# 🎉 There is reason to celebrate! 🎉

* *21st of November, 2022*

It's that time again: The chocolate cake is baked, the hot drinks are ready!

For the 2nd birthday of LSSM V.4 we would like to celebrate with you again and have therefore prepared a few surprises for you:

* Lots of colourful balloons
  Via the LSSM menu you can let a few balloons rise and pop them by clicking on them. At the bottom right you will find a counter that you can use to indicate how much time you have invested in clicking on balloons!
* Better Beta
  Not just a play on words, but actually a novelty for the LSSM: We are switching from Closed-Beta to Open-Beta.
  What does that mean in concrete terms?
  In the settings, everyone now has the option of switching between stable and beta versions. In addition, there are individual so-called "preview branches" from time to time. This is probably of less interest to the generic user, but especially in the development of new features, we can thus enable more targeted testing with a potentially higher number of users. These preview branches are automatically deleted after 7 days without an update, users then receive the stable version again.
  Potential contributors - developers who would like to contribute to LSSM - also have the opportunity to test the whole thing directly withinLSSM without having to set up their own test instance. However, only the LSSM team can set a preview branch live or update it, so that not just anyone can create a preview branch (with potentially harmful code).
* OpenCollective: <https://donate.lss-manager.de/>
  Money makes the world go round, and so we also have running costs to run LSSM. This is not much at the moment, but we would like to give all users the opportunity to support us financially. For this purpose, we use the platform "OpenCollective" (<https://opencollective.com/>), which allows us to make all donations and the use of them completely transparent.
  Important: Donating has no direct influence on the development of LSSM! We will not invest more or less time, nor will there be any direct benefits such as premium features for individual users. The development of the LSSM will remain on a voluntary basis in our spare time and the use will remain completely free for all users!
  Of course, we are happy about any donation, but we would still like to point out that we will keep the project running as before even without the donations.
  Should the amount of donations cause a surplus we will think about further investments. This could be e.g. investments in an improved reliability but also the purchase of licences that allow us development of further or more extensive features. But these are just ideas, and we don't want to take money out of your pockets!
  OpenCollective allows you to donate in different ways: One-time, monthly and yearly. The amount can be chosen freely (we have nevertheless created three exemplary one-time donations so that you could save a few clicks if necessary). It is important to know that not the full amount is available for us, because different fees apply depending on the payment method. In addition, 6% processing fees go to our fiscal host "OpenCollective Europe" (<https://opencollective.com/europe>), which manages the money for us so that we don't have to worry about things like accounting and taxes.
  By the way: With every donation you can optionally donate a slightly higher amount, which will then go to OpenCollective itself.

Due to the recent problems in the data centre, we would like to take this opportunity to once again refer to our official status page, where the current availability of LSSM can always be viewed: <https://status.lss-manager.de/>

We would like to celebrate with you and thank you, our community, for your continuous support!
We look forward to many more years with LSSM, no matter which version there will be to celebrate.

Your LSSM team,
Jan, Sanni, Ron and Crazycake