Updates

🎵 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, transition leases, 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.
• Release verification recorded a passing production build, 213 automated checks, zero ESLint errors and zero known npm audit vulnerabilities.

👥 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.

🎵 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.
• Loot boxes were moved to Groove pricing 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.