Updates

Sign in to the Discord Activity through your browser, then return to the stage in Discord. Public stages now give you a clear choice to share what you’re listening to on your Discord profile.

New accounts get a randomly selected free starter avatar. You can choose a different one in your profile whenever you like.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade’s Discord Activity can show your stage, track and listener count on your Discord profile while you listen. Friends who join can open the same stage on groovecade.com or stay in Discord.

Stage art and avatars load more reliably in the Activity. If a player can’t load there, open the stage in your browser to keep listening.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

When enough listeners woot together, the stage lights up with hearts, the crowd dances harder, and the booth gets a HYPE! badge. DJs can earn 5 Grooves, and the track gets a 🔥 Hyped badge in stage history.

Open Stage history to save up to 50 tracks from your session, or pick your favourites. Add them to one of your crates or start a new one. Tracks you already have are skipped.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.21 carries on the desktop refresh. The homepage now shows you what a room feels like before you even walk in.

Rooms at a Glance

• Quiet rooms no longer say they are reconnecting. They now read Quiet right now · Booth open, so you know a spot is waiting for you.
• Room cards lift and glow softly when you point at them, and live rooms show a small moving equalizer instead of a plain dot.
• When nobody is around, the hero invites you to be first in on GrooveCade.FM with AutoDJ ready to go.

The Room View

• A new preview shows a DJ booth and a dancing crowd from the busiest room right now.
• When a room is quiet, the lights dim and an open spot in the booth gently invites you to take a turn.

How It Works

• The four steps from crate to crowd now come with small live previews of the app: your crate, the DJ line, a track playing with woots and chat, and your own stage settings.
• The preview changes as you scroll through each step.

Look and Feel

• Sections on the homepage now sit at an even distance from each other, so the page is easier to read from top to bottom.
• The room spotlight at the top tilts gently towards your mouse, with a soft light that follows along.

Comfort

• If your device is set to reduce motion, the tilt, the crowd and the equalizers stay still.
• Phones and tablets look and work exactly the same as before.

Thanks for keeping the rooms fun. Full notes for every update are at https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.20 gives the homepage a warmer welcome on bigger screens. This is the first step in a bigger desktop refresh, with more to come in the next few updates.

Logo Welcome

• The GrooveCade logo greets you once when you first open the homepage on a computer, then steps aside so you can get to the music.
• It only plays once per visit, so coming back to the homepage later takes you straight to the rooms.
• Click anywhere on it to skip it right away.

Homepage on Desktop

• Sections on the homepage now fade gently into view as you scroll down, so the page feels a little more alive.
• Room cards, guides and explore links arrive one after another instead of all at once.
• Everything only appears once. Scrolling back up leaves it all where it is.

Comfort

• If your device is set to reduce motion, the logo shows as a still image and the page stays calm and still.
• Phones and tablets look and work exactly the same as before.

Thanks for keeping the rooms fun. Full notes for every update are at https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.19 gives every stage a clear team of hosts and helpers, and lets hosts decide who can join the DJ line and how often.

Stage Roles

• Stages now have a clear ladder: Host, Co-host, Manager and Bouncer. Staff can only act on people below their own rank.
• Resident DJ and VIP are extra roles that someone can hold on their own or alongside a staff rank.
• Hosts choose what each staff rank may do: clean up chat, manage the DJ line, skip tracks, ban, change room settings or give out roles.
• Hosts can rename any role for their stage, so your Bouncers can be Door Crew if you like. Names you leave as they are show in your own language.
• Your role badge in chat, the people list and the person menu all use the stage's role names.
• Staff can change someone's rank and extra roles from the person menu on a phone with a few taps.

DJ Line Rules

• Hosts choose who can join the DJ line: everyone, VIPs and Resident DJs, Resident DJs only, or staff only.
• Resident DJs can join the line even when it is locked.
• Hosts can cap how many DJs wait in line at once.
• Hosts can set a short break after each DJ's turn before they can rejoin the line.
• Artists and keywords in a stage's Blocklist are now turned away when you join the line or change your song.
• The repeat block is now set in hours, with quick picks for 1, 3, 6 and 24 hours. Existing stages keep the same time they had before.

Languages

• New text is available in English, Dutch and French.

Thanks for keeping the rooms fun. Full notes for every update are at https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.18 keeps everyone on a stage hearing the same moment of the same song, more smoothly than before.

Tighter Sync

• When you join a stage, GrooveCade now checks the time a few times and uses the steadiest result, so one slow connection can no longer put you a second or two out of step with the room.
• If your YouTube player slips slightly ahead or behind the room, it now speeds up or slows down by a tiny amount until it catches up, instead of jumping. Most people will never notice it happening.
• Bigger slips are still corrected with a quick jump, but only after the player has been out of step for a moment, so a brief hiccup no longer causes a restart.
• Ads are always left to play untouched. Sync waits until the ad has finished.
• Coming back to a stage after switching tabs or apps still brings you straight back to the room's place in the song.

Smoother Listening

• Fewer audible skips and restarts when your connection is a little uneven.
• Your volume, the shared player and the YouTube and SoundCloud players work exactly as before.

Thanks for listening together. Full notes for every update are at https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.17 gives every stage its own look and house rules, and makes stages much easier to use on your phone.

Stage Rules

• Hosts can now write house rules in sections such as Song rules, Chat rules and a Blocklist of artists or keywords.
• You see the rules when you first open a stage, and again whenever the host changes them. Tap I agree, and tick Don't show again on this stage if you only want to see them when they change.
• Tap I agree once before you chat or join the DJ line. Guests can close the rules and keep listening. You can read them again any time from About this stage.

Make Your Stage Yours

• Hosts can pick an accent color, a surface tint and a chat background for their stage, with a live preview before saving.
• Add a short welcome message that greets people once when they open your stage.
• Built-in scenes and your own uploaded backgrounds work with the new colors.

Easier on Your Phone

• Long-press, or tap the ⋯ button, on a chat message or a person to open a large, thumb-friendly menu.
• Messages: reply, copy or report. Stage staff can also delete the message or mute its author.
• People: view their profile, add them as a friend or mention them in chat. Stage staff can also mute, ban, change roles or remove someone from the DJ line.
• Menus close with a swipe down, a tap outside or the Escape key.
• Tap the track title to open the queue, which now shows what's playing above Up next.
• Long-press or tap ⋯ on the now-playing bar or a queued track to woot, grab, open the source, copy the link, change your song or leave the line. Staff can also skip, lock the line, move tracks up or down, or remove a song.
• Swipe left on your spot to leave the line, or, as staff, on someone's song to remove it. Undo is there for a few seconds.
• Staff can drag the handle on the right to reorder the line.
• The chat box stays above the keyboard while you type.
• In Crates on a stage, swipe a track right to add it to the DJ line, or to change your song if you're already in line.
• Tap Edit order in a crate to drag tracks or move them with the arrows. Each move saves right away.
• The lobby has a new Your rooms tab with every stage you open or host, including private ones.

Timed Mutes & Bans

• Stage staff can mute or ban for 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days or for good, with an optional reason.
• Mutes and bans end on their own, and staff can lift them early.

Languages

• New text is available in English, Dutch and French.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.16 strengthens server-only moderation history, adds bounded Discord Activity messages and updates application validation dependencies. Existing stage permissions, YouTube and SoundCloud playback, account login and Discord Activity behavior are preserved. Additional browser feature restrictions are enabled without blocking Discord embedding.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.15 gives stage hosts clearer entry rules while keeping account age details private.

Choose Who Can Join

• Hosts can require an account before anyone enters their stage. Public and unlisted stages can still be discovered, but guests must sign in before the player, chat or audience roster loads.
• The same controls are available when creating a stage and in Stage Settings. Existing stages keep their current guest access by default.

SFW, NSFW & Minimum Age

• Stages can be labelled SFW or NSFW. NSFW always requires a signed-in account and a minimum age of 18, even when the custom minimum is lower.
• Hosts can set an optional minimum age from 13 to 99. Age-limited SFW stages also require an account. Labels and age limits appear on stage cards and in the stage header.
• NSFW discovery cards use neutral artwork instead of showing stage images before entry.

Private Account Age Checks

• Entry checks use the birth month and year already saved privately on the account. Missing details lead to Control Panel, with a return link to the stage.
• Checks wait until the last possible birthday in the saved birth month. Hosts cannot see birth details or an account’s exact age.
• This is self-declared age, not identity or documentary verification. Stage labels do not change GrooveCade’s content rules.

Enforced Beyond the Button

• The server checks room data, presence, queue admission, chat, reactions and Companion access. An invitation or password does not override a stage’s age requirement.
• A rule change rechecks connected listeners and removes the player for accounts that no longer qualify. Age-service failures do not grant access.
• New controls and entry messages are available in English, Dutch and French, with English fallback elsewhere.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.14 lets you delete your account yourself and makes GrooveCade feel better on phones, especially iPhones with a notch.

Delete Your Account

• Your profile now has a Danger zone with a Delete my account button. Type DELETE to confirm, and you're logged out straight away.
• Deleting removes your profile, crates, friends, follows, connected accounts and the stages you own.
• Your room chat, reactions and leaderboard entries stay visible as “Deleted user”, and your side of direct messages shows as [deleted].
• Privacy choices now links to account deletion, and the Privacy Policy explains what happens.

Fits Your Phone

• The top bar, install popup, update notice, mini player, sheets, dialogs and full-screen stage now stay clear of the notch, status bar and home indicator.
• Pages no longer bounce or pull past the edge, and the page behind a stage no longer scrolls on phones.
• Full-height pages now fit the visible screen when the browser bar shows or hides.

Languages

• New text is available in English, Dutch and French.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.13 makes stages friendlier for everyone who drops in without logging in, and tidies up a few rough edges on the stage page.

Start the Music

• The player card now has a clear ▶ Start the music button, with a short note that it allows the YouTube/SoundCloud player and shares your IP with them.
• Block player and Privacy choices are still right there.

