efforts and community validation. We encourage you to poke around and provide us feedback. We discourage you from using this environment for your development needs at this time since we do not consider these changes stable yet.
This month we focused on post-deployment bugs, facilitating data backfilling efforts & drafting initial changes. The full set of changes can be reviewed here
Additions
Fixes
Maintenance
This month we entirely focused on migrating the client project to TypeScript. With this effort done, we can now find a lot of issues before even pushing an update.
Next month we will focus on adding support for audio mode and other small improvements.
There were some issues with the new VitePress migration being served from a base path, so we are hosting the new docs here:
https://api-docs.beta.animethemes.moe/
Will continue to be updated every Monday
We have begun in earnest the backfilling of missing data introduced by the wiki release.
For example, the audio-only mode seed required backfilling video source data to ensure deriving source videos worked as expected. This was para's primary backfilling effort in July.
We have also been working on backfilling resources and anison data. 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.
From recent discussions on adjusting our encoding standards, the backlog of our existing repository becomes more and more of a problem. We would need to potentially replace thousands of videos for any change, and that also means hunting down obscure sources over and over again. An idea was brought up that we are hoping to slowly adopt going forward.
We will begin maintaining an archive of source files and encoding scripts that can be used to generate encoded videos for our repositories. That way, if we decide to tweak our encoding standards or if we want to reproduce our encoded file with, say, a new major version of libvpx, we can trigger execution of these scripts against the source files to produce new WebMs.
To start things out, contributions to KuroPon will be voluntary. Aside from the encoded WebM, the contribution should have:
We hope this project can help better future proof AnimeThemes and allow us to continue improving the quality of our work.
For those wondering, the name comes from the openings.moe contributor who was working on a similar mass encoding project for that site.
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 2022-07-01. 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 2022-10-01. 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.
Audio-only Mode Release
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!