Friday missive 27 Oct 2017

Friday. The end of a week, which is a quartering of what a somewhat culturally-ancestral ancient people estimated as a quarter moon, were kind of wrong, but just ran with it, and that just worked. Somewhat.

This week was a big lesson in machines and data and what that all looks like down in the weeds. The Single Sign On (SSO) process that's happening behind the scenes in between the new forums (which should be good now!) and this server here is diagrammed in a flow chart with a ridiculous number of points. It's one of those problems where someone taking a gander from the outside might ideate a solution that makes sense to them but not to anyone actually working on the problem.

We migrate to the new forums (fora sounds nicer right?) next week, and I'm sure one of us will find some nice juicy issues, but like our Germanic week, it will all work, but unlike a week, we'll have the opportunity for adjustment.

Here's what code change volume for RateBeer looks like right now


Hmmm... new things out this week, including the roll back in of last week's rollback

* RateBeer Mobile App had a new release. You can read more about it (and puzzl's torrid #fanlove for Wyatt) here:
https://www.ratebeer.com/forums/ratebeer-update-new-ratebeer-mobile-app-version_299860.htm

* We created controls for a pernicious scraper that was dragging down the site. If you scrape (and you shouldn't, you should use our API), please be kind!

* Updates to a few boring admin functions including duplicate finder, bug addition, and fixing of beer ratings

* cgarvieuk emerged as a community organizer in the new Discourse forums

* New versions of the brewer page have begun. This code will probably be shared with search in order to make calls more efficient and get people the limitless paging they've always wanted for their search

* More support all around the site for Unicode, but we still have a lot more work to do on emojigeddon

* Consolidation of ticking/star rating and our rating and tick systems. Mobile rating was something that was unleashed with the best intentions, and works well, and was a change most of us wanted but it ended up being a tail that wagged the dog. Mopping this up is something I'm still working on. But I'm very happy with the transition. I hope you are too. We added almost another million ratings to the database with this change. My son calculated that if each row was a centimeter on a piece of paper then we could start laying down sheets of printed out ticks and traverse all the country roads in between our house and the nearby town of Sherwood, Oregon -- about six miles.

* With the above in your Profile, you'll see your mobile ticks arrive under ratings on the web, colored pale blue, and indicated as ticks. You'll also see summary counts of each. You can convert one kind of rating to the other very easily on web and mobile. I hope you enjoy.

Ive been having single sign on issues for 2-3 hours now :-( cant get to new forums, Goes there and the redirects to main ratebeer page

Can you make it so we can delete ticks from aliased beers please.

What is a scraper?

A script run on a server that loads pages of another website and extracts information from it. It's against the TOS of almost every single website as it takes up a massive amount of resources and bandwidth, slowing the site down for everyone. Basically, someone's most likely got some sort of rating aggregation website that is constantly scraping RateBeer web pages to get the latest rating scores, instead of using their API, which is slowing the website down for all of us.

Originally posted by LazyPyro
A script run on a server that loads pages of another website and extracts information from it. It's against the TOS of almost every single website as it takes up a massive amount of resources and bandwidth, slowing the site down for everyone. Basically, someone's most likely got some sort of rating aggregation website that is constantly scraping RateBeer web pages to get the latest rating scores, instead of using their API, which is slowing the website down for all of us.