Musical Nexus - News & Announcements

Hey everyone,

Welcome back. Please excuse any weird layout issue or miss-aligned items etc that you may see as I update the website. There will be quite a few changes coming to the website over the next few weeks. The entire theme, as well as the music submission areas will receive a face lift among other things.

The website backup was completely restored successfully, so if you had an existing account with us you should be able to log back in like normal.

Note: For those of you that are still at your submission pending limit, the submissions won't be approved until most of the task list below is finished. Once these various tasks are done submission approvals should be faster going forward.

Task List | Key: Not Started, In Progress, Complete

• Update General Website Related Things
  • Apply the 30 updates we have missed to the framework and then fix new errors
  • Update Terms / Privacy Policy / Guidelines
  • Remove Broken Ads
  • Update Login Methods (Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc)
  • Update overall theme, port some things from old theme
  • Switch to a cleaner / more legible font
  • Update Third Party Plugins
  • Remove Old / Archived / Broken related things to clean up database structure
  • Reconnect Web Hook Notifications + Role Sync to our Discord Bot & Server
  • Fix our Sitemap and Website Verification on Google Search Engine Console / Webmaster
  • Re-Initialize our Google Analytics
  • Update Friendly URL's in Mabinogi Halls to be more descriptive
  • Update the Activity Stream to be more descriptive
  • Move 3MLE Downloads to our CDN Apollo
  • Allow Composers, and Pro Members (+Staff) to change their own Display Name once every 30 days
  • Allow Users not in the above groups to change their own Display Name once every 120 days
  • Allow users to deactivate or delete their own account.
  • Allow Members and above to delete their own Submissions without Mod Action (The first rank, Initiate cannot)
  • Fix the Email Template(s) CSS Coloring + Text Coloring
• Update Various Images / Logos / Reacts / Emotes
  • Reaction Emojis
  • Menu Layout and Imaging
  • Main Logo & Email Logo
• Update Submission Layout & Design
  • Re-Arrange overall layout to accommodate for the below two changes
    • Mabinogi Hall
      • Change Mabinogi Hall from images to button style from MS2 Hall for Listing Display
      • Port Pro Member options from MS2 Music Hall to make sure they are par with each other
        • Port Listing Image Display | Composer & Pro
        • Add Visualizer Image Background Display | Composer & Pro
        • Add Pager Background Image Option | Pro Only
      • Implement 2 column layout on record view with Instrument Panel / New Song Previewer
         *Note - Not all previous songs will be updated to the new layout, but all new songs will use it.
        • Solo Hall
        • 2 Person Ensemble Hall
        • 3 Person Ensemble Hall
        • 4 Person Ensemble Hall
        • 5 Person Ensemble Hall
        • 6 Person Ensemble Hall
        • 7 Person Ensemble Hall
        • 8 Person Ensemble Hall
    • Maplestory 2 Hall
      • Implement 2 column layout on record view with Instrument Panel / New Song Previewer
      • Switch to new file download system and update template to show new download tracking data
• Implement New Music Preview Piano Roll
  • Create Custom Web SoundFonts (Progress Report)
    • Mabinogi
      • Layout Testing in Progress: Ex1, Ex2, Ex3
        • Add 3MLE Instrument ID Map
        • Add Mabilcco Instrument ID Map
    • Maplestory 2
  • Attach to our CDN Apollo for Note Delivery

• Implement Final Fantasy XIV Hall
• Create Final Fantasy XIV 3MLE Version
• Setup our CDN Service | Apollo
• Setup a REDIS caching server
• Separate the Database into it's own server group for scalability.
• Update Music Hall Listings With Better Filtering & Sorting
• Merge each games music halls into 1 for each (Reliant on the above being finished)
  • Mabinogi - Merge 10 Halls into 1
  • MapleStory 2 - Merge 10 Halls into 1

We have updated the MapleStory 2 3MLE version to include the most recent 4 instruments they added to the game.

• Koto
• Shamisen
• Shakuhachi
• Taiko Drum

You can download the updated version here.

