What is this post about?
At the end of each month, we publish a report for patrons on the status of the project and the work done that month.
There is no guarantee that we will be able to spend much time on the project each month, but overall we hope that this will give more transparency to the people supporting the project.
Progress Report for January 2023.
This month we spent a total of 4 hours working on the project:
Responding to server incident.
Solving the spam issue in our Discord.
Unfortunately this month we have not had the opportunity to spend developing the project, so most of the time we have had has been spent responding to incidents and keeping things up and running.
Responding to server incident.
For example, this month we had another server incident leading to service unavailability for about 15 minutes. Backup ip geolocation took the place of our main servers during downtime, but still not good.
The root of this problem lies in the optimization work done a couple of months ago and we will work on fixing it when we add the patron badge feature. To just show your conversation partner your patron badge (without compromising privacy) our server would need to handle not just ~30 million requests per month, but 100M+. The current problem should go away after expanding our server for this task, so for now it is enough to just restart the server periodically.
Solving the spam issue in our Discord.
Also this month there was a problem with spam in our Discord server. Different people sent invitations to strange servers and a couple of times phishing link every few days. Most likely the accounts used for spam were previously hacked.
And although such links were quickly removed by our moderators, this month attacks became much more frequent so we decided to set up a rule to prevent anyone from sending any link to the chat.
No links - no problems!
What's next?
Our main goal for February is to launch the community translation platform.
Our users are spread all over the world and we notice a lot of deletions in countries where English is not a common language. Getting started to work with translators as soon as possible means getting actual support for more languages ASAP so that more people can use the extension in their native language.
Internalization is a complex task with most of the work already done in 2023 so the only thing that left is to actually register our project on the localization platform and notify already interested people from the community.
There are other goals formed in my head during January (such as expanding the set of patron features), but I won't spoil in case I can't find more time to get it done in February.
Anyway, I hope to see you next month!
qrlk