A Clearer Guest Experience

• Guests see one short line explaining they're listening as a guest, with a quick way to log in to chat, react, grab tracks or DJ.
• Woot, Grab and Meh now have tooltips, and guests get a friendly login hint when they tap them.
• An empty chat now says hi back: guests are invited to log in and be the first to chat, and the current track is shown.
• The arcade card shows guests a login prompt instead of asking them to type a chat command.

Counts You Can Trust

• The listener count in the stage banner and the chat Users list now come from the same live presence, guests included.

Smoother Stage Page

• The install app popup now waits until you've started the music and listened for a couple of minutes, and no longer covers the player card or the reaction buttons.
• Stage lore now shows bold, italic and links properly.
• The leaderboard no longer gets stuck loading: it shows results, a login prompt, or an error with a Retry button.
• The 'Hosted by' line is no longer cut off.
• Small labels and captions on the stage are bigger and easier to read, and icon buttons have clear names and tooltips.

Languages

• New text is available in English, Dutch and French.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.12 prepares creator-hosted set premieres while keeping Mixcloud completely disabled pending written permission and release review.

Coming Soon: Set Premieres

• We're building set premieres: creators will be able to schedule a public DJ set as a stage event with a countdown, then start it together with everyone in the room.
• Admins can already try a preview of it on a private test stage. The preview doesn't affect any live stage or queue.

How Premieres Will Work

• A premiere waits for the current song to finish, and nobody loses their place in the queue, even through AFK checks.
• Sets play in the official, visible Mixcloud player, only after you agree to it, and only for signed-in listeners aged 16 or older.
• If your browser or Mixcloud doesn't allow skipping ahead to catch up, we'll tell you clearly instead of retrying in a loop or playing anything hidden.

Mixcloud Stays Off For Now

• Mixcloud playback stays completely switched off until we have written permission from Mixcloud and have finished our privacy and safety review.
• Mixcloud doesn't show up in crates or room controls yet, and nothing can turn it on early.

Recover an Idle AutoDJ Booth

• A connected signed-in listener can recover an idle AutoDJ room without waiting for the ten-minute server safety check. One listener owns recovery, with bounded retries, reconnect handling and the existing queue and provider checks.
• An idle response no longer counts as a successful start, and the server rechecks audience activity before pausing an unattended room.

An Accurate Welcome

• The founder welcome is clearly marked as automatic. Its FAQ now explains Spotify approval and manual YouTube matching, paused Apple Music and Deezer imports, and SoundCloud track-link limits. Replies still reach Mr.Chippy, and existing members are not sent another welcome.

Quieter Stage Updates

• A small corner loading wheel replaces the updating bar, keeping stage layout steady. Fast refreshes stay invisible; a compact Try again action remains for connection failures.

Chat Toggle Fix

• The auto-translate switch stays inside its track when turned on or off, including compact stage chat and direct messages. Keyboard focus is visible and reduced-motion settings are respected.

Languages

• Premiere controls are available in English, Dutch and French, with English in other languages for now.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.11 cleans up public branding while preserving the existing backend and account services.

A Fresh Official Look

• GrooveCade's new official logo and artwork now show up everywhere: the browser tab icon, link previews, the landing page, About and the site header.
• Artwork stays sharp at full quality, and the small tab icon loads faster.
• Installed app icons and seasonal themes keep their look.

Matching Sign-In Screens

• Login, sign-up and password recovery now share the GrooveCade logo and seasonal style.
• The account-access screen matches the same theme, with the same translated guidance.
• The Discord loading screen has cleaner wording.
• The About page now reflects that GrooveCade is in Beta.

Nothing Changes for Your Account

• Your account, sign-in (including Google and Discord), sessions and uploaded media all work exactly as before.
• Our hosting and data-processing disclosures stay the same.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.10 adds owner-controlled checks for broken YouTube and SoundCloud links inside each crate.

Check a Crate

• Check links is available beside each owned crate and in the in-stage Crate Studio.
• Each click checks up to ten tracks. Continue requests the next batch; opening a page or crate never starts a scan.
• The results show progress, the check time, links that resolve, confirmed unavailable links and uncertain results.

Keep Checks Lightweight

• Checks run a few at a time, and repeated links are only checked once.
• Results are remembered for a while, so re-checking is quick: working links for 24 hours, unavailable links for one hour and unsure results for ten minutes.
• There are no AI calls, automatic rescans, background checks or repeated retries, and fair limits keep checks light for everyone.

Review, Clean Up and Restore

• Checking never removes tracks by itself. When it finishes, you can clean up only the links confirmed unavailable.
• SoundCloud links are only marked unavailable when they're truly gone. Private, restricted or temporarily unreachable tracks are marked unsure instead.
• Your original SoundCloud share links, including private ones, are kept as they are.
• Only the crate owner (or an admin) can check and clean up a crate, and cleanup won't overwrite changes made in the meantime.
• Removed tracks are saved first, and Restore puts them back in the same spots as long as the crate hasn't changed.

Languages

• The new Check links button is available in all 112 supported languages.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.9 prepares the first Discord and Companion upgrade batch: a room session that survives website-tab closure, clearer Companion controls and more accurate Discord sharing.

Companion Room Sessions

• Companion 0.20.0 keeps you in the room even after you close the website tab. Website and Companion still count your account once.
• Songs move on to the next DJ with the same room rules as the website: access, bans, festival schedules, timing and queue order.
• Closing or hiding the Companion panel leaves the room cleanly. Being in a room doesn't earn XP or Grooves.
• Older Companion versions keep working.
• The Companion now reliably follows the room you're actually listening to.

A Companion With Breathing Room

• Separate Listen, Queue, Crates, Chat and account views.
• The panel no longer jumps around while music plays, and keeps your chat draft, cursor and scroll position.
• Browsing another stage doesn't pull you out of the room you're listening to until you choose to switch.
• Seasonal accents and creator room artwork update without interrupting playback.
• Only one Companion panel plays music at a time, so you won't hear double audio.
• After a browser restart, the Companion remembers your last room and catches up when you press Resume.
• Added support for groovecade.org and removed a permission the Companion no longer needs.
• Swapping a queued track waits until it's ready, and Enter in chat works properly with input methods for languages like Japanese or Chinese.

Adaptive Stage Screens

• Ultrawide YouTube videos smoothly widen the stage player to fit, then go back to the normal size for regular tracks.
• It respects reduced-motion settings and never restarts the song. If the video size is unknown, the normal frame is used.

Smoother Song Changes

• In the Companion, the next YouTube or SoundCloud song loads straight into the same official player, with no full reload.
• Older players keep reloading as before.
• Player controls stay visible and uncovered.
• Your browser and the providers still decide on consent and autoplay. YouTube still doesn't play hidden in the background.

Discord Room Sharing

• Your Discord status can show the room, track, room artwork and track time while you listen or DJ.
• Sharing is off until you turn it on. It's never shown for Backstage, private or password-protected rooms, when your activity privacy is on, or when music is paused, blocked, muted or your turn has ended.
• Leaving a room or turning sharing off now always clears your Discord status.
• Rooms without a cap no longer show a made-up capacity.
• Room links that open the Discord Activity take you to the right room.
• If sharing your status fails, it shows a small notice instead of breaking the Activity.

Bot Room Cards

• Public stage cards from the Discord bot show creator artwork, the current track and DJ, and direct links to the website and Discord Activity.
• Only public rooms appear on cards, and the bot won't ping anyone.

Languages

• New website text reuses existing translations. The Companion and bot replies are in English for now.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.8 addresses shared loading failures, fixes AutoDJ command selection and improves recovery when returning to a suspended tab.

Stop the Account Refresh Loop

• Fixed a loop that kept reloading your account.
• Your profile loads once, even when several parts of the site ask for it at the same time.
• The site no longer waits on older account rewards and avatar upkeep before letting you in.
• Logging out now always sticks, and a newer profile change can no longer be undone by an older update.
• The site starts up faster by loading settings and your sign-in together.

Recover From Loading Failures

• If the site can't connect at first, you'll see a translated retry screen within ten seconds instead of waiting forever.
• The stage and its current song load on their own, separately from chat and the queue.
• A chat or queue hiccup no longer shows "Could not load this stage" when the stage itself is fine.
• When chat or the queue is still loading or fails, a small status bar shows up with a retry button, and the music keeps playing.
• Coming back to the tab refreshes chat and the queue once and quietly retries short hiccups. If something keeps failing, you can still retry it yourself.
• If a stage fails to load, you get a retry button. Private stages still check who's allowed in.

AutoDJ From the Command Picker

• Picking AutoDJ from the command list now fills in /autodj start for you.
• Typing just /autodj also starts it.
• Who can use it and how it works stay the same: hosts and admins only, the current track keeps playing, queued DJs go first, and emergency controls and festival schedules still come first.

Return to the Live Track

• When you come back to a hidden or restored tab, the room catches up to the song that's playing now, for guests too.
• SoundCloud can keep handing off tracks while the tab is hidden, as far as your browser and SoundCloud allow.
• YouTube won't autoplay in the background, because its rules require the player to be visible. When you come back, you jump to the current track instead of a missed one.

Languages

• New status and retry messages reuse existing translations.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.7 repairs delayed queue startup and silent gaps between DJ turns.

Get the Next Track Moving

• An empty booth now starts the next song right away instead of sitting silent.
• Queue and reaction updates no longer hold up the song or lock the controls between turns.
• If a song fails to start or hand off to the next DJ, GrooveCade tries again a few times.
• A brief hiccup when someone takes over the booth now recovers on its own.
• A track waiting in Track Rescue no longer stops the next ready DJ from playing.

Remove Avoidable Waiting

• Playback no longer gets stuck waiting on a slow time check; it uses the last known time instead.
• Late time checks can't throw playback off anymore.
• Picking a song for the queue no longer waits on an extra lookup first.
• Room access, music rules, blocked songs, consent and official YouTube and SoundCloud players all still apply.

