tblrthreadtracker

[tblrthreadtracker]

Hi there! I've been using rpthreadtracker off and on for almost ten years and I just wanted to thank you for creating and maintaining such a vital tool for the community. I hope you find a cool rock or interesting leaf today.

This is a very kind message, thank you! :) I am so glad that it has been useful for you all of this time. <3

Things are covered in snow here but I will attempt to venture out tomorrow and find a cool rock just cos you said so. ;)

Happy writing. :)

[tblrthreadtracker]

RPThreadTracker Updates - I'm Still Here, Closing Patreon, and Other Info

Hello, friends! Happy 2025!

First allow me to apologize for having been quite off the radar recently; the last year was, to put it mildly, very chaotic for me and I have not had a ton of mental energy to put towards managing RPThreadTracker. That is, frankly, probably going to continue to be the case in the coming year as well.

While I'm not planning to close the app at the moment, I don't anticipate I'll be doing a ton of new development on it. A couple of associated notes:

I'm going to be closing the Patreon I have had running for the last couple years. I'm in a position now where I don't need the support to continue hosting, and I don't feel like it's reasonable to continue taking membership donations on Patreon when I'm not really producing any new development on the site. Thank you SO much to everyone who has contributed to me there over the last few years; your support has meant a ton. Paypal donations are still always welcome if you want to contribute, but I won't be taking regular Patreon donations anymore.

I have received a couple of messages from people asking for help recovering their account which I know I never followed up on. I will be trying to do so for some of those outstanding messages in the next week, but if you tried to reach me in the past for help logging in and did not receive a response, please feel free to message me again at rosalind@blackjack-software.com from the email associated with your account.

There have been some bug reports recently from people reporting issues with not all of their threads being loaded. In a lot of cases this seems to be happening to people who have had accounts for a long time and have built up enough threads that attempts to fetch all of them from Tumblr start getting throttled. While I hope to eventually do more work to improve performance in this regard, I recommend archiving, or exporting and then removing, some of your oldest threads if you are starting to encounter this issue.

Thanks again so much to those who have supported the app over the years and who are continuing to use it. I am sorry that I do not have more news to report as far as improvements to the app but I do hope that it continues to be useful to you all in its current form. Please do continue to feel free to reach out to me if you encounter issues unrelated to the above one.

Thanks,

Trackermun

[tblrthreadtracker]

This outage should now be resolved. Feel free to reach out and let me know if you encounter any further issues! :)

-Trackermun

Reporting site down as of 07/18/2024 around 8 P.M. EST. Server 502 error.

Hello! Thank you so much for letting me know about this! I appreciate it. :)

Just had a look at my hosting provider and it looks like they're suffering an outage right now in the Central US region which is where RPThreadTracker is hosted. They are actively looking at getting it repaired and their last update was about 45min ago.

Unfortunately until this is resolved on their end there isn't much I can do so you may see RPThreadTracker outages until the situation is fixed.

I'll post an update when things seem to have been resolved. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes in the meantime!

[tblrthreadtracker]

How do you use the RPThreadTracker QuickAdd extension on firefox? I downloaded it, but when I go to use it (and to pin it on the toolbar), it is greyed out and can't click on it to access it.

Hello! Sorry for the incredibly delayed reaction on this, and also to the similar ask received from @valebatcattus around the same time; either Tumblr or my spam filter swallowed both notifications and I'm only just seeing them now as I logged in to address the current RPTT outage.

The truth is I have not had a lot of brain space for dev stuff lately so I hadn't been paying too close of attention to the tracker lately. 😭 But I will try to take a look once the site is back up and see why the Firefox extension isn't working anymore. I appreciate both of you letting me know about it!

[tblrthreadtracker]

Reporting site down as of 07/18/2024 around 8 P.M. EST. Server 502 error.

Hello! Thank you so much for letting me know about this! I appreciate it. :)

Just had a look at my hosting provider and it looks like they're suffering an outage right now in the Central US region which is where RPThreadTracker is hosted. They are actively looking at getting it repaired and their last update was about 45min ago.

Unfortunately until this is resolved on their end there isn't much I can do so you may see RPThreadTracker outages until the situation is fixed.

I'll post an update when things seem to have been resolved. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes in the meantime!

[tblrthreadtracker]

This should now be resolved, but please reach out to me if you are still experiencing issues.

Thanks,

Trackermun

RPThreadTracker SSL Certificate Update

Hullo, folks - ty to those who reached out and let me know that RPThreadTracker is currently displaying a certificate error. My SSL certificate expired and the new one hasn't kicked in yet; should be resolved soon. Nothing's wrong with the site itself and you should still be able to use it if your browser allows you to bypass the error.

The issue should be fully taken care of soon. Thanks for your patience.

[tblrthreadtracker]

RPThreadTracker SSL Certificate Update

Hullo, folks - ty to those who reached out and let me know that RPThreadTracker is currently displaying a certificate error. My SSL certificate expired and the new one hasn't kicked in yet; should be resolved soon. Nothing's wrong with the site itself and you should still be able to use it if your browser allows you to bypass the error.

The issue should be fully taken care of soon. Thanks for your patience.

[tblrthreadtracker]

I just wanted to say thanks for the diligence fixing rpthreadtracker! It’s such a great and wonderfully-built tool for tracking threads, especially if you have multiple blogs (or characters).

You’d mentioned reporting any issues, but I did want to report something else: I’ve noticed since the update that in general, the app seems to be running a lot smoother. I found it was really slow before the downtime to load threads, especially if I had a lot, to the point that I actually had to make different accounts for each individual blog because I had that many threads to manage. I’m probably going to see if moving back to a singular account to track all of my threads is viable now because before it definitely wasn’t with how laggy the tracker was. So that’s possibly an upside to you having to make all of the backend changes!

