Website Errors in July 2023

Scott Hardie | July 29, 2023
This website has some very old code, and I'm working on that.

While I was out this evening, my host made a minor upgrade to a later PHP version. It's a normal sort of thing that happens all the time, but in this case, it broke a ton of stuff across the site because that old way of coding was finally no longer supported.

Although the timing was lousy since I was out and didn't notice for hours, it's my fault, not the host's. I'm sorry for the trouble!

Anyway, I quickly fixed most of the urgent problems that I could find. The two pages still not working that I know of are Current Scores in the goo game, and Start a Concert in Rock Block, because those are going to need more time. I'll have them fixed asap, probably Sunday.

Please alert me to any further errors that you notice on the site. You can do so right here in this discussion, or privately via the Feedback form. Thank you!

And thanks, Erik, for sending me the first error report already.

Erik Bates | July 29, 2023
If there's something I'm good at, it's pointing out when something has gone wrong :)

Scott Hardie | July 31, 2023
Celebrity Goo Game's Current Scores page is fixed. It's still slow to open; I'll deal with that separate problem asap.

Scott Hardie | August 2, 2023
Artist images are drawing correctly again in Rock Block.

Scott Hardie | August 2, 2023
About 10% of the movie review pages in Thorough Movie Reviews were blank. They are now fixed.

Scott Hardie | August 3, 2023
The Player Achievements page was only loading about halfway and then stopping. It's fixed.

Scott Hardie | August 3, 2023
The pages for individual weeks within The MCU Project would not open. They are now fixed.

Scott Hardie | August 9, 2023
Individual blog posts were not displaying replies. That is now fixed.

Scott Hardie | August 9, 2023
Automatic concerts are now spawning again in Rock Block.

Scott Hardie | August 10, 2023
Artists with long names are now drawn correctly. (Thanks for letting me know, Steve.)

Scott Hardie | August 11, 2023
In Rock Block, each artist modal now works when you click on an artist for more information, and some concerts that weren't displaying the stage at all are now fixed.

Scott Hardie | August 12, 2023
Member profiles in TC were not displaying at all if the member had only partial data (such as blog posts but not blog replies). This has been fixed.

TC discussions that involved polls sometimes didn't display either. This has been fixed.

The page for the old Happy Together tournament was blank. This is fixed.

The Three Clues game page would not open. This is fixed.

Erik Bates | August 12, 2023
Amazing how one change can have such a domino effect, isn't it?

Scott Hardie | August 13, 2023
It is! I keep finding more wrong. There's a joke among developers:

99 bugs in the code
99 bugs in the code
take one down
patch it around
103 bugs in the code

I described what happened as a "minor PHP upgrade" on the server, but technically speaking it was a major upgrade, in that the site went from one major version to another (PHP 7 to 8) instead of one minor version to another (8.0 to 8.1). Generally speaking, major versions are when backwards-incompatible changes happen, which means that old code can spontaneously stop working. And Funeratic still has some very old code in it; there are parts of this site that have not changed since 2006, the last time that I did a complete rewrite. I was still coding for PHP 4 back then, and I had some bad coding habits that compounded as the site grew, so there are problems everywhere. (I called it a "minor upgrade" because, for any other site without such an ancient code base, there would have been little or no interruption.)

Code that I've written more recently has tolerated the upgrade from PHP 7 to 8 just fine. If Funeratic's code was entirely written to modern standards, I would have taken the option offered by my webhost to upgrade much earlier when I was ready, but instead I had to leave the site on the slowest possible automatic upgrade schedule. Inevitably, the day came when they could wait no longer and had to upgrade my site for security reasons, and although the precise timing turned out to be lousy, they made the right call overall and it's my fault for letting the code get this out of date. I've been working on a full rewrite, albeit very slowly because I can't work at the speed that I'd like these days, but their upgrade beat me to it.

Compounding all of this has been a series of outages where Funeratic is completely offline, usually for 1-3 minutes but sometimes much longer, for instance 2pm-10pm last Sunday. Only about half of these outages have been related to the PHP 8 business as far as I can tell, which makes the whole repair process extra frustrating. Imagine trying to fix faulty electrical wiring throughout your home while the power keeps going out: Did it go out because I just now broke something, or because the wiring was already bad, or for some other unrelated reason outside of the house? Did the power come back on because I just now fixed something, or because the electric company fixed something on their end, or because the interruption to power was of an inherently temporary nature? Arrgh. I want to get to the bottom of what's causing the unrelated outages, but that will have to wait.

