What's coming in April?

Hello Serializd Family! I'm back with another update!

As you've probably noticed, there hasn't been a big feature update in the last couple of weeks. I try to get a new feature out 1-2 times a month. However, this last month required me to work on a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, and I want to share that with you here.

Migration

First off, remember the big outage earlier in March? I had to take the entire app down for 12 hours. This had to happen because I was moving Serializd from my old cloud hosting provider, to a new one.

The old provider had been causing problems for years now. It was an outdated platform and would break frequently. Of all the times Serializd was slow or down in the past, 50% of it was because something went wrong with the provider (the other 50% is me making some stupid mistake and not realizing it immediately 🫣).

Anyway, for the last 6 months, this hosting provider was even more of a nightmare to work with, and their prices kept going up too. Early in March, they kept having problems, and the user experience on Serializd kept degrading. Luckily, I found a good alternative at that time, and decided to move Serializd over.

Migrations like this are hard and time consuming. Even before the 12 hour outage, I had to do a lot of work to move things over and make sure nothing was breaking. After the outage and migration, I had to do a lot of maintenance to clean things up, make sure the app was fast, and that costs weren't high.

Since the migration, Serializd has been 50% faster, and costs have been 20% lower! The app also hasn't had to go down (except for a few minutes last week because I made a mistake lol). I'm very happy with how things are operating right now, and I hope you're feeling the difference too 😊

Stats

Every week, I get a few emails from community members asking me why their stats are not updating. Right now, your time stats (i.e "time spent watching tv" and "number of episodes watched") update every 30 minutes. This is because it's really expensive to create a system that immediately updates your stats when you watch something new. Serializd gets millions and millions of episode logs every day, and it's simply not sustainable to update stats at that scale... until now.

With this new cloud provider, I'm able to build a new stats system that updates faster! Specifically, stats around your Time Spent, Number of Episodes, and Show Statuses (i.e number of shows Currently Watching, Watched,  Watchlisted, Paused, Dropped).

I've been working on this for the last week, and it's almost done. Even now, your stats should be updating faster than 30 minutes. I'm trying to get the time down to a few seconds so it's basically instantaneous.

There's 2 reasons for doing this:

1. Stats being updated immediately is a better app experience

2. New feature: Badges!

Badges

I'm working on a Badge system for Serializd! These are essentially "awards" that are given to members for accomplishing certain things.

A lot of Badges are stats-based (i.e if you hit a certain milestone with your stats, you get a badge), and this meant that the stats system had to be updated so that people can get their badges as soon as they earn them.

Badges are coming soon (this week!) and will be exclusive to Patreon members for the first week so that you can get a sneak peek and let me know if you'd like any changes. Initially, Badges will only be displayed on your profile, but I'm hoping to expand this so that you can "pin" a badge and have it appear next to your name everywhere on the app. I'm hoping this will make the Serializd experience more fun!

As I'm writing this, I'm realizing the through-line here: the migration had to happen for stats to be faster for a badge system to be built. Funny how that worked out lol

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Some other things,

• If you are on a Patreon tier that gets you merch, and you haven't received merch yet, please send a message and a let me know!

• If your Patreon isn't being linked to your Serializd, please make sure that you're signed into your non-creator Patreon account when you're linking. Patreon doesn't let me link other creator accounts.

• I'm also working on some Patreon-exclusive perks. Right now, I'm thinking of having special profile banners on Serializd for Patreon members. Let me know if you have ideas for other Patreon-exclusive perks. However, keep in mind that I want to keep the app free for everyone, so I don't want to lock "features" behind a subscription. Cosmetic things like exclusive colors or banners are fine though

• Stats are going to be faster, but this does mean I have to pay a little more ($100-ish/month) for specific servers. Please spread the word about the Serializd Patreon to help keep Serializd alive and free ❤️

Have a wonderful weekend!