Monthly BotB Work-a-Doodlesismnesses...
Added 2025-03-03 20:49:23 +0000 UTCHey, folks, this year I've decided to pivot from making monthly videos that only higher tiered patreonts can see. I'm going to start doing public posts here showcasing lists of what I got done while working on Battle of the Bits. I will continue to plan to make these posts on the 1st Monday of each month. Though, because I was uncertain what the change would be, there is an additional month worth of work to share! 🙌
As a side note, I had to call in help from dreamhost a couple times last month to figure out why the site died. In the first instance, we were basically being DDOSed by AI bots trying to learn about chiptune or something. They seemed to be really interested in tags and tracing the entire tag relational matrix. The second instance dreamhost couldn't figure it out actually. Turns out using command line tools to resize large .gif files into thumbnails can be resource intensive. While a page load will crash out if we hit ~138mb of ram under php, this isn't true for php's exec() function. Imagick was basically choking out all resources provided for the site and then some. Both of these were relatively easy fixes once the problem was found, but all-in-all both instances were some really stressful hours. 😅
January and February Work Complete
hide lyceum history button if article has no history
profile editor "homepage" defaults to https:// url prefix (was http://)
improved handling of battle cover art once battles ends
lots of IP bans for bots including ChatGPT
seriously have about 10 updates that are just bot blocking
block mummi/zombi ailed botbrs from uploading entry renders
refactored barracks Roll Call page to be less crashy
Presults Page
This is a page hosts of major battles see while they do a results stream.
sticky header (displays options and info)
handy clipboard icons for easy entry url copying
countdown timer for battle "auto end" timestamp
multi entry period view with options to repeat battle winners at end