Right now I'm just trying to fix the issues that truly block something from working on the site, ignoring the many where something is merely wonky but functional. The two remaining blockers that I know of are the "Start a Concert" form and the software that warps celebrity photos into celebrity goos, which involves an external software library that I have disabled on the server until I have a chance to focus on it, because turning it back on will inevitably introduce all kinds of additional problems to fix ("take one down, patch it around..."). We'll run out of unpublished goos in about two weeks, so there's a deadline for me to implement that fix.

To be clear: I still really enjoy working on Funeratic overall, even with reduced participation lately, and I actually enjoy fixing many bugs. I'm lucky that I frequently get to spend time working on something that I enjoy. It's just the pressure to fix things now, under challenging circumstances, that tends to drain the fun out of it. :-\

Scott Hardie | August 30, 2023
The Create a Goo page is now fixed and goos can be submitted again.

Scott Hardie | September 5, 2023
I am profoundly frustrated.

Beyond this site continuing to go offline for reasons beyond my control -- for example, six hours this past Sunday, until I got the host to fix their own mistake -- there remain a countless number of bugs and flaws in the system, quietly wreaking havoc on normal site operations.

I rely on various automated notifications to keep the site on track, because I can't monitor everything directly. For years, if something went wrong with a goo publishing because of, I don't know, some weirdly accented letter in the celebrity's name or something, I would wake up to all kinds of emails and big red notices on the site informing me that no goo ran today and it needs to be corrected asap.

There hasn't been a peep out of the site for days. I was curious how the goo game was going, so I just looked at the Current Goos page just now and discovered that no goo has published since Friday 9/1. No error emails. No error notices on the site. No automated task in my To Do list popping up to make a goo. Not even anyone telling me "hey Scott, something seems broken" because, I assume, anyone still playing is getting as accustomed to the site being broken as I am.

For the record, I had no idea. I haven't been able to pay attention. I had COVID and spent last week coughing until I puked. And when I have had spare time lately, I've been forced to spend it resolving my mother's estate. I'm sorry, the lawyer needed me to track down all 70-something pages of my mother's 1998 tax return with the state of Illinois; that's the sort of thing that doesn't leave much time for clicking around this website for fun. That's why I rely on automated systems to keep the site running!

I can and will fix the goo game bug this morning. But who knows how many other bugs are out there? What other systems aren't behaving without me realizing it? Normally I'd be on top of this huge mess that started in July (!) and would have fixed it all by now, but these are not normal times. I'm currently at Ron Swanson levels of frustration with this website.

If you want to help, please continue reporting bugs to me, here in TC or in private, or I suppose on Facebook if the site is offline. I appreciate it!

Known bugs as of now (front-end only, so ignoring the back-end bugs like the site not notifying me of problems):
• no goos are publishing despite some being in the queue and ready to play
• the nav menu at the top of each page doesn't recognize your RB label and prompts you to join the game
• the "Start a Concert" form won't finish opening
• the "Manage Subscriptions" form won't finish opening
• new content is not indexing correctly and thus not showing up in search results

Steve West | September 5, 2023
Wow! I was taking the position of, "Scott's got his hands full so the last thing he needs is my pestering ass." I'll try to be more informative going forward.

Scott Hardie | September 6, 2023
Ha! Well, I sincerely appreciate that. And I shouldn't take out my grumpiness at my predicament on people who are also affected by it and trying to help me get through it. :-)

Scott Hardie | September 8, 2023
It shouldn't feel this good to wake up to a website that is online and has no new error messages.

Scott Hardie | September 12, 2023
All of the known bugs are now fixed, with one exception, the Start a Concert form. I've been working on that for weeks and I'm forced to conclude that it's irretrievably broken. It never worked all that well in the first place: Even optimized for maximum speed, it had to do so many computations to determine what form options were still viable based on the options selected so far that it was very slow to use. You'd check one box on the form, go do something else for a few minutes, and come back to check another box. It was ridiculous even when it was working correctly.

So, I'll replace it with something closer to the form in "Classic Rock Block," in which you would first select an opponent, then select a theme if any, then select a trade rule and play rules, then select artists, et cetera. This multi-step form is not how I like it to work -- conceptually, I have always preferred the idea of jumping around to any choice in the process at any time -- but it's probably the only way to scale up with the size of data that the game has now. I don't know when I'll finish it, but I'll keep working at it quietly until it's done.

There are still some back-end code problems (such as in my admin tools for running the site, and in the nightly scripts that update data), and approximately one million tiny improvements that could be made in the code that get recorded as notices in the error logs. But as of today, I'm aware of no other front-end errors on the site beyond that RB form. If you notice anything else wrong on the site, large or small, please let me know. Thank you! I appreciate it.

Scott Hardie | September 13, 2023
Fixing automatic concerts this morning made me realize the problem with the Start a Concert form. It's working again, albeit as slowly as ever. I still plan to replace it with a different version but at least we can use this old version in the meantime.