Core development report

in #core11 months ago

Hello ! I haven't done one of those in a while, usually I link to development happening in the core dev meetings. But because a lot of things happened over the christmas break I figured I'd take time to write a post to explain some of them. And also I figured it was important to bring transparency and light on things that sometimes just don't work or time is spent on things that aren't features.

These days I'm 100% on hivemind, so all those will concern hivemind

The bad: performance issues and reverts

Performance issue with the new communities type

The @blocktrades team identified a performance issue with one of my changes https://peakd.com/hive/@howo/communities-is-getting-an-update--what-to-expect

These are kind of tricky to detect because you need to do a full sync, which is very time consuming. So there is no automated tests to cover those. In the end I figured out that the issue came from an SQL query. The problem was quickly found and fixed in this merge request: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/619

Reverted the setRole / setTitle feature

About four months ago I built a feature to prevent community owners from setting an user as moderator or giving it a special title, this is because we saw people were given those roles even thought they didn't want it or weren't aware as a way to make a community seem more legit than it actually is (eg: setting @acidyo as moderator of a community titled "zing's fans" even though he isn't associated with it). We had to revert it, thanks to some testing from @mahdiyari. We found out that this broke historical changes for communities.

After some back and forth we thought about some solutions but all of them were technically too heavy for the feature and we didn't want to push those so close to the deadline, so we decided to remove it until we can think of a good solution (Basically introduce versioning within hivemind so that some changes only trigger after a specific date, similar to hard forks)

This happened in https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/631

The good

Fixed an issue where beneficiaries rewards were not counted in the apis

The problem is explained here: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/issues/204 basically if you look at a post after the payout and that post had beneficiaries all the benficiary rewards will not be included in the "total rewards" portion of a post, eg this post shocases a 14.48 hbd reward https://peakd.com/hive-194913/@badge-696969/hotshots--52223 but in reality the reward is 29.014 because all the author reward went to beneficiaries.

So I pushed a fix which should go live soon: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/issues/204

Made good progress on community beneficiaries

Community beneficiaries is a feature that allow a community owner to set a minimum beneficiary setting, and if the minimum is not set, the post will be automatically muted. This allows communities to enforce a "common pot" to build things or just make the owner some money if the community is enticing enough. This is basically another tool towards paid communities to make them into businesses.

The work is happening in there: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/621

But while working on it I realized there was big performance hurdles, so I had to work on another feature to clear those out. Namely:

Muted reasons feature

Right now a post can be muted (bridge_api_object has grey to true) for those reasons:

  • user has less than 1 rep
  • The post is muted (by a community mod)
  • User role is muted (in a community)
  • User posted in a type 2 or 3 community when they didn't have the right to (non-member posting in an member only community for instance)
  • The post is a comment and it's parent is muted

This can get confusing for users "why am I muted here ?" and some front ends may decide to honor "grey" in different ways or have it up to the user (eg: I want to see posts from minus 1 rep).

So I built a feature so that the api endpoint returns the reason why a certain post is muted (eg: a mod muted this post). This will allow greater muted flexibility and improve UX.

Work is almost done and happening here: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/626

Mock helper script

This one is waaay less relevant to you unless you're specifically a hivemind dev, but I built some helper tooling to easily push mocked blocks onto hivemind to test various features without having to resync. Overall this saves bit of time but that's something you end up doing all the time when developing so that's quite usedful.

Work is done and can be seen here: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/620

Conclusion

And that's it ! I'm going to continue working on hivemind for the foreseeable future as there's a lot of work to be done (most of them being quick wins).


Sort:  

So excited.
Can't wait for the new communities

When I first saw the data inconstancy issue, I thought it was related to my owner fix. Glad to see it wasn't that(well not glad to see the bugs, but happy to know I wasn't the one to be causing bugs this time 😅).

Thanks for the update. I would like to know more about these business front ends. Is there a difference between them and the ones that charge a fee like cinetv? What other front ends charge a fee and what is the fee (%)?

Hi, it's up to each front end to charge what they feel like is fair. Each have some differences and you'll have to research them yourself as I'm not familiar about all the details for every front end. I tend to only use one (peakd)

Thank you so much for sharing. 😊

Wow very detailed report. Thanks for sharing boss

!WOC

Amazing work on Woc, @howo! kairke(2/8) is impressed by the energy and effort you've put into this post. Your contributions are truly appreciated.

This post is truly outstanding! @kairke wants to show their appreciation with a gift of 0.3 WGOLD. Keep doing what you're doing!

BTW! WGOLD is the token of the War of Clans ecosystem, you can use it to have discounts in all our games or stake it and earn rewards now!


Hey @howo happy new year!

It looks like the setRole / setTitle feature thing has removed my genuine mod role from some communities eg OCD and Pinmapple. Short of asking the community owner to add me back in, what's the solution please? I imagine many mods won't be happy they have suddenly lost their rights 😣 And does this apply to names given to subscribers? As part of moding Pinmapple I have noted abusers accordingly but I can't see those names now. I don't know if it's because I don't have mod rights, or whether they've all been removed. If so, then we definitely need that reversed... please 🙃

Also, did this change impact the community names? Some of the communities I follow is shown as hive-xxxxxx instead of the community name. And some of the community names have changed, like WorkLife community is shown as Product Design Live, and Pinmapple is shown as Haveyoubeenhere.

Thanks

Hi ! I'm sorry for the delay in the response, the change wasn't supposed to slip into production but some nodes independent nodes have rolled with the development branch already. I suggest switching to api.hive.blog or api.deathwing.me as an api node for the time being.

And does this apply to names given to subscribers? As part of moding Pinmapple I have noted abusers accordingly but I can't see those names now. I don't know if it's because I don't have mod rights, or whether they've all been removed. If so, then we definitely need that reversed... please 🙃

Everything will be back what you are used to don't worry 😅

Also, did this change impact the community names? Some of the communities I follow is shown as hive-xxxxxx instead of the community name. And some of the community names have changed, like WorkLife community is shown as Product Design Live, and Pinmapple is shown as Haveyoubeenhere.

It's basically the same issue. Which should also be fixed by switching nodes.

You may need to empty your cache too for the changes to take effect.