Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

I rushed the relaunch out the door, so I still have a lot of development work to do on the Guild. I work best under debilitating pressure. I don't feel like keeping this first post updated, so go to the last page or two of this topic for updates.

Issues I'm currently working on:

- Notification systen - Investigate missing self-convos like Fallenreaper's. (More info)

Random things:

- When a post is deleted or hidden, and if that post was the latest post in a forum or topic, then the forum or topic should update their latest_post_id. Right now a hidden post will show up on the homepage and everyone clicking on it will get a "Forbidden" error. - Add the list of shared-conversations between you and the user whose profile you're on. (On the previous Guild, this list was displayed below the blue "Start Convo With {{ username }}" button) And plenty more.

Special thanks

- <3 to the person that registered on Github just to fix a link on the subscriptions page (https://github.com/danneu/guild/pull/8). It's also the Guild's first user-submitted patch. - <3 to everyone that has been reporting issues.

Server downtime and community solutions

The problem with donations is that they aren't recurring. Donation-based systems also just don't bring in much money. I also just don't need the money.

The limiting factor with the Guild has been my time, and donations aren't going to pay my wage to work on the Guild and address its problems.

The real problem is that 1) the Guild's core code is one year old and can't scale anymore and 2) I'm the bottleneck for *everything*, even trivial bugfixes and typos.

At the moment, I'm rewriting the Guild's core to factor in everything I've learned about scaling the Guild this past year. I'm making some fundamental changes so that it has no scaling issues. That addresses point #1.

To address point #2, I'm rewriting the logic in Javascript and using Postgres (SQL) for the database. And then I'm open-sourcing the codebase so that tech-savvy community members can contribute patches to the codebase and I can merge them in. Javascript and SQL are two of the most commonly used web technologies, and that's intentional. I want there to be an almost zero barrier to entry to helping out with the Guild. Even if you're a newbie programmer, you should still be able to submit a patch for something like a typo or a templating glitch. More experienced developers can implement more high-profile patches. I'll be able to review these patches, test them, and merge them in.

I'll provide an update once I hit my first milestone: inviting users to test the code on my development server.

Is RPGuild dying?

The Guild today isn't much different than it's ever been.

- It's always had performance issues. From 2009 to 2011 it was even down for a couple hours each day for a reason I never figured out. It only ended because I got a job and could afford to migrate the Guild to a better server.
- There's always been a long list of bugs to fix and features to implement on the to-do list. After the great Guildfall of December 2013 when everything was deleted, I took a month off to build the Guild from scratch but I ran out of time (money) and we're left with the most buggy and feature-weak implementation of the Guild to date. But I was able to implement some cute features like multi-user PMs and IC/OOC roleplay tabs. And the Guild now fits on a server that costs half of what I was paying when it was running on vBulletin.
- It's always been hard for me to scavenge free-time to work on the Guild. I haven't spent much time here since I was seventeen and invested the first year trying to bootstrap the community into something more than me and my two friends talking to ourselves. Maybe I blew the entire free-time budget that year. I'm twenty-six now.
- People have always been "migrating somewhere else", and the Guild has always been "on the brink of death" and "not like it once was".

Yet, here we are.

The reality is that those things don't really matter that much. We just deal with them in the same stride we deal with stop lights and breakups and cold days when we forget our mittens.

What does matter is that there is a vibrant long-standing community here that transcends QQCode, taxi-cab yellow, and catastrophic data loss.

Test

test

When There is Lag

Yeah, this is the Guild's #1 problem right now.

Today is my last day at this job and I want to set aside a chunk of freetime to resolve this issue (if nothing else).

Unfortunately, the issue might demand some serious refactoring to fix.

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This is a pretty critical issue now that people are hitting the 100 subscription cap.

I'm working on performance issues right now, but this is in my Top 5 Issues To Fix.