Start AutoDJ From Chat

• Stage hosts and site admins can use /autodj start.
• It turns on the stage's configured AutoDJ, checks its crates and starts an empty booth.
• Queued DJs still go first. A song that's already playing finishes normally, and a running AutoDJ isn't restarted.
• Emergency AutoDJ controls and festival schedules still come first.
• If there's nothing playable, you get a hint to check the stage settings instead of a false "music started".

Some browsers may still need a click before audio plays.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.6 adds personal welcomes to reward invitations and admin controls for pausing avatars with Grooves refunds.

Give Your Invitation a Voice

• Add an optional welcome message in Admin → Grooves → Reward invites.
• Plain text, emoji and line breaks are supported, up to 1,000 characters.
• Use {grooves} to insert the configured reward amount automatically.
• A live admin preview shows the message before saving.
• A Neon Kingdom welcome template provides an editable starting point.
• Recipients see the message alongside the reward and their explicit Claim action.
• Existing claim amounts remain the basis of the displayed amount after a campaign reward change.
• Messages remain attached when rotating a code. Leaving the message empty retains the normal invitation.
• New and existing users remain eligible under the campaign's existing restrictions.

Pause an Avatar, Look After Its Owners

• The admin avatar section shows enabled/disabled state and an availability filter.
• Confirm the selected avatar before disabling and processing refunds.
• Disabled avatars stop appearing for new shop purchases, level unlocks and mystery-box rewards. Gifts and marketplace purchases are paused for that avatar.
• Existing owners retain their avatar while it is disabled.
• Refunds use the recorded acquisition value, rather than guessing from today's catalogue price.
• Confirmed credits are recorded in the ledger and followed by an in-app notification explaining that the avatar may be removed or reworked.
• Free avatars receive an availability notice where applicable without a fabricated currency refund.
• Missing legacy purchase evidence appears for admin review.
• Uncertain currency writes are not automatically paid again. Matching ledger settlements or verified balances can resolve them without a second credit.
• Refund and notification processing can be resumed after an interruption.
• Re-enabling requires a completed scan and resolved pending work. Repeated disable/enable cycles do not repay the same acquisition.

Consistent Acquisition Records

• New shop purchases, initial mystery-box ownership and marketplace purchases record refund value and provenance.
• Gifts retain that provenance. A new paid marketplace acquisition receives its own price.
• Legacy duplicate inventory records backed by the same payment share one refund identity.

Languages

• Invitation and avatar-control labels include English, Dutch and French with explicitly marked English fallback elsewhere.
• Custom messages remain administrator-authored plain text. System refund notification text is English.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. Welcome your crowd and keep their Grooves accounted for.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.5 makes the personal account menu smaller and improves the handoff from profile communities to stage community windows.

A Compact Account Menu

• The opening menu shows your identity, current status and short account shortcuts.
• Open How you appear for the four existing availability choices: In the Groove, On a Break, In the Zone and Backstage.
• The status-duration selector is tucked inside a disclosure. Existing expiry, 30 minutes, one hour, four hours and until-changed choices remain available.
• Open Status note for a small editor with the existing 120-character limit and explicit Save action.
• Cancelling a note returns to the menu without saving. Failed saves retain the draft for retry.
• Activity and privacy has its own small view for Cade activity and cabinet-name sharing.
• Longer privacy explanations are available on demand. Important current-status explanations remain visible in the status picker.
• Edit profile, Avatar Shop, Control Panel and My Communities remain accessible.
• Desktop uses a smaller 300-pixel popover. Mobile uses a compact bottom sheet with scrolling when needed.
• Native radio controls, keyboard focus outlines and larger touch targets remain available. Subview changes move focus to the new controls; Back restores focus to the corresponding shortcut.

Communities That Open

• Selecting a community from a quick profile now closes that profile before the stage community window takes focus.
• Community links in the personal account popup also close that popup.
• Your own floating profile uses your joined-membership list, including communities hidden from your public profile.
• Other listeners and guests continue to see only memberships you chose to share. Hidden memberships are labelled in your own compact list, without adding management controls to the hover card.
• Changing the viewer remounts the collection so a personal list is not carried into another account's view.
• The source popup does not restore focus over the newly opened community dialog.
• Links retain their stage destination and community-panel query, including when the community belongs to the current stage.
• Ctrl, Cmd, Shift and middle-click retain normal link behavior.
• Community visibility, pinning and membership controls keep their existing responsibilities.

Languages

• The two new compact-only labels cover English, Dutch and French with explicitly marked English fallback. Existing translated social labels remain intact.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. Keep the controls close and leave room for the music.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.4 adds admin-managed reward invitations for community campaigns and giveaway winners.

Reward Invites

• Create campaigns in Admin → Grooves → Reward invites.
• Choose a campaign name and a custom code, or generate a random code.
• Set 1–1,000,000 Grooves per claim and a maximum of 1–1,000 claims.
• Enable or disable a campaign without deleting its history.
• Optionally reserve a campaign for an existing winner account. A one-claim limit suits a single winner.
• Copy a shareable /invite/CODE link. Recipients can also enter a code at /invite.
• Viewing a link does not award currency. A signed-in recipient must press Claim.
• New and existing accounts are eligible. Each account can claim once per campaign. Existing personal referral links continue to track signup attribution without automatic rewards.

Reset the Link, Keep the History

• Rotate a code to invalidate the previous link while retaining its usage count and claim records.
• Retired codes cannot be reused. Create a new campaign for a fresh reward pool.
• Reward changes apply to later claims, preserving the amount recorded for earlier recipients.
• A usage cap cannot be reduced below the number of reserved claims.
• Conflicting admin edits require a refresh rather than silently overwriting a newer change.

Claims and Review

• Server-side checks enforce admin access, winner restrictions, enabled state and claim limits.
• Retry and repeat-click protection retain the original claim instead of paying it again.
• Ambiguous currency-write failures remain reserved for manual review. Paid claims missing a ledger receipt also appear for reconciliation.
• Marking a claim reviewed never grants Grooves.

Languages

• New invitation copy includes English, Dutch and French, with explicitly marked English fallback elsewhere.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. A good invite deserves a little groove.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.3 adds personality to the wait and brings more visual consistency to discovery, stages and community tools.

Good Things Loading

• Stage arrivals now say things like “Taking you to the party…” and “Giving the bass a little elbow room…”.
• Crates, Cade, friends and messages, profiles, settings, community pages, discovery, account pages, listening history and information pages each have their own loading lines.
• A small vinyl-style activity indicator accompanies the text. Section loaders can show stable placeholder rows.
• Messages change at a relaxed five-second interval. Longer waits switch to an honest waiting message after fifteen seconds.
• Reduced-motion preferences keep the playful line stable and slow the indicator. Hidden pages do not cycle copy; unmounting clears the timer.
• Screen readers receive a stable loading announcement and can read the playful line without repeated live announcements.
• No fake percentages, simulated completed tasks or artificial minimum wait are added.
• Loading screens cover initial route/auth waits and actual stage, crate, friends, listening-history and community data waits.
• In-stage lazy windows use a small loading surface while the stage remains mounted.

A More Consistent Groove

• Shared control sizing and corner shapes bring Home, community buttons and Cade actions closer together.
• Small discovery labels, filters, room metadata and selected stage controls have clearer sizing and contrast.
• Room cards align their content and actions more consistently while keeping creator thumbnails in proportion.
• Game playfields retain their individual controls and geometry.
• The community view switcher has a compact segmented treatment with explicit selected state and visible keyboard focus.
• Empty community sections and recoverable errors use consistent surfaces and spacing.
• Creator tools open with the invitation preview and sharing controls. OBS setup sits in an expandable section underneath.
• Stage chrome retains a solid backing around key information while venue backgrounds continue to fill the stage.

Seasonal Homepage Colour

• Restored broad background gradients and the headline gradient using the active seasonal palette.
• Featured panels, primary actions and room-card accents follow the same colours.
• Standard mode keeps the familiar ember, magenta and aqua palette. Seasonal scheduling and admin previews use the existing theme bridge.
• Gradients are static, respect forced-colour presentation, and keep the recent layout and artwork proportions.

Languages

• The normal loading label uses existing translated UI copy.
• Playful copy includes English, Dutch and French. Other languages use explicitly marked English text for these lines.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. The next good track is worth finding.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.2 keeps community tools inside the live stage and gives home navigation a clearer layout.

Community Tools in the Stage

• Community home, Creator tools and Host studio share one stage popup.
• Open community information, switch tools and close the window without navigating away from the room.
• Existing community and creator links redirect into the matching stage window. Invitation attribution is preserved, including older host-studio links.
• Community shortcuts in Tonight, profile crests, collections and challenge details open the stage window.
• Hosts retain their welcome, announcement, celebration and challenge tools. Existing access checks remain in place.
• Community competitions can open within the window. Embedded cabinet play receives DJ-turn pause handling and Escape pauses an active run before closing.
• Dialog content scrolls separately on small screens; its title, description, view buttons and close control remain available.

Creator Artwork on Invitations

• Cards use the creator's stage thumbnail first, then an approved stage background, then legacy cover artwork.
• Seasonal presentation does not replace the creator's invitation artwork.
• Creator tools display the selected image in the invitation preview.
• Downloaded SVG cards embed supported raster artwork, keeping the image available when the file is shared or opened offline.
• Card text remains escaped. Unsupported image types, oversized files and unavailable artwork show a retry message rather than silently producing an image-free card.
• Stages without configured artwork retain the generic invitation treatment.
• Challenges associated with stages use their first stage's artwork on result invitations.

