development best practices?

tl;dr: there is concern over recent updates. Civitai might try adopting some "best practices" such as backup tables, "click testing," A/B testing or access to the old site for new features if they don't already. Civitai should focus on features users want and allow feedback before rolling out new features on the live site.

Hi, I'm not one to lecture on best practices at all, however, I notice some discontent in the questions and discussions in light of some of the recent updates and it makes me wonder what civitai's process for rolling out features is and if "best practices" are being used (or if not best practices simple stuff like keeping a backup table or "click testing" features before deployment). It is not that the site breaks from time to time but that sometimes new features are added that are not wanted and are even considered detrimental to the user's expectations or disruptive to the way they were using the site in the past.

Adding automated unit tests for new features is pie in the sky (we don't even do that at my job), but we do dedicate long meetings to discussing feature proposals from our client, which are then further discussed later so we can give feedback on feasibility and so on then discussed again in terms of implementation and the rollout plan. There are often months between adding new features and about a week of extensive testing before a feature moves from development to production. Then we test again on production.

Obviously, since this is an "open-ish" source project there would be a different format for these types of discussions, maybe these discussions do happen, I'm not present in the Discord server, but it seems like in lieu of something like them there should at least be A/B testing on new features to see if users like them. Many sites such as reddit allow access to the old site or allow certain users access to a beta version of the site so they can provide feedback. I know the pace of AI development is breakneck but I think the civitai team should let features marinate a little before rolling out new ones and especially make sure they're working on features that users want.

I just want to underline that these recommendations are meant to improve civitai as a site since I believe it is a useful service, not to knock the team. I think adopting some of these practices would allow users to "keep the faith" as it were and improve the teams credibility so it doesn't look like they are running damage control in the discussions all the time.

As far as the disappeared images and galleries, that's fairly unacceptable. I'm not upset about it but I fear it will make users not want to use the site, so some sort of communication about whether or not they're gone for good or civitai is working on getting them back would be nice.