Wednesday Updates

I'll start keeping track of all the big things changed each day!

Here is the list for today.

8/17/2011

• Fixed leader synch issue when changing leaders
• Fixed soundcloud and imgur
• Fixed name overflow in chat list
• Fixed moderators
• Live testing a fix for "blocked by firewall" message

And a list for yesterday since we didn't write one for yesterday.

8/16/2011

• Added back a "classic option" that restores you to the old layout
• Added user avatars for a more interesting bubble chat view
• Added back thumbs in chat when you paste links

Regarding the New Push

I'll make an "official" announcement later, but I wanted to quickly address what seems to be the biggest issues:

1. Chat thumbs are not gone, it broke. Literally fixing it now.... should be out in a few hours (UPDATE: FIXED)
2. Playlist importing from YouTube will be back within a day or two
3. We are working on a way to allow you to go back to the "vanilla" synchtube layout (UPDATE: FIXED. click "classic view". we will be improving the classic view over time as well but you can at least switch now)
4. Working on resolving better icons (anyone a professional icon designer?) (UPDATE: Thank you DigitalWF for a playlist icon set!)

Thanks everyone for the quick feedback. It really makes a difference when we hear what works and what doesn't. Two steps backward, one step forward, right? Wait, that doesn't sound right...

~mrchess

August 2011 Survey

In preparation for the second release, I want to take a quick survey to try to figure out what frustrates everyone the most. If you have a moment please fill this synchtube happiness survey out, and if you're a mod tell your room too!

http://bit.ly/nW9FHG

Have a good weekend,

mrchess

What media do you want to share?

The next iteration of synchtube will be coming soon, which should be snappier and more reliable.

In addition to the performance gain, I am also looking for new types of media to implement into this release.

Anyone have suggestions for medias to synch besides YouTube? So far we've added Vimeo (fixed it proper) and DailyMotion. What else should we add?

EDIT: Also note we are not limited to videos. SlideShare, imgur, stuff like that can work too.

-mrchess

Cannot connect to synchtube! Explained.

This is a brief post explaining this dreaded message.

Synchtube currently uses 3 ports -- 8884, 8885, and 8886.

If you receive the message "Cannot connect to synchtube" it is because you cannot access these ports.

It could be for a variety of reasons:

1. You are behind a firewall, or your router is blocking the ports.

2. If you are trying to access from work or school, your network IT may have blocked the port.

3. ???

4. Profit

No, but seriously. As far as I know those are the only two reasons. If you can figure out a way to unblock the ports, you should be good.

We are working on a solution to proxy the ports, but it isn't as easy as it seems. We actually tried to push a solution a few times already but... it didn't work.

But yes, we are actively continuing to track this problem and are looking for possible solutions! If you still see this problem despite unblocking the ports, please leave a note here and paste your browser specs too (Firefox 3.6, 4, 5, Chrome, etc.)

Thanks!

~mrchess

EDIT: If anyone is a sysadmin and has any other ideas of why people wouldn't be able to connect, please feel free to help suggest a fix!

Heads up, possible playlist wipe coming up...

Synchtube has come a long way over the past half year, with traffic growing nearly 200% since January. There's been a lot of ups, downs, memory upgrades and server re-writes as we re-designed and architectural things over and over to accommodate the traffic. Thanks everyone for stickin' with us!

However these changes just aren't enough, and the unfortunately reality is that we still have code in live production from 1.5 years ago when synchtube was just a hobby project. This old spaghetti code is actually the foundation for the client, which is BAD as it stops us from being able to quickly build and fix issues that people report.

For the nerd curious, we had been persisting data on the server and client differently, grandfathering in old data through wrappers in every upgrade, performing conversions to keep everything in the same state, but we never actually took time out to root problem areas. Or more honestly, I never took the time to fix it *grin*. Hey -- I was working full time, ok?

Well, it has finally come back to haunt us, and the synchtube data just isn't sustainable anymore -- our wrappers just cause confusion and as the site grows. The good news is that we (my buddy and I) are facing the problem, have agreed on standards and a workflow, and we have been re-writing things to fit these standards over the past week. We expect these changes to go into live production within 2 weeks.

But you know how they say no pain no gain... our new flow and standards, despite being good for the future, make all the old playlists defunct. This is one of those one step backwards two step forwards moments.

Anyway, I say "possible playlist wipe" because depending on how difficult it will be to write a conversion script I might write one, but as of now it doesn't seem very likely.

~mrchess

Addressing the recent caps

Recently we put on a 500 character description cap, as well as a 20 moderator cap.

This was done due to increasing bandwith costs as rooms were having 80+ moderators. Images add up quickly in bandwith costs. I am working on a solution to try and lower the costs, but until then these caps will have to stay in place.

~mrchess