ngl, its honestly upsetting how absent the mods are :')
if they fell out of intrest of running the site, or they dont have time for it then they should get more mods or hand the reigns over. its not right that all of these tickets go unawnsered for days, months, heck, even years! with a website with a big userbase, there is for sure going to be problems that the mods will need to stick in and help with. I dont feel any ill-will to the mods of course, but some activity from them would be really appriciated tbh,,
Do you think staff should post an update?
874 Votes
Yes! I want to know what's going on!
13 Votes
Nah, I'm good
Closed! Thank you so much to everyone who helped boost this and get the mods back <3 I don't feel like this thread is needed anymore, so I'm going to lock it. <3
Original thread content:
Hello! I know there's been a lot of concern (especially in this forum) about where all the mods are. A lot of us have tickets that have gone unanswered for months - some over a year - and there hasn't been much of an update from anyone on the toyhouse staff about what's up with that. The last post in the "announcements" forum was 1 year and 2 months ago. I recently decided to email support, and the following is my email and their response. I just wanted to share it with you guys to hopefully answer some questions. I'm tagging admin, lulu, cy, minsu and jaywalk in hopes that they see this thread, so if you have any questions for them regarding this topic, or want to request an actual announcement/update from them, comment below!
My Email:
Hello! It has come to the attention of many toyhou.se users that the mods and creators of the site appear to be almost entirely absent. There is a lot of fear that the site will experience a fatal bug and go down with nobody to fix it. Will we lose all of our characters and art? What about those of use that are paying for subscriptions?
So firstly, I was hoping to find out more about volunteering to be a mod for the site. Personally I have a ton of free time (thanks covid) and plenty of experience as a manager, as well as moderating online groups and forums. If I could donate my time, I would do so gladly.
Secondly, I know toyhouse is a side project for the creators, but is there any way the community could get an update just to know that someone's still alive out there?
Thank you for your time- toyhou.se is my favorite website and I truly want to see it succeed in every way. Hoping to hear back soon. <3
- lohkiit
Response:
Hi lohkiit,
Thanks for reaching out, and for offering your time and work! The team's
currently not looking to expand, but will put out a public notice when
we decide to take on mods.
We're still actively fielding tickets and keeping an eye on server
health, and are definitely around to handle any site-breaking bugs or
outages.
With regards to a lack of updates, most of my attention right now is on
improving current code rather than introducing new features. The
codebase hit the size where it's troublesome to make changes without
breaking things, which has made it difficult to respond quickly to
feedback and bugs; I'm currently working on a partial rewrite which will
take awhile but should make it easier to make updates without breaking
the site moving forward.
My secondary priority is expanding the suite of mod tools so that it
takes less time to field tickets, which will hopefully help with the
clogged up ticket desk -- we won't be looking to recruit until after
these tools have been updated.
Unfortunately since neither of these jobs are front-facing it might look
like like radio silence for awhile, but I'm still present and available
for questions, feedback and concerns!
Hope that eases any worries; just let me know if you have any other queries.
--
Lulu
Toyhou.se Support
*All that being said, please remember to be kind! The staff of this site are wonderful people, and under no circumstances should anyone be rude to them. As they've said many times, this site is a side project.
I understand that fixing a bug is something that can take a long time, and nobody wants to be in that position of fixing site-wide bugs because it's never a quick and straightforward thing.
But it does not take long to post "Yes, this is a site-wide issue and we are working on it."
I only just started using Toyhou.se and I was driving myself up a wall trying literally everything I could think of before I found out it's a site-wide issue. And now I just kinda have to keep coming back and trying it to see if it's fixed yet? I would be 10x less frustrated if we just got a simple announcement, even without an ETA.
I considered that if this site turns out to be as useful as I hope it'd be I would get a subscription to support it because this kind of database site is so so expensive, but this isn't making a stellar impression.
I will note though, to anyone who uses Refsheet, I think it might be VERY easy to rip images off of it, so please watermark everything you have.