Waterfall Staff

Community Update - Waterfall 1.0

As promised - the next Community Update would be the release announcement.

WATERFALL 1.0

After more than a year in the works, it's finally time to deploy the Rewrite.

What's the Rewrite?

For those who haven't been here since the beginning and so are unaware, the Rewrite is a project I started late 2019. The site was getting bigger than I anticipated and a successful Kickstarter had just happened to make an app. Unfortunately, the code showed it - what had been slapped together as a proof of concept was now the foundations for what you're using right now, and it was getting increasingly difficult to add new features and adjust the existing ones. So, I pretty much decided to start from scratch, and rewrote the entire site. That's what's being deployed tomorrow.

Those who were here in the early days will remember how fast new features came - sometimes, I was able to deploy two or more major features a day. The rewrite means those days return, and I can make things happen much, much faster than over the last 9 months or so.

When?

See the post directly underneath this one for the formal downtime announcement!

There's no formal estimation given for how long it'll take, since that'll largely be determined by how many images are on the site, since that's where the bottleneck is in the dry runs. I've optimised it as much as I can, but it'll probably be at least 24 hours.

What'll happen during the downtime?

During the downtime, the site will be completely unavailable, save for a maintenance page. It'll have some basic status updates on there, but you're encouraged to come hang out in the Discord while it's going on! We'll play a few games together or something.

Almost all data on the site is being converted into a new format. The only things I can think of that "break" per se are blocklists, blog descriptions, and badges. Blocklists have been talked about enough so I won't reiterate on that. Blog descriptions are being changed - given the app will start development immediately, it felt reasonable to prep for those now. They're being changed to be shorter rather than full bios, so that when they show in the app, someone doesn't have to swipe two full screens down. This means they'll be cleared in the update, alongside your badge settings - this is because the internal structure of badges has changed, so you can pick them all again (you can change the order of them now!) Your blog and dashboard theme may also be reset for the same reasons, so all in all, nothing too destructive is happening.

What'll happen after the update?

I'll be on standby to fix any major bugs that crop up. Given every line of code has been rewritten, there'll likely be a few that I missed.

Minor bugs will be put on a list to be triaged, and they'll be fixed in patches over the coming days and weeks, along with adding the hold-backs.

Hold-backs in this case refers to new features that are mostly complete, but are being held back a bit to make bugfixing the major stuff a little easier. It also includes one or two things, such as the advanced page editor, that are finished but I've found major bugs (i.e. security issues) in that need fixing, but aren't major enough features that it's worth holding the update itself back for.

After that, the GitHub repo and Discord will be open again to accept new feature requests, and a staff post will be made with a poll on what you want to see first. There'll also be a Patron update that gives a post-mortem on the whole rewrite saga, so keep an eye out for that if you're supporting the site.

It's been a long time coming, but we're finally there, and here's the 24 hour warning I promised.

See you on the other side.