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ZorbaTHut  1d ago (text post)   1348 thread views

Site Backend Changes

Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.

The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.

The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.

I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.

 

tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.

(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)

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Weird. Context link has always been visible and functional for me.

Yes, the "context" link used to work. I thought I said that, but maybe I wasn't clear.

RR is saying that it doesn't anymore, and I can confirm (I got served immediately after making that post, and indeed used the workaround I stated).

Should be fixed now (ping @RandomRanger).

Part of the changes involved solving a huge number of weird undocumented inconsistencies, and some of these either got solved the wrong way or were inconsistent-by-design. It is kind of weird that you can see the context; we're leaving that in for now just because the alternatives are worse.

(What it really should be doing is giving you an anonymized view of the conversation tree but I do not want to think about coding that at the moment. Maybe later.)

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