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posted by martyb on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the gasping-for-air dept.

Martyb here once again with today's update on our site's update. I apologize that this is not as well written as my prior updates as exhaustion and outside issues are demanding of my time. I ask you to please bear with me.

Quick Recap: As you may recall, our servers were getting melted trying to serve up highly-commented stories. Further, this made for an unacceptably long delay between the time one would request a story and when it would finally get returned for display. Our devs have implemented alternative display modes, "Threaded-TOS" and "Threaded-TNG" which use a much more efficient means of processing comments and getting them to you. These changes went "live" on Saturday, February 25.

Like anything new, we expected there would be issues. We very much appreciate your patience as we tried to work through these as they were reported. And did you ever let us know!

Paulej72 (aka PJ) and TheMightyBuzzard (TMB) have been laboring mightily to keep up with the issues that have been reported as well as a few they found independently. Similarly, as their fixes have gone live, our community has had to deal with a changing landscape of "what happens when I do this?" To add to this, comments being such a major part of the site's purpose, there are "knobs" in several places where users can customize which comments are presented to them and how they appear. The permutations are many and wide-raging. As bug fixes have been made, the impact of changing these has had different effects over time.

I've been astounded at how much the community has been supportive of our efforts, how well problems have been described and isolated, and how quickly the devs have been able to fix bugs as they have been noted. Even more impressive was the discussion in our last update story on possible alternative means of implementing the <spoiler> tag. I'm proud to be part of this community — you rock!

Stories: While all this activity has been happening, stories have still been posted to our site for your reading and commenting pleasure. We are working with a reduced editorial staff at the moment. Us long-timers have been posting as we can, but I would like to personally thanks our new editors fnord666 and charon for their heroic efforts getting stories posted, and takyon for his continued efforts at providing well-written stories. I have noticed submissions from new folks as well, and the heartens me immensely! (Note: I hesitate to call out people in particular for fear I will overlook someone; any omission is purely my fault and I would appreciate being called out on it if I have failed to list your contribution.)

Plans: This development blitz has, however, come at a cost. For those who were with this site at its inception, there was a "day of rest" imposed on the developers who had worked basically non-stop trying to get our site up and somewhat stable. I have suggested a similar break to our dev staff. Recall we are all volunteers doing this in our spare time. PJ has plans coming up and will be unavailable on Friday and Saturday. From what I've seen, TMB is well nigh a crispy critter at this point and most certainly needs a break. And, quite frankly, I've put a lot of personal stuff on hold while working on this update and could use a break, as well. In short, we are tired.

So, PJ is around for a bit (in his free time while at work) for today and TMB is getting a well-deserved breather. NCommander is nearing burnout has been tied up with an outside project that demands his full attention and has been unable to help much. I'll poke in from time to time, but I really need some time off, too.

What I ask from the community is that we do something similar. Step back for a moment. Look at the forest and not just the trees. Play around with the different display Modes. Try setting a different "Breakthrough" and/or "Threshold". Things should be much more stable today, so that will make it easier to gain a "mental model" of what does what.

The other thing I would ask is for the community to pull together and try to address issues together. Someone posts an issue about struggling with having to click on all the little chevrons? Inquire about their user preference settings, and suggest a different value for Threshold/Breakthrough. My sense is that some are more adept at using the new features and they can help others to get a better understanding of how things work. With those issues addressed, we can more clearly identify and isolate underlying problems and focus our energies more productively.

tl;dr We're not done yet, we truly appreciate your patience and forbearance during this transition, we need a break, and you guys rock in helping others in the community understand and use the new stuff. As always, keep our toes to the fire — we are here for you — let us catch our breath and we'll be better able to move forward.

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
Site Update: The Next Episode
Site Update - We're Getting There!

 
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @12:44AM (5 children)

    by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @12:44AM (#474191) Journal

    Yesterday I sat down to fix a bug and couldn't even read my own code.

    Sounds like a normal day working with Perl, to me. :)

    (and I say this as someone that likes Perl.)

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  • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Friday March 03 2017, @01:22AM (4 children)

    by paulej72 (58) on Friday March 03 2017, @01:22AM (#474204) Journal

    LOL. That is even more so with Rehash. Some of the code is scary enough that I am afraid to touch it. Knock wood, I hope it never breaks.

    --
    Team Leader for SN Development
    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @02:46AM (3 children)

      by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @02:46AM (#474232) Journal

      Yeah, a while back when SN was just starting to get real feature improvements added to it, I got the idea that I might join up and help out since I've used Perl since the late '90s (though I'm rusty now because I started using functional languages more).

      Then I saw the actual code and nope'd out. It's like someone confused a list of bad practices with a TODO list, and I probably would have nuked the codebase from orbit and started over before trying to fix that nightmare.

      I appreciate that you guys are willing to work on and update/fix its problems, but in my opinion the sanity loss isn't worth the pay. :)

      • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday March 03 2017, @03:16AM (2 children)

        by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday March 03 2017, @03:16AM (#474246) Homepage Journal

        It's gotten considerably better since then. The only really harry bits are in the database anymore since I deleted about 2/3rds of the codebase about a year or so ago

        --
        Still always moving
        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Friday March 03 2017, @04:07AM (1 child)

          by Marand (1081) on Friday March 03 2017, @04:07AM (#474257) Journal

          That's good to hear, and not very surprising. You guys seem to care about doing shit right.

          ... Plus I don't think making it worse would have been possible without deliberate effort. ;)

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday March 03 2017, @03:11PM

            by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday March 03 2017, @03:11PM (#474371) Homepage Journal

            Well, there's a rather notorious hack in place that emulates some of mod_perl 1.3 behavior. The original mod_perl implementation allowed you to read/write form values so that later function calls could access them. In Apache 2.x, the STORE method in APR was removed for form variables and a whole lot of code depended on that behavior. My solution was to write a global hook that checks the first time the $r variable is accessed, and copy the entire thing into local storage so I didn't have to edit a million lines throughout the codebase.

            I also remember I had to do some rather arcane magic to hold process wide state data via the barely documented pnotes API.

            --
            Still always moving