I started writing this up, then sent a preview to a friend, and he was
like "oh cool, but also this is not correct?"
I didn't realize Dyeworks has limited-time support to be *able* to dye
certain items. Hey, glad we're writing this guide for people like me,
then! lol
I wonder if we can lean on Owls for this. It seems like they already
list "Permanent Dyeworks" for some items, I wonder if they say
something special for active limited-edition Dyeworks items!
Oh right, it's possible for `Item#pb?` to return true, but
`Item#pb_color` to return `nil`, if the item has the paintbrush item
description but we can't find a color whose name matches the item name.
This would be expected if a new color were added to Neopets, and PB
items for it were modeled by the community, but we hadn't manually
added the color to the database yet.
Previously, the Item Getting Guide would crash in this scenario. Now,
it correctly handles the possibility of a `nil` value for `pb_color`,
and shows some placeholder info.
To test this, I temporarily edited some item names to not contain the
color name anymore (e.g. "P-rate Elephante Shirt and Vest"), then
loaded the guide and made changes until it no longer crashed.
This doesn't matter a ton in production, where we already have most of
our manifests loaded! But it matters a lot on my relatively-fresh
development instance, at times like now when images.neopets.com is slow
to respond. A single item search was taking minutes before this change
(5 seconds of timeout per asset for 30 items!), but now takes a few
seconds the first time, as it should!
Now, for colors like Mutant or Magma where there's no paint brush
image to show, we use a sample pet image instead, to help it have equal
visual weight and clarity as the cases with the paint brushes.
We do some cleverness in here to make sure to always show the relevant
species, if possible!
Ohh yeah, this helps communicate the process much better, especially
for what the Shops/Trades links mean.
I think I'm gonna also go get the paint brush thumbnail images and add
them to the database too, to help better communicate that this is a
paint brush item situation.
This'll affect the recommended acquisition method by a lot!
NC Mall info like current price isn't surfaced anywhere else in the app
right now. It'd probably be good to add to the item page, and maybe
some other places too!
TNT requested that we figure out ways to connect the dots between
people's intentions on DTI to their purchases in the NC Mall.
But rather than just slam ad links everywhere, our plan is to design an
actually useful feature about it: the "Item Getting Guide". It'll break
down items by how you can actually get them (NP economy, NC Mall,
retired NC, Dyeworks, etc), and we're planning some cute actions you
can take, like shortcuts for getting them onto trade wishlists or into
your NC Mall cart.
This is just a little demo version of the page, just breaking down
items specified in the URL into NC/NP/PB! Later we'll do more granular
breakdown than this, with more info and actions—and we'll also like,
link to it at all, which isn't the case yet! (The main way we expect
people to get here is by a "Get these items" button we'll add to the
outfit editor, but there might be other paths, too.)
Simple enough to start! If `shadowbanned: true` gets set on a user,
then we show a 404 instead of the actual list page, *unless* you're
logged in as that user, or coming from a known IP of that user.
This isn't a very strong mechanism! Just something to hopefully
increase the costs of messing around with list spam.
Not getting a lot of takers, I think it was wise to start small just in
case, but there doesn't seem to be a floodgate problem, so let's remove
the limitations and increase the ask! (But still not a full launch yet,
because I want to funnel people through the feedback process first.)
Yay, we got the API endpoint for this! The `linkage` scope is the key.
Rather than pulling back the specific fallback behavior we had wrote
for usernames before, which was slightly different and involved
appending `neopass` in there too (e.g. `matchu-neopass-1234`), I
figured let's just use a lot of the same logic, and just use the
preferred name as the base name. (I figure the `neopass` suffix isn't
that useful anyway, `matchu-1234` kinda looks better tbh! And it's all
fallback stuff that I expect serious users to replace, anyway.)
Ahh okay tricky lil thing: if you show the settings page with a partial
change to `AuthUser` that didn't get saved, it can throw off the state
of some stuff. For example, if you don't have a password yet, then
enter a new password but leave the confirmation box blank, then you'll
correctly see "Password confirmation can't be blank", but you'll *also*
then be prompted for your "Current password", even though you don't
have one yet, because `@auth_user.uses_password?` is true now.
In this change, we extend the Settings form to use two copies of the
`AuthUser`. One is the copy with changes on it, and the other is the
"persisted" copy, which we check for parts of the UI that care about
what's actually saved, vs form state.
Ah okay, if you leave the password field blank but don't have one set,
our simple `update` method gets annoyed that you left it blank.
In this change, we simplify the model API by just overriding
`update_with_password` with our own special behavior for the
no-password case.
Simplified this a bit into a helper. It's kinda odd to me, but
convenient for this moment, that Rails allows views to read `params`! I
guess it's for escape hatches exactly like this! lol
including validation logic to make sure it's not already connected to
another one!
The `intent` param on the NeoPass form is part of the key! Thanks
OmniAuth for making it easy to pass that data through!
I'm getting ready to add handling for "what if you don't *have* a
current password*??", so it seems like the right way to do that is to
just eject the controller and start customizing!
Ahh right, in development `User` and `AuthUser` will have the same ID,
but that got messed up early on for us in production DTI 😅
Here, we switch the form to reference the `User` instead of the
`AuthUser` (to get the ID right), then we also change how we compare
the IDs, because `User#to_param` appends extra text onto the ID after
the number!
Whew, exciting! Still done nothing against the live NeoPass server, but
we've got this fully working with the development server, it seems!
Wowie!!
This is all still hidden behind secret flags, so it's fine to deploy
live. (And it's not actually a problem if someone gets past to the
endpoints behind it, because we haven't actually set up real
credentials for our NeoPass client yet, so authentication will fail!)
