Mahz

Man, it's been a while...

Welcome back dude. So you must've been around when the guild was more like this!

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Captain Jordan: Haha, nice. You stumbled upon the concept of incremental local cache. Though the nice thing about keeping it in memory (as opposed to file I/O) is that you get atomic reads & writes for free (x = 42).

Mahz's Dev Journal

Latest push: - Implement ability for staff to move topics with an optional redirect.[1] - Removed all database queries from the homepage so that it loads almost instantly (always a cache hit).[2] Technical notes for the badass hackers: [1]: The "redirect" (on by default) is a "Topic moved" papertrail message that shows up in place of the topic on the origin forum so that moved topics don't just vanish. What seems like an easy feature ended up taking a while because I basically had to change from simply sorting topics by latest_post_id to sorting topics by moved_at (timestamp) and latest_post_at (timestamp). I struggled to do that sort performantly til my friend pointed out that I can create an index on the expression (topic.moved_at OR topic.latest_post_at). Blew my mind. [2]: I've been slowly moving database queries to a simple cache object I created that refreshes each cache item at some arbitrary interval in the background (source). That way cache reads are always instant. By caching the homepage's list of categories, forums, and latest posters (updated every 10 seconds), I reduced the homepage load time from 20-50ms to <1ms on localhost. So far I've spent the rest of my time working on the "Hide" system. I'm essentially trying to replace all destructive deletion with a system of is_hidden = true flags. For one, that will make all "deletes" reversible. There really isn't a good reason for a forum in 2015 to delete data, but I also just want to set the stage for user-level deletion. It's pretty hard though. Next weekend I will pick more enjoyable features to work on for sanity.

howdy everyone!!!

Welcome :)

I want to create my own RP forum.

@Narii

Famous last words

Mahz's Dev Journal

I personally would like to see dice, it may convince me to head down to see the nerds at Tabletop

@Vortex

But what will convince you to use a 150x150-sized avatar, tough guy?

@Mahz

That does bring up a good point, though. Will the Guild support higher native resolutions of profile pictures in the future?

@LegendBegins

I could only do something like that when I implement image uploads instead of the current hack. That way I could do server-side processing and, for example, output two different resolutions which will display depending on your device rez.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Latest push: - Added basic users list with partial username search (Implemented by @TheMaster99) Various sorting options will eventually be implemented, but this should be good enough for the most common use case: just finding people. The pagination is limited for performance reasons but I'll likely improve it once I implement sorting.