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posted by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @03:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-muffin-welcomes-you-to-the-future dept.
I'm pleased to announce that our site upgrade appears to have been successful, and as promised, here's the list of major changes rolled out in this upgrade. Our muffin overlord however has instructed to leave some items off this list so they can be announced separately as some sorta big surprise. The staff managed to nod their heads and agree as they fail their save rolls against mind control.

Muffincode 14.04 Changelog
  • CSS and UI revamps, including a much cleaner user control panel
  • Submissions now get properly formatted from the get go
  • Lameass filter now reports why you're lame
  • REDACTED
  • REDACTED
  • REDACTED
  • REDACTED

You can download the latest hot piping tarballs here

The muffin has granted me a sliver of free will to talk about our update and upgrade policies.

Right, I realize that this is a pretty small update, even taking in account the features the muffin has prevented me from announcing, but I wanted to go into how we're going to do site updates, and what does this mean for you.

I feel that its important that we upgrade the site in a consistent matter so people know when updates are coming. Right now, we're still working on finalizing the specific QA and release processes, but the current plan is to release new versions of the code every two months, with YY.MM version scheme. Our plan is that the site database will remain backwards compatible across one major release, so if we roll something out in 14.06, and you guys hate it, we can revert to the previous version without blowing the site up in the process. This also means if we blow the site up, reversion is trivial.

However, two months is a relatively long time to go between updates, especially ones implementing major functionality (something I'll talk about later), so we'll also be doing point releases which are backports from the master branch to the current stable branch. We'll do these as needed and post about them here when we do it.

We are working to try and squish some of the more major remaining bugs in the site, and we welcome anyone to come join us on IRC and join the dev team. As far as major user facing bugs, we're aware of the timezone one (which has remained illusive to fix), and UTF-8 is still wonky (we found the cause, still working on the fix). I hope to get both of these fixed in point releases in the near future.

I'll have a more in-depth write up on how we'll be managing site development hopefully this week, but until then, leave your feedback below, and know that the muffin is always reading.

NCommander adds: Fixed a typo with the versioning scheme
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by naubol on Tuesday April 01 2014, @03:53AM

    by naubol (1918) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @03:53AM (#23884)

    Hwat happened to it? Did google hack SN and delete it?

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @03:56AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday April 01 2014, @03:56AM (#23886) Homepage Journal

      I pushed it back an hour to prevent two stories from going out at the same time. I already posted this the moment that one came out of the queue. It will reappear in approximately 45 minutes from now.

      --
      Still always moving
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Hartree on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:07AM

    by Hartree (195) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:07AM (#23889)

    Ah crap. ncommander's playing with his muffins again. And in public, no less.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:28AM

    by davester666 (155) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:28AM (#23897)

    How about, say a week or two before you roll out each revision, you make a beta site which runs the updated code.

    Then, you randomly punt people who normally would get the current version over to the beta site.

    What could go wrong?

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:34AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:34AM (#23898) Homepage Journal

      We're actually planning to do this (a feature tentatively called "edge") where users can opt-in to try the latest and greatest on the main site. Unlike some other sites, we'll be responsive to feedback and criticisms :-)

      --
      Still always moving
    • (Score: 2) by Techwolf on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:36AM

      by Techwolf (87) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @04:36AM (#23899)

      If a comment deserves a -1 funny, that one is it. :-)

    • (Score: 2) by rts008 on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:08AM

      by rts008 (3001) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:08AM (#23959)

      I have mod points, but could not apply them to your comment, due to there not being a '-1, not funny' mod category.

  • (Score: 1) by G-forze on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:15AM

    by G-forze (1276) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:15AM (#23911)

    Right now, we're still working on finalizing the specific QA and release processes, but the current plan is to release new versions of the code every two months, with MM.YY version scheme.

    Seems to me the versioning is YY.MM. Maybe fix summary?

    That aside, great job! Thank you for all your hard work.

    --
    If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:55AM

    by captain normal (2205) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:55AM (#23930)

    Isn't everything tied to UTC? What's wrong with that? NTP is tied to UTC. As a sailor I'm used to dealing with UTC, it's how we navigate.

    --
    When life isn't going right, go left.
  • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:30AM

    by lhsi (711) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @08:30AM (#23967) Journal

    Does the message change after a certain number of submissions is reached? I submitted two to get it over 10 to see if it would but it didn't (I'm wondering if it will omit the "only" part after a certain threshold).

    Aside: due to the wording of it, I for some reason have the "10 green bottles sitting on a wall" song stuck in my head...

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:14AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:14AM (#23993) Homepage Journal

      There's a lag between when the stories go in the queue, and when the counter updates. I'll ask paul to write up the specifics as he implemented the nagger. The counter itself vanishes if there are >20 stories in the hopper (which is usually enough to get us through a day).

      --
      Still always moving
  • (Score: 1) by CoolHand on Tuesday April 01 2014, @11:56AM

    by CoolHand (438) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @11:56AM (#24046) Journal

    Mmmmmm....... Muffins...

    --
    Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
  • (Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:51PM

    by nightsky30 (1818) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:51PM (#24095)

    Does it still have to be called slashcode? Can we call it Soylentcode or Soylentcode: The Forked Beta?

  • (Score: 3) by hankwang on Tuesday April 01 2014, @02:32PM

    by hankwang (100) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @02:32PM (#24194) Homepage
    Nice small style improvements here and there, but

    the blockquote styling is still poor.

    Put borders around it, change the background color, put a vertical bar on the left, or whatever to make it stand out from the surrounding text other than an indent.