Hi All,

The new Drum Kit is out on Mabinogi so we have updated our 3MLE for Mabinogi to include support for it! Here is a handy key guide below for what each note is for the drum kit. This key was put together by @Blargel.

Drum Kit Key

I have also updated the instrument drop down list in 3MLE to be similar to how we do it for Maple Beats so that the instruments are more closely grouped with their instrument "family".

The Submission Limit System and Auto Unapprove system have been completed and now implemented. Below is an explanation of what each one accomplishes.

Submission Limit System

This allows us to set a cap on how many submissions you can have pending at any one time. Once you reach the limit you will not be able to submit anymore songs until some of them have been approved. There is a counter in the top right that will let you keep track of how many you have pending as well as their approval/rejection status.

Your current submission pending limit can be found in the top right bar to the left of the notifications.

If you click on the Pending text it will drop down a window similar to the notification window. Here we can see that my first submission of Megalovania was removed or rejected. If it is removed or rejected you will get a private message about it from an SSR Member with a reason.

For the most recent submission we can see it has a flag, this means it is still pending approval and has not been touched yet.

When an submission is approved the flag will be replaced with a green check mark:

You are able to click on the song title and it will take you straight to the submission. The list will only show about the most recent 15 submissions, if you want to see previous ones then you can click on "View All" to see the entire history list.

Here are the current group limits for submissions:

• Default Group Limit: 8 Submissions
• Composer Group Limit: 10 Submissions
• Retired Staff Group Limit: 10 Submissions
• Pro Group Limit: 12 Submissions

This system also helps us to keep the submissions pages mixed up instead of having one user across 5 pages in a row because they were submitting many at once. But aside from this it also helps us and our staff keep the queue in check instead of letting it get to upwards of 600 submissions pending.

Auto Unapprove System

We now have an automatic unapproval system. This means that when you edit certain fields in your submission that require a manual check or intervention from the SSR team that the record will unapprove (be hidden) until it has been checked and updated.

Yes, this does mean you no longer need to report your post for an update. The system will detect that certain fields have been edited and notify us automatically for an update!

The following fields will always unapprove a post temporarily for reapproval:

• 3MLE Save File Uploads (MapleBeats)
• MML Code Box (MabiBeats)
• Recommended Instrument Choice
• Piano Roll Preview (Pro Member Option)

If any of the above fields are edited in your submission after approval then it will temporarily unapprove it until it has been updated by us.

Hi everyone,

The maintenance and server / database move went without a hitch so this issue is not related to that.
 

What Happened

Unfortunately during the maintenance I realized that I made a mistake a week back or so with some of the file storage. Some of the older MapleStory2 song listings were using a different format for the MS2MML file download than we currently use.

I mistakenly thought we had updated them all already but it turns out, this was not the case. Unfortunately I was not able to find any backups of this particular storage block either. I was able to get a count of the songs that were lost in this process, and due to the MS2MML files no longer being available nor the MML code in general I have removed all of the listings associated with the broken MS2MML files.

• Solo - 695
• 2 Person - 45
• 3 Person - 10
• 4 Person - 10
• 5 Person - 7
• 6 Person - 7
• 7 Person - 2
• 8 Person - 3
• 9 Person - 1
• 10 Person - 0

Those numbers are the exact counts of the amount of songs that were lost in each section for MapleStory 2. I greatly apologize for this blunder, it pains me as we lost a lot of GREAT music submissions from users who do not even visit the site any longer. If you are still an active user from back in the days of MapleStory2 beta you will have to resubmit those songs. All of the above songs that were lost were from early May - August 2018.

How will we prevent this from happening again

I have actually already solved this issue. Previously before the site maintenance we were on a lone dedicated server box with a lot of inefficiencies and old back end set ups. I did not just clone the server hard drive and move it to the cloud, I redid the entire back end of how my websites are setup as well as the databases, search service, etc. I then moved over all of the data separately and re-imported the databases from scratch.

An added benefit of now being in the "Cloud" is that our data no longer lives on one lone hard drive either, it is split up and duplicated in the "Cloud". We also have automatic scheduled back ups now that shoot off into a separate backup storage block in a different datacenter that the cloud provider has.