The Neopets Media Archive is a service that mirrors `images.neopets.com`
over time! Right now we're starting by just loading manifests, and
using them to replace the hacks we used for determining the Alt Style
PNG and SVG URLs; but with time, I want to load *all* customization
media files, to have our own secondary file source that isn't dependent
on Neopets to always be up.
Impress 2020 already caches manifest files, but this strategy is
different in two ways:
1. We're using the filesystem rather than a database column. (That is,
manifest data is kinda duplicated in the system right now!) This is
because I intend to go in a more file-y way long-term anyway, to
load more than just the manifests.
2. Impress 2020 guesses at the manifest URLs by pattern, and reloads
them on a regular basis. Instead, we use the modeling system: when
TNT changes the URL of a manifest by appending a new `?v=` query
string to it, this system will consider it a new URL, and will load
the new copy accordingly.
Fun fact, I actually have been prototyping some of this stuff in a side
project I'd named `impress-media-server`! It's a little Sinatra app
that indeed *does* save all the files needed for customization, and can
generate lightweight lil preview iframes and images pretty easily. I
had initially been planning this as a separate service, but after
thinking over the arch a bit, I think it'll go smoother to just give
the main app all the same access and awareness—and I wrote it all in
Ruby and plain HTML/JS/CSS, so it should be pretty easy to port over
bit-by-bit!
Anyway, only Alt Styles use this for now, but my motivation is to be
able to use more-correct asset URL logic to be able to finally swap
over wardrobe-2020's item search to impress.openneo.net's item search
API endpoint—which will get "Items You Own" searches working again, and
whittle down one of the last big things Impress 2020 can do that the
main app can't. Let's see how it goes!
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.
I've moved the support secret into the encrypted credentials file, and
moved the origin into a top-level custom config value in the
environment files, with different defaults per environment but still
the ability to override it. (I don't use this, but it feels polite to
not actually *demand* that people use port 4000, y'know?)
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!
This one is important, I didn't notice that this is a way of setting
attributes that won't be written to both tables! `name` will only be
written to the translation table (which crashes the save), and the
other fields would only be written to the main table. Fixed! (I don't
like the super-dynamic this code was written before, anyway.)
Missed this at first - now that the `name` field is just a normal field
and is always English, it's now an error to provide the locale to it as
a parameter, like we used to for the translated version of the field!
Like with Species, Color, and Zone, we're moving the translation data
directly onto the model, and just using English. This will simplify
some of our queries a lot (way fewer joins!), and it's what Neopets
does now anyway, and I have a secret hope that removing the complexity
along the codepath for `item.name` might help speed up large item lists
if we're lucky?? 🤞
Anyway, this is the first step, performing the migration to copy the
data onto the `items` table, making sure to keep them in sync for the
2020 app for now!
Tbh I'm not sure `special_color` is actually used anywhere? It used to
be how we decide what to show in the previewer on the item page, but
that's been replaced with the 2020 logic, so idk…
But in any case, I noticed that the description doesn't match the
pattern we have, so here's the fix!
I looked at this and was like. "ok literally what is
`nonstandard_colors` trying to do"
reading it again now, I'm realizing the idea is that it probably runs
two queries: one to get nonstandard colors, then depends on
ActiveRecord to implicitly convert the relation to an array and then to
IDs for the second query? Instead of doing a join??
Idk, it's unused, so trash it!
This used to be the behavior, and the site has plenty of graceful
fallbacks for it, I just forgot this one when doing Rails upgrades!
Note that the impress-2020 stuff is *not* as graceful about this, so
the wardrobe page won't show the pet until the color is in the DB. Ah
well, still an improvement!
Okay right, the wardrobe-2020 app treats `state` as a bit of an
override thing, and `pose` is the main canonical field for how a pet
looks. We were missing a few pieces here:
1. After loading a pet, we weren't including the `pose` field in the
initial query string for the wardrobe URL, but we _were_ including
the `state` field, so the outfit would get set up with a conflicting
pet state ID vs pose.
2. When saving an outfit, we weren't taking the `state` field into
account at all. This could cause the saved outfit to not quite match
how it actually looked in-app, because the default pet state for
that species/color/pose trio could be different; and regardless, the
outfit state would come back with `appearanceId` set to `null`,
which wouldn't match the local outfit state, which would trigger an
infinite loop.
Here, we complete the round-trip of the `state` field, from pet loading
to outfit saving to the outfit data that comes back after saving!
Now that DTI 2020 has been deployed without references to the
translations tables, we can stop keeping them in sync!
Next step is to drop the tables and be done with them altogether! (I
have a backup of the public data for this too, as does this repo!)