A Navbar With Breathing Room

• Discover, Cade, Crates and Friends have readable labels on wide screens.
• A navigation button is available at every width. It opens all destinations, stage creation, account tools, language, help and support.
• Notifications and the personal account control remain directly accessible.
• Secondary tools no longer compete for a single fixed-height row.
• The navigation menu scrolls within the viewport and supports Escape with focus returned to its button.
• Seasonal logos follow the same bounded sizing as the standard logo.
• The home tour opens the menu whenever its language or account explanation needs it.

Languages

• Invitation error copy covers English, Dutch and French, with the existing English fallback elsewhere.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.1 gives discovery and live stages more breathing room, and expands the Cade starter into a chaptered guided journey.

A Clearer Way Into the Music

• Returning listeners get a compact welcome, Tonight and the room browser near the top of Discover.
• Guests keep the introductory hero, followed directly by the room directory.
• Recent visits, recommendations, events, live-pulse links and the arcade promotion remain available below the directory.
• Tonight uses a compact layout, with sound preferences and optional measurements in a disclosure instead of another full-size card.
• Removed the continuous discovery light beams, animated borders and layered glows around room cards.
• Reduced heading sizes, shortened duplicate feature explanations and gave the community invitation its own contained image and text layout.
• Featured artwork and room thumbnails keep their intended proportions rather than enlarging a crop to fill every panel.

More Space on the Stage

• The header keeps stage identity, current track, listening controls and personal display within reach.
• Community membership, the community home, Follow, tutorials and host settings share a More menu.
• Stage and track titles use readable static text with full-title tooltips instead of multiple moving text strips.
• Dancing avatars open their normal quick profile, including your own avatar. Availability controls stay in the users/account surfaces rather than replacing the floor profile.
• Removed availability dots and status notes from floor avatars and their profile cards; active arcade-controller indicators remain.
• The welcome notice expands for its full text and can still be dismissed.
• New room-layout defaults start with the navigator collapsed. Existing saved layout choices remain respected.
• The desktop chat rail gains space where available. Message badges show the first badge and an expandable count rather than every badge beside every name.
• The bottom bar keeps queue access and compact progress; detailed activity stays in the existing Pulse panel.
• Crowd reactions start with applause, hands and love; More opens the remaining stage toys.
• Venue backgrounds fill the stage canvas on desktop and phone while preserving their proportions. Provider playback, consent and queue actions keep their existing responsibilities.

Tours That Follow the Room

• Home guidance includes the Tonight destination and retains the directory and information-section anchors after their move.
• Stage guidance opens the grouped room actions for their explanatory step.
• The navigator is revealed when its chapter needs it; other steps keep more of the venue available.
• The regular guide continues to snapshot and restore the listener's panel and visibility choices after pausing, finishing or leaving.
• Tutorial preparation explains controls without joining a community, changing a preference or sending a reaction.

The Cade Guided Journey

• Replaced the four-stop starter with twelve stops across Find your cabinet, Own your run, Bring your crowd and Chase the encore.
• Chapters cover searching and categories, reading a cabinet mission, Practice/Daily/Ranked, keyboard and touch controls, optional sound, social competition, the stage popup, pause behaviour, standings and seasonal collectibles.
• Manual guidance highlights the real control and follows it when the page or container scrolls.
• Native manual popovers are used when available, with a fixed-position fallback inside the same page or stage dialog.
• Opening manual guidance moves keyboard focus to its next action. Escape pauses the guide without closing an enclosing stage arcade window.
• Pause stores the current step per account or guest browser. Chapter buttons allow jumping ahead; completion and replay remain available.
• The revised guide has a new local version. Older completion records are retained, and the new guide can be paused or skipped.
• Starting a game or opening social play dismisses the guide; guidance never starts a round, joins a challenge, equips a frame or grants a reward.
• Cabinet launches, replay validation, score records and existing daily reward limits remain in place.

Languages

• New Cade explanations cover English, Dutch and French, with the arcade namespace's explicit English fallback elsewhere.
• Reused translated regular-tour copy for the moved destinations. Existing legal-language and translation-loading behaviour is retained.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. Find your room, learn your cabinet and make space for the music.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.10.0 connects first visits, lasting communities and social arcade play. Bring your crowd, make a night of it and give people a reason to come back.

🎟️ Your Next Night Starts Here

• Added Tonight on GrooveCade with joined communities, a recent public stage, upcoming gatherings and entered challenges.
• Choose a preferred genre and see why a community is suggested.
• Automatic introductions wait for successful playback. Manual tours remain available.
• Navbar login, registration and community joining preserve the intended destination.

🏠 A Home for Your Community

• Stages have a persistent community home with a newcomer welcome, host announcement, upcoming events and track-title recaps.
• Hosts get a preparation checklist and links to stage setup, event tools and creator tools.
• Community homes link back to the live stage and use existing explicit membership.
• Hosts can launch a short opening celebration through the existing director system.
• Added an applause reaction and larger touch targets to the existing stage reaction rail.

🕹️ Play With Your Crowd

• Share a friend challenge with a server-issued course, explicit entry, verified results and a rematch option.
• Hosts can create ten-minute room rounds for current stage participants.
• Weekly cups rotate three cabinets and close Monday at 00:00 UTC.
• Community matches require acceptance from the opposing host; hosts can choose a future start time.
• Cup points come from placement per cabinet. Team totals count their top three contributors per cabinet.
• Competition rounds have their own standings and are excluded from normal daily leaderboards.
• The existing in-stage Cade popup hosts social play while keeping the room player mounted and DJ-turn handling intact.
• Ten players posting positive verified results across a cup's cabinets earn a shared community encore decoration.
• Existing daily XP and Grooves limits remain; these features introduce no additional currency grants.

🏆 Your Community Identity

• Choose a home-community crest from memberships already displayed publicly on your profile.
• Showcase up to three completed public competitions as souvenirs.
• Leaving, hiding or losing access to an affiliation removes its public crest.
• Private and unlisted competitions cannot become public profile trophies.

📣 Invitations & Creator Tools

• Share community and challenge links using the device share sheet or a copy fallback.
• Download editable SVG invitation cards with escaped text and a direct public link.
• Creator tools provide OBS Browser Source links for now-playing information, the next event and public cup results.
• Creator overlays are opt-in, public-stage-only and omit account navigation, chat and mandatory account dialogs.
• No invitations, broadcasts or external announcements are sent automatically.

📊 Learn What Brings People Back

• Optional experience measurements are off by default and explained beside their control.
• Host and admin reports show sampled invitations, stage entries, successful playback, participation and returning accounts.
• Reports include sampled page-ready timings and communities with repeat scheduled events.
• Reports cover a bounded 30-day sample; they are not total audience counts or proof of event attendance.
• No paid analytics service or additional integration is required.

🔎 Competition Rules & Visibility

• Joining a competition is deliberate; simply opening an invitation does not enter a player or award anything.
• Room rounds check fresh stage presence as well as community membership. A player cannot switch teams by changing the submitted score.
• Cancelled challenges reject new submissions. A round already started before the deadline has a short finishing grace period.
• Results use a bounded sample of up to 500 verified runs per cabinet and show up to 50 players. A warning appears when a cabinet reaches the sample limit.
• Public showcases recheck community visibility and membership; changing a stage to private removes it from public presentation.
• Optional measurements describe observed samples and page readiness. They do not claim a complete audience count, a formal performance benchmark or confirmed event attendance.

🌍 Languages

• New crowd screens have complete English, Dutch and French copy, with an explicit English fallback elsewhere.
• Existing language catalogs, legal fallbacks, seasonal branding and the twenty-game lineup remain.

GrooveCade stays free. Bring your crowd. Make it your night.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.9.1 connects the Cade to the people around it. Choose how you appear, see when someone on your stage is playing, and join the communities you want to keep close.

🎛️ Your Availability, Your Call

• Click your account avatar in the navbar, on the stage or in the Cade to open the new availability controls.
• In the Groove means online and available. On a Break replaces the everyday AFK choice. In the Zone quiets optional notifications. Backstage makes your account appear offline.
• Desktop uses an anchored panel; phones use a bottom sheet with room for the status controls.
• Add a short status note and choose whether a status clears after 30 minutes, one hour or four hours, or stays until you change it.
• Backstage stays on until you change it. It cannot silently expire into a visible online status.
• Native radio controls, text labels, distinct status shapes and keyboard-friendly dialogs make the choices readable beyond colour alone.
• Quiet listening and changing browser tabs do not automatically mark you away.

🎮 The Cade Joins the Crowd

• A small controller icon appears with your stage avatar and in people lists while an actual arcade round is playing.
• Pausing, finishing, returning to the cabinet list or leaving clears the activity. Opening account controls pauses the game so you can change settings.
• Activity can be shared without naming the game. You control both the activity badge and the separate option to disclose a cabinet name.
• The controller works with the existing twenty-game lineup and the in-stage /cade window.
• Arcade inputs are tracked locally and sent with presence updates. Each tap or keypress does not create another network write.
• Recent real game interaction can count as activity for the stage's AntiAFK check. An idle lobby or a stale disconnected tab does not qualify.
• Arcade presence does not award XP or Grooves and does not bypass booth-line readiness, permissions or moderation.

👥 Communities You Actually Join

• Added Join community and Leave community controls to stage information and the stage toolbar.
• Visiting a stage does not enroll you. Joining is a deliberate choice that lasts after you leave the live room.
• Membership and Follow remain separate: joining keeps a community in your collection, while Follow controls the existing stage-notification relationship.
• My communities in the account panel gives you one place to manage your joined stages.
• Choose which public communities appear on your profile and pin up to six favourites for the compact profile preview.
• Public and quick-profile cards show the affiliations you have chosen to share, with a view-all control for a longer list.
• New memberships start hidden from your public profile. Private and unlisted stages cannot be made public through this feature.
• Community display checks current stage access and visibility, so a stage becoming private is removed from public affiliations.
• Joining does not grant host, manager, bouncer or DJ permissions. Leaving preserves stage points, roles and moderation history.

