long time no post here, so I'll have a go at rounding up 2013s summer development before I forget half of what has been changed :)

The updated interface went live on august 1st 2013, and there has been some praise for the changes applied - no harsh criticism from any side, so I guess its well taken.
In a nutshell, the new design is centered, less blue and (hopefully) a bit more self-explaining than it used to be as far as the connection between remixes is concerned.
There is JQuery and AJAX requests in use now, replacing the iframe soulutions used before that. One quite nice effect of the restructure is that obviously spam bots have a much harder time to get into wikiloops, we only had one spamming incident since the update, while they were everyday business before that.
By examining the user database with various criteria like multiple registrations from same IPs and other indices, about 400 potential bot users could be eliminated from the system, so there was a slight drop in member stats after that - which has been more than outperformed by new people signing up, peaking around 150 new members in just one week.
Some new featueres have been introduced, like the high resolution upload feature, allowing to attach a .wav file to a newly uploaded jam.
Then, there is the notification system that now allows notifications on comments (sorry about the grammar bug in there, going to fix it soon) and on new remixes by users you follow. Obviously, people do like that a lot, thanks to Anne Cozean for requesting this feature!
Since wikiloops has exceeded the 50 gigabyte of webspace mark by now, there was need for another server upgrade which was undertaken in early october, resulting in much quicker server response times (dropped from about 500ms to 200ms).
Along with jQuery, theres now the JPlayer in use on wikiloops, ending the struggle in designing around the browser-specific player interfaces that always busted the design quite a bit.
The player skin is still one of the uglyer parts of the loops, but it works quite stable - and since firefox now supports mp3 in html5 players, I could end the area of flash players on the loops for good.
By using all sorts of page speed, rich snippet, spider simulation and conformity checker tools I could spot some more things needing fixes to achieve good Search engine results.
Hits coming from Google have multiplied by 5 since last october, so I assume the changes applied are having positive effects :)
There has been quite an amount of time invested in getting the german and french domains up to the state of development, including going over the help file section that had to be adapted to the new interface. Many hours, many hours.
Currently, theres a handfull of members who offered to do other language interfaces and who are equipped with the english template files - I do hope they will find their ways thru the translation job and maybe we will see some more flags offered this year... that would be very nice, especially since the subdomains in other languages are being picked up by googles search quite well after the update.
Besides all of this, I am facing some business issues concerning the taxreport for the wikiloops company - obviously its a bit of a problem for german tax collectors to imagine a business thats not selling anything and receives payments from overseas for t-shirt sales and advertising. The amount of work that is expected is outrageous compared to the little money that is involved, but with germany being one of the worlds tuffest organized burocraties, theres no way around that. (I once read somewhere that 80% of the worlds books on taxation are written in german... go figure).
Speaking of it, there has been some changes regarding the ads on wikiloops and I have tried out several approaches to find a configuration that doesnt look too annoying and gives at least some result.
Currently I am testing ad-sales via buysellads.com, looking forward to finding out if thats a good alternative to googles adsense programm... we'll see.
Thanks to all of the donations, I hope to see some black numbers below the bottom line this year. But theres still some time to come.
I am doing a lot of research lately covering the topics of free text search on wikiloops - after experimenting with a google custom search engine, I see there is quite a riddle to solve on how to make a text search work. Just imagine people looking for their favorite band or a specific song they'd love to find on wikiloops - even by evaluating the comments, title, description and tags it would be only a slight chance to find a good result. Please keep this in mind when tagging your next uploads... I cannot improve on features like this if there is no data I can crawl :)
The second issue I am researching on is another go on the mobile page or (maybe even better) ways to automaticly reorder the pages design in case a mobile device is used. This is a topic for itself, and I have spent hours reading on the various ways and approaches that have been praised as best practise so far. I think this is something I'll start working on soon - it would be a mistake to neglect the fact that more and more people use their smartphones and tablets to surf the web, and why shouldn't a site like wikiloops offer easy navigation for these users.

so, let me round this up with todays state of the loops - currently, theres 7347 registerred users and 10558 tracks online :)
I will wait to newyears day to calculate how many percent growth rate that is, but I think its pretty good :)

As always, feel free to jump this thread or let me know what you think by PM - your Fool on the Hill