Two motivations here:
1. Unconverted pets should no longer exist on Neopets.com (and we
especially don't expect new ones), so this logic helps no one.
2. The Baby Pteri keeps getting overridden to be marked as Unconverted
because it has only one asset, which is incorrect.
A decent heuristic for a bygone era, goodbye!
Yay it works(*)! But two major missing pieces:
- Outfit saving doesn't persist it at all
- Item compatibility is unaffected: items will still appear in search
and in the preview, even when they don't fit anymore.
To help with space, I'm just showing the word "Nostalgic" (or "???" if
it's from a series we don't recognize, this is hardcoded by ID), and
trusting that from context it will be obvious that it's the "Nostalgic
Faerie" case or whatever. (Moreover, in both the button and the select
we're omitting the species name, by similar reasoning!)
Note that this _still_ doesn't actually apply the style to the outfit
whatsoever; this is all just local state as we're continuing to play
with UI concepts. Actually applying it is probably next though! (Though
there's a couple more UI things I want to do, like some affordances to
clarify that a Style is applied and that Expression changes won't work.)
Something in the Rails loader doesn't like that I have both a gem and
a lib folder named `RocketAMF`, I think? It'll often work for the first
pet load request, then on subsequent ones say `Envelope` is not
defined, I'm guessing because it scrapped the gem's module in favor of
mine?
Idk, let's just simplify all this by making our own module. I feel like
this old lib could use an overhaul and simplification anyway, but this
will do for now!
Like in 0dca538, this is preliminary work for being able to drop the
`zone_translations` table! We're copying the field over first, to be
able to migrate DTI 2020 safely before dropping anything.
Non-English languages haven't been supported on Neopets for a while, so
I'd like to remove this extra cross-cutting complexity, especially
since it's now inconsistent with the real site anyway!
The main motivation is that I'd like to do this for items too, because
I have a hunch that all the complexity of `globalize` to read
`item.name` is part of what's making large user lists so slow to
render: lots of little objects getting created down the stack, and
needing to be garbage-collected later.
I'm not sure that's why! But I figure removing this complexity is a
simplicity win anyway, so let's do it!
Note that this doesn't *finish* the migration, it just starts it! The
`Species::Translation` and `Color::Translation` models still exist, and
still have their data, and not all references to them are scrubbed yet.
I especially don't want to delete the backing tables until both DTI and
DTI 2020 are ready for it!
So this change will someday be paired with another change to actually
drop the tables - after backing up the data for future records just in
case, of course!
If your first wanted list was created before your first owned list,
then `false` would come before `true` in the keys of
`current_user_lists`.
I both fixed this to be more consistent at the model level, because who
likes unpredictable behavior? But also downstream at the view I
hardcoded that true should come before false, because that's a UI
concern that I want to be encoded in the view regardless of what's
upstream.
It was a bit tricky to figure out the right API for this, since I'm
looking ahead to the possibility of splitting these across multiple
pages with more detail, like we do in DTI 2020.
What I like about this API is that the caller gets to apply, or not
apply, whatever scopes they want to the underlying hanger set (like
`includes` or `order`), without violating the usual syntax by e.g.
passing it as a parameter to a method.
Ahh I see, the way we got away with not having a `trading` scope before
was a weird metaprogramming `{owned/wanted}_trading` situation. Okay,
let's trash that in favor of our new stuff! And that helps us bulk the
queries too which is nice.
In impress-2020, we do a big slow query to figure out which users have
been active in trades recently. Now, we cache that timestamp on the
User model.
This won't have any immediate effect; it's to clear the way for Classic
DTI to receive the better trade ratios feature people like from 2020.
I also added some unit testing infra because I finally wanted it! for
all the ways you can trigger this timestamp lol
Note too that this is a bit of an unusually complex migration, but my
hope is that the batching and query structure and such helps it run
surprisingly fast! 🤞
So this was a slightly wrong error message, what was happening was:
1. Trying to load the image hash for this pet, by looking them up at
https://pets.neopets.com/cpn/PET_NAME/1/1.png and seeing what URL it
redirects to.
2. But pets.neopets.com was rejecting our User-Agent string, which
would've been just "Ruby", since we hadn't set it otherwise. I guess
that's an explicitly banned string?
I also found that the kind of more-helpful User-Agent string I like to
write was being rejected, and I could only get it to accept something
very simple? So that's what we're using now, I guess!!
Building toward replacing more of the 2020 data sources! I think this is
an endpoint that benefits from bulk loading, esp with the way the item
page previews work. I also like taking the concept of "canonical" out of
the GQL interface, and instead just loading for each of the 50 species
and letting the client decide. (And then it can fast-swap between them!)
