Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Update: I awarded the trophies for the 4th and 5th Labour contests.

Are there any specific features we should keep a close eye on?

@LegendBegins

Looks like the platform upgrade deployed without a hitch and brought with it some pretty big performance improvements. The Guild is using 60% less memory and response times are 60% faster.

I'm now working on upgrading some of the Guild's library dependencies, though this is much harder and might introduce unexpected breakage.

[Bug report] Unable to change e-mail adress

@Blake I was able to reproduce this issue by trying to change my email to one that already exists in the system. Is this possibly the case?

If you PM me the email you want your account changed to, I'll sort it out for you.

Though I do need to show a "Email already taken" message instead of "INTERNAL ERROR". #willfix :) github.com/danneu/guild/issues/81

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ellri: Thanks. Is this also an issue on Android phones? On every keypress, the char counter below the textarea is updated. Maybe this is the issue, though hard to believe.

@LegendBegins: Interesting. I have a weak double-post prevention system that tries to avoid double-click submissions. Seems that the mechanism needs to reset itself after pressing the back button.

Popping my head in right now to say that I just deployed a platform upgrade. Let me know if yall encounter any breaking changes.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Closing the browser still/again logs me out regardless of "remember me" being checked.

@Shienvien

I'm so stumped. :(

As mentioned in my previous few posts, I'm upgrading the Guild's underlying platform and all the various libraries the project depends on, so maybe a relevant bug was fixed somewhere in the graph of dependencies that will solve all of our problems.

Mahz's Dev Journal

There's been a lot of activity lately, especially in my inbox, about the next step for the RPGN project. So I'm looking forward to seeing what I need to do to help with that.

Also, @Terminal asked me to very politely inquire as to the status of the prizes of their "Twelve Labours" contest, with a view to keep the contest running smoothly.

@Darkmatter

I'm about to catch up with the Contest Mods right now. I wish the trophy system wasn't bottlenecked by me.

Perhaps it's just a changing of the guard but I am personally of the opinion that many of the 'faces' of the guild, good and bad, have drifted off. I'd love to do something to help foster the sense of community spirit as lame as that sounds.

@Darkmatter

I think it's best to look at the post-Guildfall Guild as a new forum entirely since it's growing from scratch. The metric of old members leaving can be depressing, but the Guild also has a healthy influx of new users.

I'm not very good at building community spirit. I frankly don't know how. I'm always interested in supporting people that want to give it a shot though.

Updates since my last post in this thread:

- Going to catch up with contest trophies right now. This is priority one for me.
- I'm still working on upgrading the Guild's platform. Taller order than I thought, but I'm excited to pay off this technical debt and see what it does for the server's performance. This is my second priority today.
- Ran into an issue while upgrading the chat server last weekend on my local computer. When I figure that out, I'll push up the chat server changes that allow mods to mute users in chat. Third priority, and I doubt I'll get to it since the Guild platform upgrade will take me a while.

Finally, Darkmatter requested this in a PM, so I might as well share it here as well:



Here's a graph of Guild activity over the last few days. Those peaks represent over twice the activity than the valleys. Each peak starts at 10:00am CST each day and abruptly falls off at midnight. Basically, morning to midnight for Americans.

Not terribly helpful information since I'm sure anyone that's been during the valleys (including 3am night owls like me) have gathered that the forum is asleep during that time. :)

Returnee

Welcome

Mahz's Dev Journal

Ouch, looks like my "performance patch" did nothing but wreck the server's memory:

(The vertical line is where the patch went into effect)


It's weird because the patch just implements my webhost's recommended performance-tuning settings.

Gonna roll it back and focus on upgrading my platform instead. Apparently the newer version has massive memory savings.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I'm back for a while.

Since this bump is gonna knock HeySeuss' departure thread off the homepage, I'll link to it here. HeySeuss has been one of the Guild's biggest contributors over the years including the time he took it upon himself to host an alt-Guild forum during Guildfall. I'll never forget that because it's one of the key things that gave me the energy to build a new Guild from scratch: being able to see all the people that were willing to help rebuild a new community gave me the confidence that it was possible.

I have a lot to catch up on, so I'll be choring through all my notifications/PMs shortly.

If anybody has something they need to talk about, now would be a good time to either bump our convo or send me a new PM if we don't have one. This helps me prioritize my slog through my PMs.

Some things I'll be focusing on in the short-term:

- Performance improvements. A lot of this is low-hanging fruit. For example, the Guild is running on version 0.12 of a platform that is now version 5.4, so I'll be upgrading that along with a bunch of the Guild's dependencies. I'll also be deploying a server change in a moment that will fix the intermittent downtime that the Guild experiences by running out of memory.
- Critical chat bugs.
- Catching up in this thread.

As I hack on the Guild right now, yall may experience some downtime here and there, so please be extra sure to save your post before you submit it in case you land on an error page. And if you ever land on an error page, the first thing you should do is press the back button which will often let you recover the contents of the "new reply" form.

Anyways, it's been six months or so since I last did some work on the Guild. Any major developments that I should know about?