PusherJS is gone!

We've been getting various reports that the pusherjs system has been causing users problems while browsing the site for a few months, but it's been hard to find a way to replace them.

First, what did pusherJS do? It powered "live" parts of the site, like the shoutbox and automatically getting events. It works by creating a 'socket' on your computer directly to the server, which is notified immediately when something changes.

Subeta is an old website. It's built from a time when you navigated between pages, when your URL changed between clicks. Pusher was created for single page websites, pages like gmail and more advanced sites. It wasn't a good fit, and made both services :( at trying.

Replacement

One of our goals for 2016 is to do less things. Pusher is a company that builds a single product and does it incredibly well. Unfortunately, we've been looking for a replacement for awhile, testing things (and even one or two got pushed for live testing) and nothing solved our problems. Which means that we had to write it ourselves.

We pushed our own node server last night, managing both the shoutbox and the live events. Pusher was built to manage a LOT of different situations, and power massive companies (and smaller businesses!). Fortunately, we were able to build our new server to just manage a few situations, and can build on top of it with modules as we add more live features to the site going forward.

Going Forward

I've got a script open right now watching the load and ensuring the same thing that got pusher locked up doesn't happen to our server. Right now we're 👍 but as more users come online, we'll continue to watch and make sure that these features don't go down.

awesome work! you do so much to keep this awesome place running! thanks so much!

hopefully this fixes all of the problems. thanks for the updates :)

edit:

as in to focus on more specific things so things get finished? or just to do fewer things, because that sounds funny :p

edit2: oh I think I get it now. to do fewer things yourself by getting outside resources?

Thanks for the update! (:

Very cool, thanks Keith!

YES FINALLY <3 Thank you so much for this :)

thank you so much for it! I'm so happy to start getting live events again!

So I would like to know what to do now in the preferences page to keep pusher on disable or to enable it??

I'm glad you are continuing to work on your site for us. We really appreciate all you do. Thanks for the update.

Thank you all for your hard work!

Besides: I wouldn't mind if I had to click to see new events. Usually I'm not staring at a page around here doing nothing anyways.

Oh my goats! I now can have hovers back! Oh, how I have missed them. Thank you!

I should also say, I can have alerts back! So many times I've missed them until like hours later.

Nice, thanks for the update! I hope it all works smoothly.

thanks :)

Exciting news!

~Thanks so much for the update. I wondered what was going on. Good to know that is being worked on. I do wonder, is this what's been causing the infinite page loading issue I have been experiencing? Or is that something completely different? Because that's enormously annoying when trying to Quest and refresh during a site event.

woohoo that sounds exciting! thanks for the update, and keep up the awesome work! (also, i love that after trying stuff that didn't work, you ended up just making it yourselves?!! you clever things you! :D )

If you use firefox then yeah pusher is probably what caused that

~ Thanks so much for letting me know that! You guys are such an awesome crew on this site.

~ Oh yes I use Firefox, I detest Chrome, and Exploder is not even worth my time.

Thanks for the update! Does this have something to do with why the shoutbox suddenly will not register enters?

As in if I type "wow

that is funny"

it will show up in the SB as "wow that is funny" and not give me that double space. I was wondering why this was suddenly happening!

Thanks! Hope the code the team wrote works smoothly! :D