The models folder is a bit confusingly large, these are more mixins and
kinda clutter it. Push them off into `lib`, I think!
I think they used to be in models mainly because Rails used to handle
`lib` differently with autoloading, and it made for a worse dev
experience. Now it's all the same, though!
We haven't used the mall spider in this app in forever (I guess we even
deleted the code at some point?), but there was some vestigial stuff
left. Goodbye!
Just moving more stuff over! I modernized Item's `as_json` method while
I was here. (Note that I removed the NC/own/want fields, because I
think the only other place this method is still called from is the
quick-add feature on the closet lists page, and I think it doesn't use
these fields to do anything: updating the page is basically a full-page
reload, done sneakily.)
There was a time when I used an old proxy server to try to fix mixed
content issues, and I eventually removed it but never took the tendrils
out from the code.
We probably _should_ figure out how to secure these URLs! But until
then, we may as well simplify the code.
I changed my mind again! At first I wanted to make the special case
clearer, and to be able to more strongly assert that the species is
not null. But now I'm like… eh, there's code that references `body.id`
that has no reason _not_ to work in the all-bodies case… let's just
keep the types more consistent, I think.
This is more similar to what impress-2020 does, I was working on the
wardrobe-2020 code and took some inspiration!
The body has an ID and a species, or is the string "all".
Preparing a better endpoint for wardrobe-2020 to use! I deleted the
now-unused swf_assets#index endpoint, and replaced it with an
"appearances" concept that isn't exactly reflected in the database
models but is a _lot_ easier for clients to work with imo.
Note that this was a big part of the motivation for the recent
`manifest_url` work—in this draft, I'm probably gonna have the client
request the manifest, rather than use impress-2020's trick of caching
it in the database! There's a bit of a perf penalty, but I think that's
a simpler starting point, and I have a hunch I'll be able to make up
the perf difference once we have the impress-media-server managing more
of these responsibilities.
Ok so, impress-2020 guesses the manifest URL every time based on common
URL patterns. But the right way to do this is to read it from the
modeling data! But also, we don't have a great way to get the modeling
data directly. (Though as I write this, I guess we do have that
auto-modeling trick we use in the DTI 2020 codebase, I wonder if that
could work for this too?)
So anyway, in this change, we update the modeling code to save the
manifest URL, and also the migration includes a big block that attempts
to run impress-2020's manifest-guessing logic for every asset and save
the result!
It's uhh. Not fast. It runs at about 1 asset per second (a lot of these
aren't cache hits), and sometimes stalls out. And we have >600k assets,
so the estimated wall time is uhh. Seven days?
I think there's something we could do here around like, concurrent
execution? Though tbqh with the nature of the slowness being seemingly
about hitting the slow underlying images.neopets.com server, I don't
actually have a lot of faith that concurrency would actually be faster?
I also think it could be sensible to like… extract this from the
migration, and run it as a script to infer missing manifest URLs. That
would be easier to run in chunks and resume if something goes wrong.
Cuz like, I think my reasoning here was that backfilling this data was
part of the migration process… but the thing is, this migration can't
reliably get a manifest for everything (both cuz it depends on an
external service and cuz not everything has one), so it's a perfectly
valid migration to just leave the column as null for all the rows to
start, and fill this in later. I wish I'd written it like that!
But anyway, I'm just running this for now, and taking a break for the
night. Maybe later I'll come around and extract this into a separate
task to just try this on all assets missing manifests instead!
Ahh, I guess I missed these, I think they're maybe not actually used in
the app is why? cuz they're all default values that are overridden at
the actual call sites. But I ran into it when running `Pet.load` in the
console, and yeah let's just fix 'em up!
This hasn't worked for a while, and I don't know an API off the top of
my head to drop in for it. Let's just delete it for now, and revisit it
later if we want to!
A really really simple change! It works on the item page, the item
index page, item search, the homepage, and the item lists page.
The main reason I avoided this for so long (even before modernizing the
Rails app) was that the ElasticSearch stuff felt like it made it messy?
But now it's pretty simple, and it works in search already cuz I did
that when I implemented item search, so, nice!
This came in a few parts!
1. Add meta tags to let us know we're logged in.
2. Install React Query, which has the data-loading sensibilities I like
about Apollo without the GraphQL that has honestly been a drag.
3. Replace the outfit-loading and outfit-saving calls with API calls to
the main app.
4. Update the main app's API calls to use our more flexible data
constructs like "pose".
