Mahz

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

Cool, nice work compiling this stuff.

There's definitely a lot to do, but I've made some good progress this weekend. I think some updates I made to the database this morning even addressed the worst of the timeout issues, though it's too soon to wash my hands.

Next, I'd like to focus on some core Guild features again. Your priority list has some good necessities. I'd also like to kill some of our expired / gimmicky features and excess bloat that does nothing anymore but make the code more annoying to work with.

I don't think it would be worth anyone's time for me to do a point-by-point reply to every bullet point. There are enough priorities that we all unanimously agree with to keep me busy. I'm in a good position with my life right now to plunge some more work into the Guild.

I will check in and make some more posts in this thread, but I at least wanted to acknowledge it after reading the first few pages. Back to work, though.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I actually didn't push my code updates last night because the Guild wasn't empty enough. Too many people would've been affected by a bad release.

I decided to do it correctly and spun up a copy of the server + database to test my changes without disrupting anyone's writing.

If the guild is running faster, it's mainly because it's not peak hours. A lil bit of superstition, too.

Edit: Oh, nevermind. A change I made to the database did have a dramatic impact. o_O I didn't expect it.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I have to fix the perf issues, first.

Right now I have the Guild running on a cloned server + cloned database where I'm testing some upgrades.

I've enabled the slow-query logger on the main database which is now collecting data and will help me figure out what I need to rewrite.

U-uh hello!

@Shirochankun Welcome

Mahz's Dev Journal

Here are the stats for the pending code changes:

- 40 files were modified
- 4,661 lines of code were added
- 8,890 lines of code were removed (many of these were just from deleting some files)

For a bit of good news for a change, I've been experimenting with a spam detector. I ran it against 25 spammer posts and 25 legit posts, and it correctly differentiated between them.

I'll be testing it out after the dust settles.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Inkarnate Agreed, I'll announce it in the site header, if I can figure out a good way to push an intermediate code release.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Yeah, those 502's are timeouts.

I'm a bit apprehensive about pushing any changes at the moment since so many people are online and things are likely to get much worse before they get better. At least right now posting is possible even if a bit insufferable due to timeouts.

I'll keep investigating in the meanwhile and plan to push changes later tonight (after the Guild's peak hours) until further notice.

I'm eager to fix this issue. What makes it hard is that I don't have much visibility into issue.

For example, I just realized the database I'm using doesn't keep a log of slow queries by default, so I'd have to reconfigure it and reboot it, yet I'm not sure long that downtime is. Is it 10 seconds, 10 minutes, or 30 minutes?