🤫 Quieter Notifications, Clearer Privacy

• In the Zone suppresses optional reaction toasts, desktop notifications, push delivery and DJ-turn notification sounds.
• Messages still arrive, unread counts still work, and the in-page DJ-turn banner stays available.
• Save confirmations and action errors remain available. Arcade sound effects keep their own sound and volume controls.
• Backstage hides named online activity and current-room lookup from friends and discovery.
• People sharing your stage can still see your avatar, chat and public DJ activity. Backstage does not promise invisible attendance inside a shared room.
• Status notes and cabinet names are excluded from hidden presence responses. Public presence signals contain only a coarse status and expiry.
• /afk remains available as a shortcut. Its optional note stays in the room, and clearing it cannot override a manually selected In the Zone or Backstage status.
• Host and moderator AFK tools keep their existing room-local behaviour.

🔄 Presence That Recovers

• Fresh sessions are combined across tabs and devices. Closing one tab cannot mark another active tab offline.
• Expired sessions and controller badges clear automatically, including when a realtime event is missed.
• A late heartbeat cannot reopen a departed session or undo a newer Backstage choice.
• Account changes discard older status responses, pending community reads and game activity.
• Existing room heartbeats carry stage activity; the account-level heartbeat runs outside the room to avoid a duplicate room polling loop.
• Failed status saves restore the previous choice and provide retry feedback. Membership changes enforce profile privacy and the six-pin limit on the server.
• Fixed status saves, community coordination, daily arcade rewards and earned-frame changes.
• Completed the tutorial translation gaps.
• Added screen-reader semantics for status graphics, stage-specific names for community controls and explicit form label associations.
• Festival grounds now uses the shared dialog library and improves focus containment, Escape handling and opener restoration.

🌍 Release & Language Notes

• Availability and community controls now follow all 112 standard interface language options, including regional English. All 108 non-English packs contain the complete 65-key social namespace and retain on-demand loading.
• Filled 15,264 missing tutorial translations across newer language packs. Machine-assisted additions remain open to native-speaker wording review.
• v0.9.0's seasonal arcade, games, scores and progression remain in place.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. Find your people, pick your pace and keep the feedback coming.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.9.0 brings the Cade side of the platform to life with twenty playable games, an arcade you can open inside a stage, verified ranked scores and seasonal collectibles. Around the games, this update makes stages easier to read, repairs room leaderboards, reduces repeated discovery content and gives hosts a quicker way to plan community nights.

🕹️ Twenty Games, One Arcade

• Added the public /cade hub with ten browser games, instructions, scores, win/loss states, pause/resume and replay.
• Crate Escape: collect records and dodge hazards across five lanes.
• Double A-Side: uncover eight matching pairs of records before time runs out.
• Echo Chamber: repeat eight growing sequences using four numbered pads.
• Speaker Wrecker: guide a paddle and clear a wall of 24 bricks.
• Pocket Headliner: hit a visual chart using four lanes, with keyboard or touch controls.
• Bassline Boa: collect 15 records while avoiding walls and your own tail.
• 256 FM: slide and combine tiles to reach 256.
• Lights Out, Encore!: solve a generated 5×5 cross-toggle puzzle by switching every light off.
• Whack-a-Track: collect target hits, avoid bombs and reach 20 hits before the timer ends.
• Crossfade Heights: drop 12 moving layers while keeping enough overlap to continue.
• Airwave Aviator: Keep your record airborne. Slip through twelve speaker gates.
• Crate Invaders: Defend the booth from eighteen descending crate drones.
• Platter Pong: Return the record and beat the house to five points.
• Frequency Freak: Catch the sweet spot and lock eight clean frequencies.
• Sample Shuffle: Send each sample to its matching symbol before the meter empties.
• Fader Frenzy: Slide the faders into order. Leave the empty slot at the end.
• Patchbay Panic: Rotate the patch cables and get the signal across the booth.
• Disco Dodgeball: Collect twelve records while the dance floor fights back.
• Encore Reflex: Hold your nerve. Hit the encore cue, never the silence.
• Backspin Brawl: Outflip the house and claim the dance floor.
• Renamed the original cabinets to fit GrooveCade. Existing game IDs, personal records and ranked history stay attached to the same games.
• Games include keyboard and touch controls. Practice varies the course; Daily uses a shared seed that changes at 00:00 UTC.
• Personal bests are stored per account or guest in the current browser. Storage failures show a notice rather than breaking the game.

🧭 A Mini Tour for the Cade

• Added a four-step starter guide covering cabinets, Practice/Daily/Ranked, touch controls, sound settings, standings and seasonal rewards.
• First visits show the guide in the page, without another blocking popup.
• Skip or finish it once per account or guest browser, and replay it from Quick Cade tour whenever needed.
• Added search, former-name matching and Action, Puzzles, Timing & reflex and Strategy filters for the larger lineup.

📱 Better in Your Hands

• Improved narrow-screen and landscape layouts, playfield sizing and stage-popup safe-area spacing.
• Added swipe controls for Bassline Boa and 256 FM alongside their directional buttons.
• Added hold-to-move controls and immediate touch actions where they fit, with cancelled holds and gestures cleaned up.
• Platter Pong supports vertical paddle dragging; Speaker Wrecker retains direct paddle dragging.
• Responsive timing lanes and stack visuals stay aligned as playfields change size.
• Added clearer goal counters to more games and kept instructions, pause and retry available.

🔊 Arcade Effects, Your Volume

• Added short synthesized effects for reveals, matches, hits, collisions, mistakes, timing cues and round outcomes.
• Echo Chamber plays distinct numbered-pad tones while retaining its visual cues.
• Effects start after a user action and have a shared mute button and volume slider, saved in the browser.
• Games have no background soundtrack and do not tap into music-provider streams.
• Pausing, hiding the tab, leaving a game or closing the arcade stops its active effects.
• Effects use a separate, bounded Web Audio context and a conservative default volume; the stage's own player controls stay separate.
• Unsupported audio or blocked preference storage does not prevent play.

🎧 Play From the Stage

• Type /cade in stage chat to open a private arcade dialog, with command autocomplete to help discover it.
• The command opens locally instead of posting a chat message or running a shared room command.
• More → Play without leaving the stage opens the same dialog.
• The room owns one arcade popup across chat, queue, mobile and immersive layouts.
• The stage player and queue remain mounted while the arcade is open; closing returns to the existing stage and restores composer focus.
• A newly arriving DJ turn pauses the game and offers a return-to-stage action.
• Hidden tabs and window blur pause active games. Resuming requires an explicit action.
• P toggles pause. Escape pauses active play; another Escape can close the stage dialog.
• Games use optional sound effects with their own mute/volume. Pocket Headliner follows its visual timing independently of the current track, and no game accesses provider streams.

🏆 Repaired Stage Leaderboards

• Fixed room standings that queried the newest memberships before sorting, which could leave older high-scoring members out.
• Stage rankings now request members in points order, remove duplicate memberships and exclude banned members and invalid totals.
• Connected the stage Pulse leaderboard to the current room.
• Added room points, global XP, selector scores and a Cade tab in the shared leaderboard panel.
• Loading, empty and failed requests remain visible, with Refresh for recovery.
• Working leaderboard feeds remain available when a separate feed fails.
• Normalized invalid XP totals so non-finite values cannot stall level calculations.
• Private-stage access is checked before room standings are returned, and public results contain only the fields needed to display a rank.

🎮 Ranked Daily and Shared Cade Scores

• Signed-in players can choose Ranked daily for server-issued rounds and shared scores.
• The server replays recorded inputs using the same deterministic rules as the browser, calculating the result instead of trusting a submitted score.
• Stage and public-community boards offer Today and All-time filters, game selection and a manual Refresh action.
• Each board shows one best result per player, ordered by score with elapsed time as a tie-break.
• Private and unlisted stage runs are excluded from the global public board; stage boards follow room-access permissions.
• Run ownership, expiry, bounded replay inputs and repeated-submission checks protect the ranked flow.
• Completed-round retries do not award the same reward again.
• Personal Practice/Daily records remain local; ranked results are saved separately.
• Standings refresh when opened, filtered or manually refreshed, without constant background polling.

✨ Daily Rewards and Seasonal Collectibles

• The first verified winning round per UTC day earns 20 XP and 25 Grooves.
• The daily cap is shared across games and uses the server's finishing date.
• Concurrent winning submissions compete for one daily grant rather than multiplying the reward.
• Verified wins during an active seasonal theme earn that theme's collection stamp.
• Collect stamps in the Cade hub and equip an earned stamp as an arcade avatar frame.
• Equipped frames appear in arcade gameplay; they do not replace every avatar frame across the platform.
• Stamp ownership is checked by the server. Private admin theme previews do not determine rewards.
• Existing seasonal artwork supplies the collectible icons and coordinated arcade colours.
• Grooves remain free on-site currency with no real-money purchase.

🌃 Community Nights Made Easier

• Added Open Decks, Fresh Finds and Cade Social event drafts in stage settings.
• Hosts can optionally create four weekly dates from the selected start time.
• Weekly dates preserve the browser's chosen local wall time across daylight-saving changes.
• Events use the existing stage calendar and normal event records.
• Permission and date validation happen before the server saves a series.
• Retrying an identical series reuses matching stage, title and date records.
• Dates are only scheduled after the host submits the form.

💬 A Calmer Stage

• Improved stage, sidebar and chat surface contrast with quieter, more opaque panels.
• Consecutive ordinary messages from the same author share their visual identity when sent within two minutes.
• Replies and changes of whisper recipient start a new group, while each message retains its own actions.
• Normal stage announcements now flow inside the stage layout.
• Immersive announcements use a smaller corner card above the controls.
• Media-consent panels give the Allow player action clearer emphasis while keeping the existing permission controls.
• The Pulse window has a bounded, scrollable body to keep longer standings usable.

