Development roundup: September 2020 (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

First of all, I want to welcome and thank all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. Your support allows me to spend more time on the site and pay for the operating costs.

If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits.

Hall of Fame

I added a new page on the sites that has taken the place of the Special Thanks section on the old site. You can see the $10 Patrons who pledged to in the Hall of Fame. If you are a patron at the $10 tier, you can upload an image and specify a webpage to link to. Once you do, your image will be shown on the Hall of Fame.

Also, a random Patron from the Hall of Fame will be shown on each page on the site. If you have a website, Twitter or Patreon page you want to promote, this is a great way to boost your reach! You can update these in your settings.

3D Model Viewer

Last weekend, I added a new experimental preview type to the website. In the past, it was already possible to attach image files and webm video to upload pages. The site now also allows you to upload 3D models as glTF or GLB files. These model files can now be previewed, right on the webpage itself. It uses a javascript component which you can find at modelviewer.dev. Hence it did not take long to implement. It does however add some nice interactivity to the sites. If you are a regular uploader, please give it a try and let me know what you think! You can find an example upload with a 3D model on this page.

There are a few caveats to be considered: at this time, it is up to the uploader to export and upload a valid glTF file for his model, or the model can not be previewed. In the future, it might be possible for us to automatically generate a glTF file for a given blender or SFM model, but at this time, this is not possible.

Ongoing Issues

We suffered a few hours of downtime last night after running mostly stable for about a week. The timing was unfortunate, since I was asleep at the time and the system monitoring and your messages did not wake me. Unfortunately, the cause of the issue was a full OS disk on most of the web nodes, which was easily mitigated. I've taken measures to prevent this from happening again. Meanwhile, I'm working on a way to better monitor downtime and notifying. For starters, I've started by setting up an automated status page that you guys can view when stuff goes down when I'm not available. This page is hosted by an external service and is thus not affected if the site goes down. 

You can find it at status.sfmlab.com 

Also note that, while sfmlab.com has stats for the past year, some of the stats will take time to populate. Over the past 6 months, SFMLab has had an average uptime of 99.102%, which is still quite admirable considering the issues we've had over that period.

Meanwhile, development continues on the new comments section, but there's not much to report on that front for now. I hope to be able to do development updates like this more frequently. For now I'm thinking once every month or two, or when I have new exciting stuff to share.

Again, apologies for the downtime and thanks for your support! Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

Kind regards, 

Ganonmaster