This is great to hear! Thank you so much for letting me know. :) I know the latest versions of .NET Core did provide a lot of performance improvements under the hood so it's nice to hear that they're having a tangible effect!

[tblrthreadtracker]

Programming object lesson of the day:

A couple days ago, one of the side project apps I run (rpthreadtracker.com) went down for no immediately obvious reason. The issue seems to have ended up being that the backend was running on .NET Core 2.2, which the host was no longer supporting, and I had to do a semi-emergency upgrade of all the code to .NET Core 6, a pretty major update that required a lot of syntactic changes and other fixes.

This is, of course, an obvious lesson in keeping an eye on when your code is using a library out of date enough not to be well supported anymore. (I have some thoughts on whether .NET Core 2.2 is old enough to have been dumped like this, but nevertheless I knew it was going out of LTS and could have been more prepared.) But that's all another post.

What really struck me was how valuable it turned out to be that I had already written an integration test suite for this application.

Historically, at basically every job I've worked for and also on most of my side projects, automated testing tends to be the thing most likely to fall by the wayside. When you have 376428648 things you want to do with an application and only a limited number of hours in the day, getting those 376428648 things to work feels very much like the top priority. You test them manually to make sure they work, and think, yeah, I'll get some tests written at some point, if I have time, but this is fine for now.

And to be honest, most of the time it usually is fine! But a robust test suite is one of those things that you don't need... until you suddenly REALLY FUCKING NEED IT.

RPTT is my baby, my longest running side project, the one with the most users, and the one I've put the most work into. So in a fit of side project passion and wanting to Do All The Right Things For Once, I actively wrote a massive amount of tests for it a few years ago. The backend has a full unit test suite that is approaching 100% coverage (which is a dumb metric you shouldn't actually stress about, but again, a post for another day). I also used Postman, an excellently full-featured API client, to write a battery of integration tests which would hit all of the API endpoints in a defined order, storing variables and verifying values as it went to take a mock user all the way through their usage life cycle.

And goddamn was that useful to have now, years later, as I had to fix a metric fuckton of subtle breakage points while porting the app to the updated framework. With one click, I could send the test suite through every endpoint in the backend and get quick feedback on everywhere that it wasn't behaving exactly the way it behaved before the update. And when I was ready to deploy the updated version, I could do so with solid confidence that from the front end's perspective, nothing would be different and everything would slot correctly into place.

I don't say this at all to shame anyone for not prioritizing writing tests - I usually don't, especially on my side projects, and this was a fortuitous outlier. But it was a really good reminder of why tests are a valuable tool in the first place and why they do deserve to be prioritized when it's possible to do so.

[tblrthreadtracker]

Update - I believe public views should now also be working, but please let me know if you run into any issues! :)

[tblrthreadtracker]

We're Back! (Mostly)

Hello all! Thank you much for your patience while I've looked into this RPThreadTracker outage. I've finished and deployed the framework upgrade for the backend code and the site is back up and running!

There are still some lingering issues - specifically, public views are still broken and I need to do some extra digging to figure out what's going on there. But the bulk of the site should be back up and running. EDIT: I think this is fixed and everything should be okay, but please let me know if you hit an issue!

It's entirely possible that there will be other bugs or weirdness that crops up with this code upgrade, so please feel free to reach out to me by ask or with a GitHub issue if you encounter anything that needs fixing.

Thanks so much to everyone who got in touch regarding this downtime! :)

Trackermun

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rpthreadtracker.com | Tracker Blog | Support me on Patreon | Submit Bug Report/Suggestion

[tblrthreadtracker]

Hi I just want to say thank you as always for thread tracker and keeping us in the loop when stuff is down. Good luck with it all and it gives me a bit of a break from hyperfocusing on tumblr! :)

I really appreciate all these kind messages. :) Y'all are very patient when this app occasionally freaks out and I'm grateful for it.

Best community. ^_^

Trackermun

[tblrthreadtracker]

Magnificent! What a beast!

@tblrthreadtracker Remember to stretch+drink water. Thank you for your hard work. :)

[tblrthreadtracker]

im dying

[tblrthreadtracker]

A quick status update:

Still not entirely sure what's going on with the tracker outage but I'm in touch with tech support at my hosting provider. My working theory is that the codebase is now old enough that they basically just stopped supporting its framework without, like, giving any sort of notification, which is a bit annoying and is necessitating me doing a bunch of code updates to get everything back up to speed. Once I've done that, I'll be able to determine whether that fixed the problem or something else is going on.

Further updates will follow here. I appreciate everyone's patience!

Trackermun

[tblrthreadtracker]

Hi bud! Hope you’re having a great day so far. Was wondering if you have a venmo or cash app or PayPal I could donate to! I don’t use patrion at all but still want to support!

Thanks for everything!

Aw. :) This is very kind of you!

I have a PayPal at https://paypal.me/blackjacksoftware which is another way you can put a donation towards keeping the tracker running. Thanks very much for considering it. <3

Thanks,

Trackermun

[tblrthreadtracker]

RPThreadTracker currently down due to infrastructure issues

Hello, all! Super sorry for the inconvenience; I've been looking into the errors currently manifesting in RPThreadTracker and it seems to be some sort of issue with the hosting provider. I've reached out to their support and hope to have an answer and resolution soon, but for now, I appreciate your patience during the downtime.

Thanks to everyone who reached out to me to let me know about the issue! I appreciate you. :)

Sorry again for any inconvenience this causes.

ETA: It is currently a holiday in the US, and I unfortunately cannot afford corporate-level 24x7 tech support, so it's possible I won't get in contact with anyone until tomorrow and it may take some time on back-and-forth. I ask for your continued patience while I get this sorted out. <3

Thanks,

Trackermun