🧭 More Focused Discovery

• Returning signed-in members see a more compact homepage hero.
• Live Pulse avoids showing a lone room again when it is already the main spotlight.
• The rail returns when another active stage adds something useful to browse.
• Listening and stage discovery appear before the Cade promotion.
• The arcade has a desktop navigation entry and the centre mobile tab; Open a stage remains available in the main menu.
• Gameplay is loaded when needed rather than being included in the lightweight homepage promo.

🌍 Copy and Accessibility

• Added complete English, Dutch and French packs for the new arcade and upgrade namespace.
• Other languages use an explicitly scoped English fallback for this new copy, including the appropriate language and text-direction attributes.
• Existing platform translations keep their current coverage.
• Games support deliberate pause/resume, keyboard controls and touch buttons.
• Decorative arcade motion respects reduced-motion preferences, while game colours and shapes retain consistent meanings across seasonal themes.

GrooveCade stays free and in Beta. This release grows the arcade around the shared music experience, with more ways to play, meet and return to your stage.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.8.6 brings a seasonal identity to the arcade: changing logos, coordinated colours, a shared event calendar and festive artwork for the official stage. This update also includes roomier branding, admin theme controls, the supplied PWA install logo and analytics recovery fixes added since 0.8.5.

🎨 41 Seasonal Logo & Colour Packs

• Added 41 themed packs, each with its own wordmark, compact icon, browser favicon and coordinated colour palette.
• Major celebrations include Halloween, Christmas, New Year, Valentine's Day, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Carnival, Sinterklaas, Lunar New Year and Pride Month.
• Seasonal and community packs include Spring, Summer, Autumn Harvest, Winter, Earth Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, King's Day, Thanksgiving and Bonfire Night.
• Music and campaign packs include International DJ Day, World Music Day, Record Store Day, Eurovision, Festival Season, Oktoberfest, Back to School, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Regional and cultural packs include Belgian National Day, Bastille Day, German Unity Day, Canada Day, US Independence Day, Golden Week, Hanami / Sakura Festival and April Fools.
• GrooveCade Anniversary, GrooveCade Festival Edition, Retro Arcade Day and Space / Cosmic complete the collection.
• Logo assets are optimized WebP files served with the app, so visitors do not depend on a live Google Drive download.

🌍 One Calendar Across GrooveCade

• Automatic mode uses one worldwide calendar. Changes occur at 00:00 UTC: 01:00 in Belgium during winter and 02:00 during summer.
• Spring, Summer, Autumn Harvest and Winter provide the underlying seasonal looks. These are editorial seasons following the Northern Hemisphere calendar.
• Specific holidays take priority over longer seasonal campaigns. When an event ends, the next applicable calendar theme returns automatically.
• Halloween runs from 20 October through 1 November; Sinterklaas from 1 through 6 December; Christmas from 7 through 30 December; New Year from 31 December through 3 January.
• Pride Month runs throughout June; Festival Season from 15 July through 15 August; Back to School from 25 August through 7 September; Hanami from 20 March through 10 April; Golden Week from 29 April through 5 May.
• Easter and Carnival follow the Western Easter calendar. Mother's Day uses the second Sunday in May, Father's Day the second Sunday in June, and Thanksgiving the US fourth Thursday in November.
• King's Day moves to 26 April when 27 April falls on Sunday. Black Friday and Cyber Monday follow Thanksgiving.
• Edition-specific dates for Eurovision, Record Store Day, Oktoberfest and Lunar New Year are entered for confirmed years. The initial calendar includes 2026; later editions need their dates configured rather than copying old dates forward.

🎂 GrooveCade's Own Anniversary

• Set the anniversary to 7 September, based on the earliest recorded change in this Base44 app's Git history on 7 September 2026.
• The anniversary theme starts with GrooveCade's first birthday on 7 September 2027 and returns every year.
• Anniversary day takes priority over the Back to School campaign, then returns to the regular calendar afterward.

🎛️ Admin Theme Controls

• Added Admin → Theme packs as the central place to manage platform-wide seasonal branding.
• Choose Automatic for the calendar, Manual for a temporary override, or None for standard branding.
• Added individual switches for Retro Arcade Day, GrooveCade Festival Edition and Space / Cosmic. One manual theme can be selected at a time.
• Extra-theme switches prepare a change for Save Settings. A new activation defaults to 24 hours, with an editable end time; switching it off restores Automatic mode when saved.
• Manual overrides expire back to the automatic calendar instead of leaving the site in an old campaign indefinitely.
• Enable or disable individual calendar packs and set custom annual or year-specific date windows with explicit priorities.
• Preview a selected theme privately, or inspect a date using the current draft schedule, before saving changes for everyone.
• Admin previews clear when leaving the panel or losing admin access. Saves check for a newer configuration so another admin's changes are not silently overwritten.

🌆 GrooveCade.FM Gets in the Spirit

• The official GrooveCade.FM room follows the active theme for its compact room logo, stage background and discovery thumbnail.
• Added custom stage backgrounds and matching discovery thumbnails for all 41 seasonal packs.
• Backgrounds follow the original GrooveCade arcade-stage style, with themed branding, speakers, equalizers and a clear foreground for the room's avatars.
• Discovery cards, room spotlights, navigation previews and event views use the shared seasonal artwork selection.
• Seasonal stage artwork is limited to the permanent official GrooveCade.FM room. Community stages retain their own uploaded backgrounds and thumbnails.
• All 41 background and thumbnail pairs use consistent names and optimized WebP files served with the app.

✨ Styling That Matches the Theme

• Seasonal palettes now apply across the shared site styling, including backgrounds, cards, borders, controls, accents and feedback panels.
• The browser favicon and supported browser theme colour follow the active seasonal identity.
• Official-stage lighting colours and shared GrooveCade branding follow the same pack so the room and surrounding interface feel connected.
• Themed navbar logos receive a taller responsive header and natural proportions. Artwork framing removes empty transparent margins from the visible layout while preserving the original logo files.
• Mobile menus and toast positions follow the taller navbar, keeping navigation and alerts clear of the artwork.
• Personal appearance preferences remain stored underneath seasonal styling and return when seasonal branding is turned off.
• Seasonal styles respect the existing high-contrast, reduced-transparency and reduced-motion controls.

🔄 Theme Changes Without Restarting the Music

• Calendar boundaries update the theme without remounting the room media player.
• Shared settings updates and tab-resume recovery refresh the active theme without introducing a constant polling loop.
• A failed settings refresh keeps the last known configuration, and expired manual overrides return to the calendar.
• Brand images fall back to standard branding after a loading error; the live official-stage background can fall back to its normal artwork.

📱 Install Branding & Analytics Recovery

• Updated the PWA install assets to the supplied GrooveCade logo, including standard, maskable and Apple touch icons.
• Installed home-screen branding remains stable while the website's logos, favicon and colours change for seasonal events.
• Fixed a room-data lookup failure where malformed legacy stage references could reject an entire authorized batch and cause Analytics to return a 503 error.
• Analytics failures now show a readable message and a Refresh action for recovery.

GrooveCade remains free to use and in Beta. Seasonal branding changes the look of the arcade while keeping the music, community rooms and your saved preferences in place.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.8.5 brings together the work since 0.8.1: a wider world of languages, a much lighter startup, easier first DJ turns, better ways to find your people, and fixes across crates, room updates and playback.

🌍 A Wider World of Languages

• The interface language selector now supports 112 standard language and regional options, with expanded coverage across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania.
• Completed the remaining planned language batches through Mongolian, including dedicated checks for recently added scripts, placeholders, links and interface copy.
• Added UK, Canadian and Australian English variants and expanded the fun and constructed-language choices.
• Improved right-to-left handling, language tags, saved-language startup and browser-language selection.
• Language switching waits until the selected pack loads. A failed download offers recovery without silently replacing your saved choice or remounting the music player.
• Legal information uses a per-language review setting: unreviewed legal copy stays in English with a notice in your selected language and the correct reading direction.
• Some newer strings still fall back to English. Community review and translation cleanup remain ongoing, especially for recently added languages.

⚡ A Much Lighter, Faster GrooveCade

• Translations now load on demand instead of downloading every language at startup. The build keeps 108 translated packs separate from the initial page download.
• Rebuilt the browser translation catalogs so English startup no longer carries the full legacy multilingual tables. Initial JavaScript fell from roughly 5.3 MB to 1.13 MB during the catalog optimization pass.
• Split page and optional room-panel code so settings, crate tools and other heavier features load when needed.
• Added selective route-code preloading that respects data-saving settings and slower connections.
• Public rooms appear as soon as the catalog is ready, while activity and friend information finish loading separately.
• Reduced repeated room, reaction and avatar-catalog requests, shared identical active subscriptions, and improved image and layout-observer handling.
• Added bundle-size checks to help future changes stay within the startup budget.

🎧 An Easier First DJ Turn

• Join the booth line with a pasted track, a search result or a track from your crate. You do not need to build a crate before trying your first turn.
• A valid track joins ready to play, removing the extra ready-confirmation step from the normal queue flow.
• Track checks explain stage length limits, music policy and queue restrictions before you submit.
• Added queue wait estimates when enough track information is available. Estimates are withheld for unknown lengths and host-controlled mixes.
• Clearer lookup recovery and editable track details help when a provider cannot supply all the information.
• Failed selections stay available for correction, and repeated clicks are locked while a queue action is running.
• Optional path guidance can be postponed with Not now. Required identity setup remains separate, and manual tutorials are available to ordinary accounts as well as admins.

🧭 Find a Stage Worth Staying In

• Discovery gives more weight to real listening activity, people in the room, friends and currently playing music.
• A recommended stage makes it easier to start listening, with upcoming community events closer to the main discovery flow.
• Added stage-follow controls and a Following view so your regular rooms are easier to find again.
• Recently visited stages bring you back to your own public-room history without exposing someone else's visits.
• Live, Pulse and Friends views keep appropriate loading and retry states while their data is incomplete.
• Account changes discard stale friend and room signals, and realtime events no longer make old activity snapshots appear fresh.

