Welcome to Revision 3520, up from 3483. This is actually a few different releases bundled together, because we had a little flurry of activity over the holiday period which we didn't post release notes for.
Most Archive users will have noticed that the Archive was experiencing very heavy loads during the holiday period, as Yuletide and other holiday challenges brought high traffic to the site. We know that our sad little 502 page was showing hir face more than any of us would have liked! However, our coding and Systems teams deserve a MASSIVE shoutout for their tireless work keeping the site up and dealing with the performance issues. They worked right through the holiday to keep pushing code improvements and tweaking server setups. We'd especially like to thank sysadmin Sidra for the incredible amount of effort she put into coaxing our poor beleaguered servers into working: her work helped get the number of 502s down from over 9000 (on 25 December) to just 9 a few days later. Go Sidra!
If you're wondering whether the Archive will be this slow NEXT year, then we hope the answer is no! The stress test this year taught us some more about how to configure things for the best possible performance. Even better, we're about to buy some new servers which our hosting service described as 'beasts'. More news on that coming soon...
Highlights
Static pages for collections
As part of our performance enhancements, the wonderful Elz worked till the eleventh hour to put in static pages for collections (you may have seen us mention these a time or three on @AO3_Status). These are pages where the whole page is created once and then saved, so it is served up quickly for the next user. They can't have any dynamic information (comment counts, hit counts), but they are MUCH faster at peak times.
All collections have static pages - the url is http://archiveofourown.org/static/collections/COLLECTIONNAME. They generate when people access the urls, so they are only noticeably faster for heavily visited collections. Check out a few of the following:
Share via Twitter (or not!)
We've noticed lots of our users sharing recs for AO3 works via Twitter. We thought you might appreciate a quicker way of doing this, so we've added a Twitter button which fills in the title and url for you! Just click the 'Share' button to see the button.
We know not all our users will be comfortable with a feature that makes it really easy to share links on external services, so we've included an opt-out - just check out your preferences to select this. If you opt out, it will disable the Twitter option on your works now, and if we introduce sharing options for other external services in the future it will also disable those. (However, opting out won't actually prevent people from sharing links to your work anywhere, it will just make them do more of the work themselves. If you want a higher level of control over who sees your work, you can restrict your works to Archive users only.)
Improvements to kudos
Since we introduced the 'kudos' option a couple of weeks ago, over 51,000 kudos have been left and we've had a ton of great feedback about it. We've fixed a few things that were not quite right with the feature: it's now 'kudos' everywhere (no weird singular usage) and you can opt out of kudos notifications without turning off your comment notifications.
Known Issues
See our Known Issues page.
Release details
Features
- Added server-relieving caching options to collections and challenges
- Added static pages for collections (fandom pages, work pages, etc).
- Added ability to leave kudos from static work pages
- Ensured that static pages would persist across deploys.
- Added 'Share on Twitter' button
- Added the ability to opt-out of allowing sharing of your works on external services (e.g. Twitter).
- Changed kudos-related wording in notification emails and on work pages to take care of the singular/plural issue - no more strange singular 'kudo'!
- Removed revision number from page titles
- More automated tests, continuing our mission to test ALL THE THINGS.
Bug fixes
- Removed author names from "share" box for anonymous works (whups)
- Fixed byline bug causing names of anonymous authors to appear in static files and downloads
- Made it possible to edit a work in a closed challenge without being kicked out of the collection
- Fixed collection links in anonymous work blurbs showing up as unparsed HTML code
- Fixed a bug where you couldn't edit tags on a work if they were related to a meta tag
- tweaked collections pages for display in Internet Explorer
- Cleaned up story notes section, fixing issues which were causing links to endnotes to be encased in invalid HTML and thus look weird.
Systems changes
- Added option to turn off kudos notifications
- Change thinking sphinx delta delayed jobs into an hourly cronjob (relieved load on the server)
- Changing reindex to every two hours (relieved load on the server)
- Gave delayed job its own restart
- Made it possible to run deploy quick on otw2 server (saves some work during repeated deploys)
- Updating static sweeper
