Just wanted to showcase an amazing stream/vod I am watching, it was an insane ride with many unexpected twist and turns but more importantly it was a unique slice of NoPixel. DasMEHDI's recent permathon which I am still currently watching involves him making 'one life' characters and if they die or go to jail they are deleted. There are rules to allow extra lives to be given for 100+ subs etc but that's the essence.

tl;dr watch this vod! :P

I tuned in expecting some luls and we got that with the first character: (click character names to go to the VODs of them)
Karen, a coupon obsessed housewife who wanted a higher status in life, hell bent on getting black friday discounts.
Followed by Reema the "Whore Lord", Ramee's older sister who was instantly brought into the fold and got to experience an intense snapshot of how the CG operate: bank jobs, shoot outs, inner gang discussions and SBS galore.
Then Mervin (continues in this vod) a potential predator turned PI turned #1 assasination target in the city, whose story involves other people’s permas and major implications.
There may be another character as I haven't actually finished the VOD yet :P

While these stories by themselves are worth watching what was really unique was that it was a glimpse of the city we never really see from one streamers pov. With each character that was created we got to see another side of the server, showcasing different roleplayers and the groups that control different areas. Mehdi was traveling around the city and it felt alive in a way I hadn't really appreciated nor even seen in all my years watching GTA RP. From gang bangers, bank robbers, tarot card readers, civilians, petty criminals and totally not a gang at all HoA to the...

I was investigating a potential issue with notifications and realised that things really didn't update as often as they could. When I first wrote everything it was with the intention of causing as little load on the server as possible as we were hosted for free. As we now have our own server to go nuts with I unshackled a lot of the backend and let it go wild.

The stream list now updates every minutes and we now pull clips from Twitch nearly constantly. The clips views on the site are still cached for 10 minutes but I will probably reduce that in the coming days.

Also if you missed it we have a new user scripts page now which adds HasRoot history buttons to Twitch VODs and Clips so you can go straight from the moment you are watching to other streamers points of view!

Enjoy!

ScottishRambler.

So today I pushed a new update I have been working on for the past week, it was motivated by Action asking if there was any way to search a specific streamers clips. It seemed like something we should offer especially now that we have our own server to go wild with. While working on it I ended up fixing a ton of other bugs and finally got around to making the VOD script available. I also spent a LOT of time experimenting with indexes. The new changes meant I really had to make sure things were going to scale and once again they now scale better than ever! lol. I wont ramble too much and will just get into the changes as there are a few to cover.

Clips - The new changes

• You can now filter by streamer and we have a new UI for filtering the data.
• You can now check clips from the last hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, and 12 hours allowing you to catch up on just the newest clips that you missed.
• Rewrote the infinite scroll for the clips page, should be much better now and increased the amount pulled per request and shown per chunk.

User Scripts

A while ago someone requested the functionality to open clips from our site in a new tab using ctrl click or middle mouse button rather than using our built in clip viewer. I thought it was a good idea but I was a little bit hesitant because it removed the 'view from other perspectives' functionality. So I made a script to replicate this when you opened clips from our site however I did not want it to inject it on every clip a user went to as it felt rude :p Some people did want that functionality so I had initially just made a variable that you could edit to toggle if it would but it was only meant to be a short term solution.

I had planned to make a page on the site where you...

So today was the day we finally moved from the old server to the new one, it was partially planned but a little bit unexpected at the same time. I had been intending to do it yesterday but put it off partly because I was busy and partly because I was anxious that the switch over would not go smoothly. I had done some testing of the new server but until traffic actually hit it I wouldn't know how well it would handle the load. I had planned to make a post before I did the change over and some other small last minute data pulls but all that really needed done at this point was to update the DNS. I was debating when I would do the change over today or if I would put it off yet again but at 1:30 BST I received and alert that the old server had went down. Our old host had assumed I had already done the changeover and had taken it down. I scrambled and pointed the DNS to the new server and crossed my fingers hoping that nothing would go wrong.

It seems however my fears were misplaced and the new server handled the traffic fine and everything seems to be running better than ever. I have been working on the site the past week and have made several performance improvements. I optimised the database and made the site use memcached for data cacheing as well as setting up OP Cache to improve the performance of the compiled templates/the site pages. We also now proxy all of our traffic through cloudflare which should help with performance but will also be another layer of protection against DDOS attacks in future.

So we are now at our new home and the change will allow me to offer a lot more features for the site. Action messaged me last night about adding more features for streamer clips and that is one of the first things on the list, also searching for streamer profiles by name, clips voting (prolly a little later) and a userscript to add a hasroot button to Twitch VODs which pulls data and takes you to the history of the current timestamp. I have had the userscript for...

So this is a semi brief update to let you know the progress on moving to the new server.

I spent the weekend looking over potential hosts and settled on Kimsufi. They offer low cost dedicated servers on the OVH network which is the network our current host are on. During the massive DDOS attacks they stepped in and helped mitigate a lot of the traffic before it hit our box. Unfortunately (for me :P) Mopman has been busy preparing for his fiancee flying in today so it was left to me to set up the box with him fielding questions when he had time. I got there in the end though (20 hours or so) and the new server is running everything that we need. It wasn't just a case of moving over the website and database, I had to set up the entire server from scratch which is not something I have done for awhile (10+ years? at least on a production server). Definitely learnt a lot and will have plenty more to learn in the future running it.

You may have noticed some downtime today on the live site while I was doing the final database backup before we switch to the new server. That was the final step to bring the new server up to date with the live site. At this point we could immediately switch to the new server but I will be holding off for a few days. This time will allow me to do some improvements to the backend that are more difficult to do when the site is live will also allow for more testing to be done to make sure the final switch over goes smoothly.

I will post an update before we do plan to flip the switch just incase there are initial teething issues. I hope you will all bear with us through these changes but I think it will be for the best. I have a list of new things I plan to add (how about comments for blogs for one? Voting on clips is coming soon™ too) once we get through the server change.

Hope you are all enjoying the site and the RP.

Sean - ScottishRambler.