🎪 Events, Sharing & Returning

• Public community events have their own shareable detail pages with stage information and a direct route into the room.
• Event actions support sharing and calendar downloads with time-zone-aware details and a reminder.
• Stage sharing uses a stable GrooveCade link, with native sharing, clipboard copy and a manual-copy fallback.
• Private or unavailable stages and events are excluded from public discovery and event details.
• Listening history now highlights personal discoveries based on your own listening and positive reactions, including tracks joined partway through.

📺 Link Your YouTube Playlists

• Added optional YouTube account linking with read-only access. Discord remains your GrooveCade login.
• Browse your account's playlists and import them into your own private crates in manageable batches.
• Continue an import and use Sync missing tracks to add new songs without removing your crate edits.
• Duplicate protection and the 100-track crate limit apply to linked imports.
• Playlist synchronization is manual. Disconnecting removes linked-account imports while keeping manually added tracks.
• Added authorization-revocation checks, reconnect handling and clearer privacy information for linked YouTube data.
• Spotify imports continue to use the existing temporary approval windows; SoundCloud account linking is unavailable.

📦 Crates & Grab: Fewer Dead Ends

• Grab saves the song the picker opened for. If that song ends while you choose a crate, a manual save can still finish after a fresh room-access check.
• Saving an ended song does not create a late live reaction or award rewards. Voting and automatic grabs still require the current turn.
• DJs can save their own track without giving themselves a social reaction or self-rewards.
• Cleaned stage-only and invalid metadata out of grabbed tracks before saving them to a crate.
• The crate picker loads beyond the old first-50 limit, offers retry after a failed read, and blocks repeated save clicks.
• Late save responses cannot overwrite another track's reactions or affect a different account, room or newly opened picker.
• Both crate editors accept lengths such as 225, 3:45 and 1:02:03, with clearer validation for incomplete values.
• Complete manual details for canonical YouTube and SoundCloud links can save without another metadata lookup. Save also respects lookup cooldowns, reducing avoidable rate-limit errors.
• Short links and missing details still resolve when needed, and private SoundCloud share tokens stay attached to playable links.
• Crate search is more responsive, filtered lists protect track ordering, and playlist imports update the local crate immediately instead of requiring another import or refresh.

🔄 Room Updates & Queue Reliability

• Fixed room-change signals that could leave booth-line, queue or chat changes stale until a refresh.
• Partial stage updates now preserve the current track unless the playback pointer is explicitly cleared.
• Room loading, reactions and account changes have stronger guards against delayed responses from an older room or session.
• Queue actions preserve newer realtime updates while their server response is still pending.
• Join, leave, track replacement, reorder and import flows received additional duplicate-request and local-state handling.

🎵 Playback & Recovery

• Improved room progression when the elected controller's tab is hidden, with a delayed visible-listener fallback for stalled transitions.
• New YouTube videos are deferred while the tab is hidden and rejoin the room when it becomes visible. This does not promise unrestricted YouTube background playback.
• SoundCloud's official widget keeps the autoplay permission needed for supported playback.
• Expired room snapshots are stopped before loading an already-finished song into the provider.
• Disposed playback controllers ignore late play, session and recovery callbacks after leaving the room.

✨ Notifications That Belong to GrooveCade

• Replaced generic alert boxes with themed cards, context icons, clearer severity styling and compact mobile layouts.
• Alerts keep an X to close, use short durations suited to the message, and pause their timer while hovered or focused.
• Duplicate messages are coalesced and the visible stack is limited to two cards to reduce notification spam.
• Followed-stage live alerts now use the same toast system, verify that music is still playing, and avoid repeated alerts for the same stage during a session.
• Live alerts respect dismissed sessions, account changes, playback ending and routes where they would interrupt the experience.
• Stage-logo badges sit at the edges of their artwork without clipping counts.
• First-time visitors can explore without an immediate release-note interruption.

📱 Mobile Polish & Beta Checks

• The mini player gives its controls their own space, improves touch targets and respects safe areas and the bottom navigation.
• Modal windows appear above the mobile player and navigation, while supported provider surfaces retain their required space.
• Reduced-motion handling and small-screen alert and sharing layouts received another polish pass.

GrooveCade remains free to use and in Beta. Bring a friend, try a first DJ turn, save something new and keep the feedback coming.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.8.1 focuses on room privacy, more reliable safeguards and clearer Spotify import access.

🔒 Room Privacy

• Private-stage data and live updates now check your current access when room content is loaded, including invitation and visibility changes.
• Whispers are limited to their participants. Public room stats show visit totals without exposing individual visit histories.
• Guest presence uses room-specific identities, and public presence excludes private session and reward details.

🛠️ Reliability & Permissions

• Shared server-side limits keep chat, queue actions and YouTube search allowances consistent during simultaneous requests.
• Stage events and activity-feed entries receive stronger account and permission checks. Event titles and links come from the stage itself.
• Notification and cleanup jobs have tighter access checks and retry protection. Private-stage notifications respect stage access.

💚 Spotify Import Access

• A visible "Spotify imports · approval required" notice explains the requirement beside the import controls and access panel.
• Each temporary access window needs team approval. When it expires, request access again; imported tracks stay in your crates.
• Spotify access checks require a signed-in account and return private, non-cached responses.

🧹 Maintenance

• Updated platform dependencies, removed unused packages and strengthened shared background-job handling.

GrooveCade remains in Beta. Keep testing private-stage access, live chat, YouTube search and Spotify import approval, and find every release note at groovecade.com/updates.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.8.0 moves from Alpha to Beta. This release plays by YouTube's and SoundCloud's rules, so GrooveCade can keep growing.

🎵 Official Players & Adding Songs

• YouTube and SoundCloud play through their official players, which always stay visible.
• Add songs by pasting a YouTube or SoundCloud link. SoundCloud works through pasted links only, and song length is read from the official player when needed.
• YouTube search uses YouTube's official search, with 5 new searches per person per day. If the site-wide daily limit is reached, search rests until the next day; pasting links still works. Videos made for kids are left out of results.

⭐ Fairer XP & Grooves

• XP and Grooves now come from taking part: chatting, wooting, meh-ing, grabbing and DJing your own songs, with fair caps per song and per hour. Idling in a room no longer earns rewards.

🧹 Calmer Rooms & History

• The What's New popup no longer interrupts you inside rooms or while music is playing.
• Listening history marks older YouTube titles that may be outdated and refreshes them when the track is played again.
• Crate collaboration is paused during the Beta, so only the crate owner can edit for now.

🧭 First-visit Guidance

• A short tutorial now starts automatically for first-time visitors after required dialogs finish.
• Guests can keep listening or log in to discover account features. Signed-in guidance continues without repeating the guest introduction.
• Take the tour stays available for replay, with scrolling and saved chapter progress.

🎛️ Your Room's AutoDJ

• Hosts can select their own crates as the primary AutoDJ source, with the GrooveCade library as an optional backup.
• Crate ownership, track limits, music policy, repeat protection and human queue priority still apply.

🎵 Spotify Access

• Spotify linking now keeps simultaneous connection attempts valid and reports account access restrictions clearly.
• Crates includes temporary access requests for the limited development-mode tester slots. The founder receives an account-linked notification.
• Admin account tools guide manual Spotify allowlist changes and approve access windows. Users receive approval and expiry notices; imported tracks stay in their crates.
• Expired accounts still occupy a Spotify slot until removed in Spotify's dashboard and recorded as removed in GrooveCade.
• Spotify album links now explain that Playlist Bridge needs a playlist link.

📜 Terms & Privacy

• Terms and Privacy now explain how GrooveCade uses YouTube API Services.

GrooveCade is now in Beta. Keep testing link pasting, YouTube search and your rewards, and find every release note at groovecade.com/updates.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.7.6 brings guided tours to the everyday controls and keeps avatar names consistent.

🧭 Guided Tours

• Follow focused, page-specific chapters through the homepage, stages, stage creation, crates, Control Panel and Avatar Shop.
• Extra guides cover profiles, friends, messages, stage-owner settings, festivals, listening history and support.
• Existing and new users receive one automatic invitation. Dismissing it stops future invitations; Take the tour remains available in page navigation and Control Panel → Tutorials.
• Pause, resume, replay or skip chapters at your pace. Account progress is remembered, and the tour scrolls to each subject, including controls inside panels.
• Stage tours reveal the relevant views and restore your layout afterwards. The original music players remain visible.
• Stage creation includes a short explanation beside every configuration item.
• Responsive cards, keyboard controls and reduced-motion support keep the guidance comfortable.

🖼️ Avatar Names

• Mystery Boxes now use the skin names saved in avatar crop settings throughout the reel, winner reveal and reward record.
• The same display-name priority applies to backend avatar catalog actions, preserving the original asset filename.

🌍 Localization

• Guided-tour copy and form explanations follow your selected interface language across all supported languages.

GrooveCade is still in Alpha. Keep testing tours on desktop and phone, nested-panel scrolling and your newly named avatars.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

GrooveCade 0.7.5 improves listening controls, chat safety and account setup.

🎚️ Better Audio Control

• Low slider levels now use a quieter volume curve across stage players, mini players and the Companion bridge, within each provider's supported limits.
• The volume icon is a master mute button for music, DJ transitions, interface sounds, sound-board effects, festival announcements and livestreams. Unmuting restores the selected volume and preserves each stream's own mute preference.
• DJ transition sounds now live in the stage listener settings menu.

💬 Safer Chats

• Room chats, DMs, whispers, edits, room bots and Companion chat reject disruptive controls, invisible fillers, malformed Unicode and excessive stacked accents.
• Normal international text, Braille and emoji remain supported; message limits no longer cut emoji in half.
• Long text and links stay contained, and older messages, replies, pins and translations receive safe display handling without rewriting stored history.

