A significant amount of time has been put into the development of the new dashboard because I believe it is a necessary component of the site to bridge many of Jappleng's sections and features together, as well as giving users a familiar face to what will eventually be a Jappleng App, whether it is mobile or on a smart TV etc...

Polishing the site is critical for Jappleng's success because in its last launch, I thought that people would be fine with bugs and design flaws given that I keep updating it over time since having a website up but somewhat broken is better than nothing. Unfortunately that wasn't the case and people did not like the concept of using an alpha build and were pretty vocal about it. This time, I'll have features working well in the new design so that if there are some bugs, they are very few and can be rectified once spotted.

Since I'm not advertising Jappleng at the present time, I'm not committing myself to any specific release date. It will release when it is ready. There will be no rush release and when it is complete and uploaded, I will send out a mass e-mail and tell members, discord users, and social network followers that it is ready.

On the note of whether or not Jappleng will remain free. I think yes, for the most part Jappleng will remain free but I will add a premium currency to the shop which can be used to purchase J-Coins as a means of convenience to support the site. I'm not interested in putting up ads or paywalling so I think that if people want to buy J-Coins, they can have that option. J-Coins if you don't know are what you collect for being active on the site which you then redeem for unlockables. For instance, if you wish to unlock the dice feature in the chat, you can spend a certain amount of J-Coins to do so. At which point, you can use the dice. If you want an ID theme that uses J-Coins, then you can buy it with J-Coins. There's a lot that you can buy, and almost everything you do on Jappleng generates J-Coins for you, even playing games!

The total cost of maintaining Jappleng at the present time costs a little over $150/mo. That does not include my time which, you can google how much a veteran full stack developer gets paid. I'm not asking for money since this is volunteer on my part but I'd appreciate starbucks once in a while. And of course, I would like to eventually hire people to write lessons that I can't write because my Japanese went from fluent to atrocious for not using it in about 10 years.

All in all, I want to start by releasing a solid feature-rich version of Jappleng and go from there. I ask that if you're reading this to please be a little bit more patient. If you would like to have a sneak peak on what it looks like, send me a DM and I'll show you some screenshots.

For more details about the ongoing development, please add me as a friend and follow my J-Spot as I regularly discuss what's new and the features in detail. Thank you for your time! Jappleng will be really awesome one day!