Okay, surprise, the bug was unrelated to Camo config (though I'm glad I cleaned
that up anyway :P). We now, at a low level, serve a placeholder image for item
thumbnail URL if, for some reason, we don't have a good thumbnail URL on hand.
One time I did a thing called Camo to try to get our HTTPS pages working,
because images.neopets.com not supporting HTTPS is crazy >_> I've diasbled it
these days, but it had debug behavior to append `?NO_CAMO_CONFIG` to all
proxied URLs when Camo was not configured.
When an item had no thumbnail URL for some reason (mall spider needs fixing,
maybe?), this caused Rails to try to map that empty string into the path
`/assets/?NO_CAMO_CONFIG`, which made Rails complain that it was trying to load
an asset that doesn't exist. This is probably a sign that using `image_tag` for
URLs that *should* be external URLs, but aren't strictly *guaranteed* to be, is
unwise - but, for now, I've just disabled that behavior. I hope Rails has a
better escape hatch for the empty string :P
Ooh, this one was nasty, and only one symptom ever got noticed:
1. Pick "Occupies: Collar" in Advanced Search.
You get the text query "occupies:necklace".
2. And, if you try to do "occupies:collar" even in text-based search,
you *also* get the results from "occupies:necklace" mixed in with
the correct results.
The trick is that, in Spanish, zone 24 (necklace) is named "collar",
as is zone 27 (collar). Not sure what to do for Spanish, but this
issue also leaked into English: we really don't want English to return
results for Spanish-named zones.
This is a tricky problem, though, because it'd be nice for es users
to be able to type "occupies:hat". I think we'll have to do the quick
fix for now, though, and just only interpret the query in the current
locale.
Turns out ~22% of our users initially land on a trade list.
We like to keep the campaign off the pages where space is at a
premium, so we try to whitelist it to major landing pages in order
to avoid accidentally creating a bad experience on some page :)
I've been doing this manually via email for a long time,
since building new stuff in the logged-in world was a pain in the old env.
But now here we are! Finally, finally :)