Would've loved to do this more incrementally, but it's hard to! You
can't split out outfit-loading and outfit-saving, or auth from any of
that, or the state gets all out-of-sorts.
Still, this is a good nugget we've pulled out all-in-all, and one that
people have been asking for! Can maybe look to logged-in item search
soon too, for own/want data?
I used the new profiler tools on this page, and noticed a lot of
allocations in the Globalize library, which we use for translating
database records. I realized that we were loading all of the fields of
not just all of the items on the page, but all of their translation
records in all locales! We used to scrape data for lots of languages, so
that can be quite a lot!
Unfortunately, Rails's `includes` method to efficiently preload related
records always loads all fields, and simply can't be overridden.
So, in this change we write manual preloading code, to identify the
records we need, load them in big bulk queries, and assign them back to
the appropriate associations. Basically just what `includes` does, but
written out a bit more, to give us the chance to specify SELECT and
WHERE clauses!
We used to do this for weird clever caching tricks that I don't think
were actually very effective. We stopped using this a few months ago,
and now I'm finally cleaning up this supporting code!
Huh, Arel can *sometimes* handle just having an attribute stand in as
"X is true" in a condition, but sometimes gets upset about it. I guess
this changed in Rails since we recently wrote this?
Specifically, item search would crash on "is:nc" (but *not* "is:np"),
saying:
```
undefined method `fetch_attribute' for #<struct Arel::Attributes::Attribute relation=#<Arel::Table:0x0000000109a67110 @name="items", @klass=Item(…), @type_caster=#<ActiveRecord::TypeCaster::Map:0x0000000109a66e90 @klass=Item(…)>, @table_alias=nil>, name="is_manually_nc">
```
The traceback was a bit misleading (it happened at the part where we
merge all the scopes together), but that hinted to me that it working
with an attribute in a place where it expected a conditional. So I
converted the attribute in the `is_nc` scope to a conditional, and made
the matching change in `is_np`, and that fixed it! Ok phew!
The URL anchors were getting like. double-encoded? The `closet[]` part
was encoding as `closet%255B%255D`. Maybe a thing in Rails, where you
need to mark them `html_safe` to insert them in a URL like that?
Well anyway, those URLs are redundant now, I just have it link straight
to the same outfit page as the big link!
Idk if this used to be different or what, but it looks like the current
behavior is: if you delete a closet list, it'll leave the hangers
present, but Classic DTI would not show them anywhere; but Impress 2020
(until recently) would crash about it.
Now, we use `dependent: :destroy` to delete the hangers when you delete
the list (which I think makes sense, and is different than what I
decided in the past but that's ok, and is what the current behavior
*looks* like to people!), and we add a migration that deletes orphaned
hangers.
The migration also outputs the deleted hangers as JSON, for us to hold
onto in case we made a mistake! I'm also backing up the database in
advance of running this migration, just in case we gotta roll back HARD!
Okay, this is a process that idk if it's even been working for a while anyway, I don't think Neopets translates item names anymore?
And it's crashing when I try to model stuff now, so like. yeah ok I'm fine with just skipping this, it's a shame to lose out on potential data going forward but *I think there just isn't data to get anyway*
I think we used this for both conversion to image, and also for CORS stuff when rendering Flash-based previews… let's trash it, I don't want to be growing our hard drive with files I don't think we use anymore!
If I'm wrong and it turns out we do use them for something, then like. hey I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, and it's very recoverable operation.
Just find_all_by's that I never cleaned up
Oddly enough, I still got a "neopets seems down" message out of this, idk if that's an actual bug or just sluggishness rn
Okay, right, if we're just using www.neopets.com (like we are for now), it fails on http://www.neopets.com because it triggers a redirect that we don't follow.
So here I 1) change the default to HTTPS, and 2) add HTTPS support to our little RocketAMF lib
Nice, just turning it on seemed to do all we need for now!
Fair questions to be asked about like, should you be able to look up by username instead of email? But like idk, this feels simpler *and* more solid, to give you feedback on if it's the right email.
Hey nice!!
Note that I removed an account delete button from the settings page. You can still send a DELETE request to the right endpoint to do it, but it's not gonna delete all the associated records, and I wanna think a bit about how to handle that better before exposing that button.
I noticed this was stopping changing your default list visibility bc contact neopets connection can't be empty, so I fixed that!
And then I just decided to scroll through every `belongs_to` relationship and add optional to the ones that jumped out at me lol
A lot of rough edges here (e.g. no styles on the flash messages), but it's working and that's good!!
I tested this by temporarily switching to the production database and logging in as matchu!
Still missing a lot of big features too, like registration, password resets, settings page, etc.
