Happy music making season

Hey there, friends of wikiloops!

Thanks for checking out the End-of-Summer news on wikiloops -
as the days are getting shorter here on the northern half of the planet,
we are ready to start into another home-jamming season!

To give you an update on what has been going on "backstage", todays post includes:
· info about our changed security measures (why you may have seen some new captchas)
· a quick note on the changed payment system & managing options
· the "Newcomer"-badge that you may have noticed on some tracks and
· some note-worthy things, like welcomeing the 100.000th musician on wikiloops

Newcomer spotlight

As you may have noticed, there is a new "Newcomer" badge shown on some tracks in the "latest uploads"-list, so our new members tracks stand out a little more.
Maybe you remember your first time uploading to the 'loops, it sure is a moment where one is up to something new, and eager to find out what will happen next, right?
The intention of the "Newcomer" badge is to highlight these first-timers tracks, so the communities veterans can check out the new members easily.
And hey, if you like what you discover, make sure to leave a welcoming comment or try a remix, just so our new members get a feeling of how this works.

Proposal - feedback wanted:
To make it even more convenient not to miss the new folks, we will test displaying some of these tracks on your newsfeeds as well in the future.
There will be an opt-out option if you do not want these newbee-features among the tracks you are getting notified about, and we will make sure not to over-do it, promised.

Protecting wikiloops - the security update 2025

Some time this summer, wikiloops suffered from slow response times, with pages taking overly long to open.
When investigating the cause, it turned out the servers were being overloaded with requests by the latest and ever growing generation of AI-powered bots.
Looks as if every company that does build AI has their own crawler out there vacuuming up whatever content they can spot online.
To put that in perspective - there were days were only 5% of what kept the servers busy were requests by humans, so, we moved wikiloops behind a firewall which is designed to keep that kind of unwanted bot visitors away before they reach our servers.
Should you have been falsely "blocked" by that firewall in the past couple of weeks, then that was most likely during the fine-tuning phase.
Should anyone continue to experience issues with the bot fence,
please do reach out so we can make sure it does not get in the way of anyones fun.

Account management changes

We have switched our payment processing partner from PayPal to Stripe, as some users reported issues with PayPal in the past (this is in no way related to the recent news about issues at PayPal, btw).
PayPal is still available as a payment option, so, this is more of a for-your-info mention here.
What may be worth pointing out is that we have changed the wikiloops account management page (in your profile ? settings tab), to give you one central spot to monitor & manage anything relating to your account or your subscription.

Numeric milestones

I mentioned crossing the 100k-members-mark,
and we also crossed the 250k-public-tracks mark this spring.

My thoughts looking at those numbers were as follows:
· 100k members ? that would make a good sized festival
· 2.5 uploads average per registered member? That is indeed funny in a way.
It means: "Hey, if you have not uploaded your 2.5 tracks yet, you really should get going!" :)

What needs to be added

A note of gratitude towards those who help keep wikiloops online.
I'm biting my tongue not to deliver a three page rant on how much harder it has become to operate an independent community site like this.
The internet and AI are changing and evolving at a dramatic pace, and I have read news of many similar-in-spirit communities folding up... but let's not get me started on that.

Let's rather note: The reason wikiloops is surviving is its communities willingnes to support the platform.

So, as always, my thanks go out to those who spend those $5 or $10 bucks a month so a place like wikiloops can continue.
Any AI tool would have done a smoother job delivering this message,
I was never good at the marketing thing...
what I am trying to say is:
If you can afford to, please do upgrade your membership and help keep wikiloops independent & online. Thanks to those who do!

Have a splendid late summer and fall season & lots of fun making music on and off wikiloops.com