posted by max on March 18, 2011 at 04:02:53 PM

Hello again,


We're still running at reduced capacity but after emptying out the YTMND bank account, we have a lot of new hardware on the way. A good portion of our systems are relatively old at this point, so I think it should make for some major improvements in speed. There will be some downtime sometime next week but I hope to get it done in the wee-hours so it doesn't bother anyone. More information on the new hardware inside.

In an effort to be more communicative, I'm going to try and give you an update you on YTMND 2.1. I've set up a real project-management system available at http://bugs.ytmnd.net, which is infinitely more useful than doing bug tracking and feature requests on the wiki. Keep reading for details.

New Hardware

Master DB Server

• CPU: 2x8 core 2.3Ghz
• Memory: 64GB 1333MHz
• HD: 4x128GB MLC SSD in RAID 10

This is such a massive upgrade to the current system which it's replacing that I'm not sure if we will even need slave databases anymore, despite costing roughly the same. I'm also planning on moving from MySQL server/InnoDB engine to the Percona Server/XtraDB engine, which I think should also have a big performance improvement on this hardware. I think once migrated, we could easily bring back the API, even if no one uses it. This machine is currently running the YTMNDEV database, and the minecraft server. It probably won't go into production until YTMND "2.1" launches.

Master Content Server

• CPU: 1x8 core 2.3Ghz
• Memory: 32GB 1333MHz
• HD: 12x1TB SAS drives, in some sort of RAID

This isn't a huge upgrade except in terms of memory and space, but it would make us redundant in that the old master content server could be a "hot backup". At any rate, things should be snappier once it's in place, which I hope to happen some time in the next couple weeks.

YTMND "2.1" Status Update

The next version of YTMND is, for the most part, aesthetic changes. There will be some bug-fixes, and new features, but mostly it's implementing the new design and a big cleanup of the HTML/CSS/JS. HTML is being rewritten to HTML5 instead of XHMTL, which I think in the long run will make my life easier. These changes have long been under way but due to numerous hardware issues and a flaring-up of piriformis syndrome, it isn't nearly as far along as I'd like. I was hoping to launch before 4/1, then I was hoping to launch by 4/1, and now I'm hoping to be done by 5/1. I'm freelancing full time as well, so I really only have a chance to work on YTMND on weeknights.


Almost every comp that we've ever paid a designer to do has included some element of including user-created images around the site, which frankly scares the shit out of me because it's a moderation nightmare. These days, it isn't as much of an issue for me because of the lack of commercial traffic focused on the front page, and more-so, my lack of sentiment for YTMND users. In the past, I didn't want to enable features which could be abused because I didn't want to have to delete users. These days, I don't care so much; with the new design, not marking your YTMNDs as NSFW will result in deletion of your account without warning.


The 2.1 design includes many visual changes from the current site, some of these existed in the original 2.0 design comps, but due to me rushing it to production and the moderation issues mentioned below, they never made it. Various pages around the site will incorporate image previews in new ways. Against my normal rule of "don't show the users new designs until launch", I'm posting up some previews for you so you have an idea what I'm talking about:

The new "Up and Coming":

I still haven't decided If I'm going to allow alternate images to be uploaded for these previews, or if it will force you to crop a current image, or what.

"Generic content boxes":

Smaller thumbnails will be used in various places around the site, I'm not sure yet if they'll be a smaller version of the currently automatic thumbnails used on the site profile, or a custom image/crop, but most likely the former.


This new design will very likely last quite a long time. I want to focus more on making YTMND stable and then adding features for the next few years. So if you mind the new design, you're fucked.

Moderation

One of the major impediments of a fully-featured moderation system has been being able to adequately track and undo moderator actions. A combination of me being a control freak, and YTMND's database not being designed in a way conducive to restoring deleted data has lead to moderation on YTMND to always be a bit of a joke; moderators (and even super moderators) have never had much power. To be honest, I'm not sure if they should have very much power, but in an effort to make YTMND more self-sufficient, after the new design, moderation is going to be a big focus for me. A lot of the features I wrote for the original moderation system never got updated for all the YTMND 2.0 changes, so they need some TLC. At that point I'll invite a very small number of users to be mods, and we'll go from there to see if it's necessary to add more people.


For those of you who want to be moderators, or for those of you who still care about YTMND, the most helpful thing you can do right now for YTMND is to accurately report on bugs and add feature requests at the new bug tracker. For the time being please avoid submitting visual and browser-related bugs and feature requests. Since we should have completely new HTML and CSS soon, a lot of the bugs won't be applicable.


I'll update later this week when I launch some of this new hardware.


-Max