Okay time to lie down lol.
Okay, `sub` seems to be a pretty standard place for user identifiers.
Let's start with that assumption! I override the `oauth2-mock-server`'s
default of `johndoe` with `theneopetsteam`, just to be cute :3
In this change, we wire up a new NeoPass OAuth2 strategy for OmniAuth,
and hook up the "Log in with NeoPass" button to use it!
The authentication currently fails with `invalid_credentials`, and
shows the `owo` response we hardcoded into the NeoPass server's token
response. We need to finally follow up on the little `TODO` written in
there!
If you pass `?neopass=1` (or a secret value in production), you can see
the "Log in with NeoPass" button, which currently takes you to
OmniAuth's "developer" login page, where you can specify a name and
email and be redirected back. (All placeholder UI!)
We're gonna strip the whole developer strategy out pretty fast and
replace it with one that uses our NeoPass test server. This is just me
checking my understanding of the wiring!
The modeling code is slow! I think in production it's being cached, and
tbh I though I had development mode caching turned on over here, but
it's quite evidently _not_ doing it if so, so. Okay! Skip for now.
This `.gif` format is used in the items list "export to petpage"
feature, as the image URL for items whose URLs are known to contain
blocked words that prevent them from being used in petpages.
But when doing some Rails upgrade long ago, we didn't notice the new
security feature that blocks redirects to other sites without a special
flag being set. It was triggering 500 errors, oops.
Now, we set the flag!
According to our GlitchTip error tracker, every time we deploy, a
couple instances of `Async::Stop` and `Async::Container::Terminate`
come in, presumably because:
1. systemd sends a STOP signal to the `falcon host` process.
2. `falcon host` gives the in-progress requests some time to finish up
3. Sometimes some requests take too long, and so something happens.
(either a timer in Falcon or a KILL signal from systemd, not sure!)
that leads the ongoing requests to finally be terminated by raising
an `Async::Stop` or `Async::Container::Terminate`. (I'm not sure
when each happens, and maybe they happen at different points in the
process? Maybe one happens for the actual long-running ones, vs the
other happens if more requests come in during the meantime but get
caught in the spin-down process?)
4. Rails bubbles up the errors, our Sentry library notices them and
sends them to GlitchTip, the user presumably receives the generic
500 error, and the app can finally close down gracefully.
It's hard for me to validate that this is *exactly* what's happening
here or that my mitigation makes sense, but my logic here is basically,
if these exceptions are bubbling up as "uncaught exceptions" and
spamming up our error log, then the best solution would be to catch
them!
So in this change, we add an error handler for these two error classes,
which hopefully will 1) give users a better experience when this
happens, and 2) no longer send these errors to our logging 🤞❗️
That strange phenomenon where the best way to get a noisy bug out of
your logs is to fix it lmao
I don't think people see this very often visually, but it's showing up
in our error logging! The Rails API changed here long ago and we didn't
notice: to render public files, we should use the `file` argument
instead of `template`.
Yay, we finally added it, the part where we include the appearance data
for the items based on both the species/color and the alt style! Now,
switching to Faerie Acara correctly filters the search only to items
that would fit (I think literally just only body_id=0 items right now,
but we're not banking on that!)
Previously, the query wouldn't fill into the search box or page title
if e.g. parsing had failed. Now it does!
I'm not sure why the rescue strategy we previously had here doesn't
work anymore (I'm sure it must've in the past sometime?), but this is
simpler anyway, let's go!
For now, I'm doing it with a secret feature flag, since I want to be
committing but it isn't all quite working yet!
Search works right, and the appearance data is getting returned, but I
don't have the Apollo Cache integrations yet, which we rely on more
than I remembered!
Also, alt styles will crash it for now!
Adding new functionality to the item search JSON endpoint, and adding
an adapter layer to match the GQL format!
Hopefully this will be pretty drop-in-able, we'll see!
The alt styles controller is the one place we use this right now, but
I'm planning to generalize this to loading appearances during item
search, too!
I also add more `only` fields to the alt styles `as_json` call, because
idk it feels like good practice to both 1) say what we need in this
endpoint, rather than rely on default behavior upstream, and 2) to
avoid leaking fields we didn't realize were on there. (And also to
preserve bandwidth, too!)
I built this API endpoint in anticipation of a change I never actually
made! I'll just remove it for now, leaning toward cleanuppery over
holding onto something I'm not sure about.
I'm gonna also use this for a task to try to warm up *all* the
manifests in the database! But to start, just a simple one, to prepare
the alt styles page quickly on first run. (This doesn't really matter
in production now that I've already visited the page once, but it helps
when resetting things in dev, and I think more it's about establishing
the pattern!)
Preparing to finally move wardrobe-2020's item search to use the main
app's API endpoints instead!
One blocker I forgot about here: Impress 2020 has actual support for
knowing an item's true appearance, like by reading the manifest and
stuff, that we haven't really ported over. I feel like maybe I should
pause and work on the changes to manifest-archiving that I'd been
planning anyway? I'll think about it.
Okay, so I still don't know why rendering is just so slow (though
migrating away from item translations did help!), but I can at least
cache entire closet lists as a basic measure.
That way, the first user to see the latest version of a closet list
will still need just as much time to load it… but *only* the ones that
have changed since last time (rather than always the full page), and
then subsequent users get to reuse it too!
Should help a lot for high-traffic lists, which incidentally are likely
to be the big ones belonging to highly active traders!
One big change we needed to make was to extract the `user-owns` and
`user-wants` classes (which we use for trade matches for *the user
viewing the list right now*) out of the cached HTML, and apply them
after with Javascript instead. I always dislike moving stuff to JS, but
the wins here seem. truly very very good, all things considered!
