Good news everyone! The alpha will be ending soon! Really, it is this time!
I know it’s been months since the last update was pushed to the site here, but believe me, I’ve been hard at work checking boxes and closing issues to get this thing finished already. A commit a day keeps the delays away. Sorta...
It’s also time to actually give you all a heads up on what to expect for the wipe/cleanup that we’ve been warning you about for almost 5 years now. So, when the alpha ends:
- Users not active in the last _two years_or who have never actually signed in will be deleted
- Tags that contain no wallpapers will be deleted
- Wallpapers that have been reported for valid reasons that have not yet been addressed will be deleted
- All notifications you may have received (wallpaper reports/deleted notices, username mentions, etc.) will be deleted
- Subscription notices _older than 3 months_will be deleted (to help speed up the move)
I don’t expect to find anything else to delete, but if I do, I’ll make sure to make another post about it.
When this does happen, I’ll also be moving the site to a newer server. I managed to squeak a bit more time out of our current one, but it won’t last much longer. So, if everything works well, expect a nice speed boost once we go live!
Going live will also bring with it a ton of breaking changes. Biggest being ditching the numeric IDs for wallpapers and moving to an alphanumeric UID (think imgur/youtube). This will break any and all links to any wallpapers on the site that are out there. This might be painful, but probably won’t kill us. We’ll also be dropping the ‘alpha’ subdomain. Basic redirects should be in place, but for everything else, you’ll enjoy the new homepage!
To ease some of the upcoming pain for those of you who made apps that tie in to wallhaven, we’ll have an API available! You can stop scrapping our HTML now (yay!). I would like to get some testing in, so if you have an app, please contact me.
I’m still working hard on getting this thing finished, so I don’t have an exact date in mind just yet. Sit tight and make sure to drop by our Discord server and follow wallhaven (and me) on twitter. As I get closer to being done, I’ll probably post some teasers and other interesting tidbits here and there.
As always thanks for sticking by all this time!