👋 Hi everyone! Earlier today we pushed some tested code out to the site, which broke it immediately for around 30 minutes. Instead of trying to live debug, I made the decision to roll back and try again later in the evening. That work was just completed (and took the site down for around 30 minutes still :() I wanted to get these out to ensure the last week of Morostide moves along quickly and doesn't get bogged down in lag.

These were mostly behind the scene updates, but I want to go through them and some of our future plans:

1. Locked down all of our environment variables. In the past we had our credentials for services all over the place, which never resulted in a security breach but was very insecure. Now they're all stored directly in the server and accessible by all Subeta code. This makes it possible for us to change variables on the site without needing to do a code deploy, as well.
2. Updated our internal filter to version 2.0. The filter is what takes all of the sCode/html on the site and filters it, protecting you from things like cookie grabbers. The new version pulls those environment variables, and more importantly can be more tightly integrated with the "new" Subeta code, that powers things like the avatars, wardrobe, and forums. In the past we were doing a call to "old" Subeta to filter the text, return it to the new Subeta and then display it. A huge roundtrip, slowing down areas of the site that require filtering and now it is done ✨ automatically ✨
3. Made some pretty significant changes to the way that PHP is set up through Subeta, to enable more caching on the lowest level of code. This should speed the site up a lot 🚗

Upcoming Changes Don't worry, I'm not making any more changes until after Morostide. There is going to be one major change, which is we'll be moving providers to the Google Cloud. Because of the changes we made a month ago to move Subeta to docker containers, it's now much easier for us to move to a server provider that makes more sense for us.

I've been managing our infrastructure, mostly by hand, for the last 100 years and I don't think anyone would claim that I'm really an infrastructure engineer. Google has a product App Engine which takes care of all of the heavy infrastructure lifting automatically. It's also significantly less overhead and cost than Amazon Web Services, allowing us to spend less on our overall server budget.

I'm really excited about this update and already have Subeta working on the google cloud in a development environment. This move will require ~12 hours of downtime, and will be announced far in advance.

Hi everyone! We thought we were done, but then we noticed there was a cache problem with the forums... (facepalm) So we spent another hour working on that. It's now resolved, meaning your forum posts should once again show up immediately!

Some forum topics may not show the most recent posts for an hour or so (or until somebody makes a new post on them) due to how caching works.

Thank you so much for your patience, and let's hope that's the last of the major unexpected errors we'll encounter here.

Other Notes!

• We're aware that pings are also no longer linked on the forums, and are working on a fix for that as well!
• We're aware about the timestamp issue!
• I'm aware these issues may have dulled the fanfare, but what is talking about in the first post is actually awesome news. It should speed things up a lot!

[edit] Pushing a fix for the wardrobe right now! [edit] Wardrobe is back up! Sorry bout that!!

Are you able to see this post in the topic? We just deployed a fix for this, so it should be working now! I was able to see my last post here immediately after I posted it.

We are currently working on a fix for the forums!

[edit] Fix pushed! Looking at wardrobe now :)

Thank you for trying to help <3

I think I've got it though. Spent another hour debugging this x_x Pushing a fix now that - fingers crossed - will fix the wardrobe!

[edit] AND WARDROBE IS FIXED, yay

There is an issue again with avatars not getting updated, but this time it's not cache but a different issue. Looking into it now!

The Wardrobe should be fixed now - Meaning it should save your avatars now when you click "Wear". (I will look into why there's no "you're now wearing this" message later. There is still no message, but it does wear the outfit successfully.)

While I was doing that, I accidentally made forums and wardrobe both stop loading for a couple minutes, so if you were wondering about that, that's why.

Fixed the Save to Shared Outfits button :)

Thank you, we've noted this and will take care of it when we get the chance. I know what's causing this, and it is just limited to unicode/emojis/etc. We'll update when it is fixed :)

It's a combination! We make these changes throughout the year, but they obviously have the most impact during holidays. Holidays also give us the most users online so we can see where the "weak" spots are.

rewrote the filter awhile ago, but it was clear over the last few days with increased forum activity that we needed to make a change to the way that it was loaded.

I understand! That is very inconvenient. I am working on restoring it :)

And there we go, all of those emojis should now be fixed :)

I think you also wanted updates on this issue

Hm, that is really strange, I swear they were working again for me just a few minutes ago. I will keep looking into it. Basically, the way we have been handling these has been all over the place... I'm trying to just have the sCode processor handle it like it should, but it's proving difficult lol.

I think I finally got it working!

Quick test - :dmg🔥 :dmg:dark:

[edit] Noooo it was just showing up :( This is so weird. Also I'm sorry for spamming you with the pings D:

Fingers crossed it's fixed for real this time!!

If you have older posts with emoji, you can click Edit and then save (you don't have to change anything) to clear that post's cache :)