👤 Account & Avatar Polish

• Avatar Shop links now sit beside avatar selection on Profile and Control Panel.
• Age setup collects birth month and year. Existing accounts without age details are prompted through Control Panel on their next login.
• Inter and Space Grotesk fonts are self-hosted.
• Protected artwork discourages direct context-menu saving and dragging while keeping player and editing controls usable. This is a deterrent, not complete copy protection.

🌍 Localization

• New audio controls and chat validation messages are translated across supported languages.

GrooveCade is still in Alpha. Keep testing quiet listening levels, mute restoration, mobile chat and account setup.

🌐 https://groovecade.com

🎵 Real Players

• The real YouTube and SoundCloud players stay visible, with artwork/player modes moving them into a compliant corner instead of hiding them.
• The mini player also keeps the real provider player visible, while listeners remain synchronized and cannot pause or seek the shared room playback.
• SoundCloud shows the uploader name and festival streams no longer place custom text over the provider surface.

🎛️ Room Controls

• Room kicks persist for their configured duration and can be lifted early with the existing unban flow.
• Invite-only and curated booth line rules are enforced for the people allowed to join.
• New festivals start private until an admin deliberately makes them public.

🔒 Security & Privacy

• Security, privacy and moderation hardening was applied across rooms, festivals and admin tools.

💿 Crates in the Room

• Crate Studio can delete crates, search YouTube and SoundCloud, add results, and choose the active auto-requeue crate without leaving the stage.
• Auto-requeue gained Random and In order playback, with in-order playback moving completed tracks to the bottom of the user's own crate.
• Collaborative crate members can manage tracks while owner-only settings stay protected.
• Spotify playlist linking returns users to the room with Crate Studio ready to continue the import.

💬 People & Messages

• Profile cards gained Message and Add friend actions, and messages can open directly inside the room.
• Mobile rooms gained the People & messages flow plus unread DM badges.

🛠️ Fixes

• Room shortcuts no longer fire through modifier keys, typing or pop-ups, and the mini player keeps playing on Control Panel.

🎮 Discord Activity

• GrooveCade can run inside Discord as an Activity, with opt-in Rich Presence for listening and DJing on public stages.
• Discord's native Join action can carry friends into the same public stage, while private stages are never shared.
• Presence updates are event-driven on meaningful stage, track and DJ changes instead of background polling.

🎪 Festival Flow

• Festival livestreams use the normal in-stage performance area and Grounds opens as a shared in-room map.
• Festival schedules can be reorganized between stages with explicit overlap warnings instead of silently rewriting set times.

🖼️ Stage & Identity Polish

• Sponsor artwork gained a dedicated animated desktop overlay, while guest identities became safer and more anonymous.

🎧 Stage Handoffs

• DJ handoffs begin during the outgoing track outro so avatar transitions can finish before the next track starts.
• Incoming and outgoing avatars move behind the booth instead of popping in front of it.
• AutoDJ and human autoqueue handoffs gained dedicated transition behavior while consecutive AutoDJ tracks stay steady.
• Transition sound effects gained a persistent listener toggle.

🎵 Playlist Bridge

• Spotify account linking can continue eligible playlists beyond the public preview, and split imports focus the newly created crate.

👤 Identity & Player Polish

• Guest cards, admin role controls, badges and long YouTube record-player labels received another polish pass.

🎵 Playlist Bridge

• YouTube and SoundCloud playlists import directly, while Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer lists are copied by matching playable YouTube versions.
• Large imports stay bounded and can split overflow into additional crates without rescanning completed pages.

🛡️ Playback & Room Reliability

• YouTube failure handling uses independent listener evidence, and Track Rescue waits for repeated failure evidence before quarantining a track.
• Shared server-clock playback, reconnect grace and the watchdog keep rooms recoverable after stale clients or disconnects.

🎛️ Room Power-Ups

• Live polls, password-protected stages, crowd floor toys, bounded Stage Stats and scoped Room Bot credentials were added.

🌈 Visuals & Localization

• Procedural visualizers use track identity plus the shared room clock, and localization/credit-discipline guards were expanded.

📡 Native Web Push

• Browser-native notifications were added for followed stages going live, DMs and upcoming DJ turns.
• Push testing is available from notification settings without unnecessary third-party polling.

🔎 Better Track Search

• YouTube and SoundCloud search moved to direct provider results for faster, more predictable links and lower integration usage.
• Direct-link entry remains available if provider search is temporarily unavailable.

🎪 Festival & Reliability

• Festival RSVPs, bulletin boards, attendance history, peak crowd stats and archives were expanded.
• Notification retry protection, provider failure handling and integration-credit safeguards were tightened.

⌨️ Commands & Chat

• Command Engine v2 moved permissions, discovery, syntax, aliases and response policy into one shared registry.
• The slash-command picker became permission-aware, while private errors and informational responses stay local to the caller.

🛡️ Room Automation

• TimeGuard, HistoryGuard, SpamGuard, LockGuard and CycleGuard expanded host automation without relying on constant background polling.

🎧 Stage & DJ UX

• Hosts who are DJing gained separate Skip and Quit DJing controls, and wide stage modes now expand the venue rather than only the player.

👥 Identity & Reliability

• Public profile loading, AutoDJ identity protection, name uniqueness and synchronized room timing were hardened.

👥 Live Room Presence

• Live user presence was fixed to recover more reliably after tab and page changes.
• Public profile hover cards moved to a safer public-profile path.

⌨️ Slash Commands

• Typing / opens a permission-aware command picker.
• Unknown commands, usage errors and permission messages stay private instead of leaking into room chat.

🎧 DJ & Stage Controls

• Hosts who are DJing have separate Quit DJing and Skip controls.
• Stage Focus and Minimal views scale the venue and visualizers more cleanly on ultrawide displays.

🔒 Profile Safety

• Public profile loading was tightened so private account fields remain protected.

🎧 Playback & Room Progression

• Returning to a live SoundCloud stage resumes from the authoritative room timestamp instead of restarting at 0:00.
• Ordinary interaction and foreground recovery no longer force unnecessary seeks that can restart or rebuffer provider playback.
• Room progression can hand control to another authenticated listener when the current DJ leaves, with server watchdog recovery for expired turns.
• Room clocks were hardened against browser throttling and local clock corrections.

🎛️ Stage & Mobile Polish

• Mobile avatars, stage interface controls and SoundCloud presentation received a focused polish pass.

🔐 Security, SEO & Discovery

• Dependency audits, public metadata, robots/sitemap coverage and responsible-disclosure metadata were hardened.
• Notification links and playback regression coverage were expanded.

✨ Homepage Upgrade

• Homepage lighting, room cards, live indicators, genre controls and community sections received a large visual polish pass.
• Mobile effects remain lighter and reduced-motion preferences are respected.

👾 Avatar Progression

• Avatar progression was split between level rewards and Groove-priced shop unlocks across roughly Levels 1–30.
• Existing users kept avatars they were already using.

💿 Stage Crate Studio

• Crate browsing and management moved into a floating in-stage workspace with search, filtering, imports, reordering and collaboration controls.
• Desktop and mobile layouts were tailored separately for the workspace.

✨ New Features

• Staff applications were added for Moderator, Community Team and Brand Ambassador with admin review and Discord membership checks.
• AI music controls gained per-track and full-crate tagging plus stage policies for Human Only, Hybrid and AI Only.

🌞 Suno Support

• Public Suno links could be added to crates with detected title, artist, artwork and duration.
• Update: Suno link support is parked for now while we look for a compliant way to support it.

🎵 Playback & Imports

• Track auto-advance, stale room states, room-clock progression and playlist importing received reliability fixes.
• Crate AI restrictions were enforced across manual selection, AutoDJ and auto-requeue.

✨ New Features

• DJs can enable auto-requeue and choose a crate so a fresh track is queued after a natural turn ends.
• Waiting DJs can swap their queued track before reaching the booth.
• Stage settings open as a floating in-room panel instead of forcing navigation away from the stage.

🎨 Improvements

• The DJ booth front was enlarged and the redundant now-playing caption beneath it was removed.

💸 Payments Out, Donations In

• Internal subscriptions, premium tiers and checkout flows were removed.
• A voluntary PayPal support page replaced product-style payments, with no roles, perks or premium features attached.

🎟️ Sponsorships

• Paid sponsorship checkout was removed and sponsorship details became admin-managed.

🧹 Cleanup

• Premium profile UI, payment-return pages and payment webhooks were retired while legacy records stayed for bookkeeping.

🎚️ Stage Volume Controls

• Volume moved from the media overlay into the Stage HUD and persists across track changes.

🔍 SoundCloud Search

• SoundCloud matching was improved with exact track URLs, URL validation and cleaner links.

🎪 Festival Livestreams

• Scheduled festival sets gained YouTube Live and Twitch stream support with automatic provider parsing and stream badges.

🪙 Grooves

• GrooveCade introduced its platform currency, with balance shown in the navbar.
• Woots, grabs and chat activity can award Grooves with anti-spam protections.

💎 Tips, Shop & Marketplace

• DJs can receive Groove tips, while avatar shop items and user marketplace listings use Grooves.
• Mystery boxes use Grooves only (earned free on-site, never purchasable with real money, and with no cash value), with level and duplicate safeguards.

🐛 Fixes

• Stage chat avatar syncing was fixed and currency operations moved behind server-side anti-cheat handling.

🎵 Live Stages

• GrooveCade launched with synchronized YouTube and SoundCloud rooms, DJ booth lines, multiple stage layouts, visualizers and stage effects.

🎤 Community & Social

• Live chat, replies, reactions, whispers, presence, crates, stage history, profiles, friends and direct messages formed the first social layer.

🎮 Progression & Discovery

• XP, badges, challenges, leaderboards, stage discovery, events, festivals and onboarding shipped in the initial Alpha.

🤖 Discord & Platform

• Discord account linking, moderation tooling, changelog posting, multi-language support and mobile-responsive navigation were part of the first release.