It is already a year and a half since the site opened!
Its youth was accompanied by an intense period of optimization and bug fixes. Many new features have been added, always with the aim of making the site more pleasant for you.

Even if other new features will appear in the future, the site is now entering a phase of maturity that requires me to do a lot of work: rethink and rewrite large parts of the code. This is necessary for two reasons: to have a fast site, and to ensure that I can maintain it.

First of all, the performance issue remains essential: there are sometimes many of you and the server must generate several hundred pages per second during peak hours. The slightest slowdown results in a stacking of requests, then a server crash and the errors you may have already encountered. I need to optimize the calculations and queries to make it lighter.

Above all, the site must be able to be maintained over a long period of time. It is based on a forum engine, which itself depends on a computer language and libraries. These will be updated and evolve over time. It will break things, which will involve me, constantly, to return to the code, to modify what must be, in short, to make the site evolve with the times. If I didn't do it, the website would slowly become impossible to evolve and condemned to be replaced or shut down.

This requires me to (i) have a clean and well-written code and (ii) not have too many. I always have to decide between my desire to create a lot of new features, and a certain control over the volume of code that I will have to maintain in the future.

Conclusion: as I have already been able to announce, I am stopping the development of new features for the moment, and concentrating now on rewriting many parts of the site. It consists of several hundred thousand lines of code. When it was rebuilt, I did not always know where I was going, which would be useful or not, and some parts can now be greatly simplified. This task should take several months.

If all goes well, you will see absolutely no difference on a daily basis, except that the site will gradually be faster and more responsive.

More likely, I will break things (I already have, sorry!), and you will encounter bugs that I invite you to report to me without delay. Obviously, the site will remain open for the duration of the work!

This topic will be an opportunity for me to keep you informed of the progress, and the features that I may need to remove or modify, temporarily or not! Have a little thought for me.

This work has been underway since this Sunday.

The Marauder's map is temporarily stopped, while it is rewritten, because it explained a large part of the slowdowns. She will come back as beautiful as she left you in a few weeks.

However, I start by rewriting essential functions that concern your profiles. This is one of the most difficult parts (as they affect all other parts of the site), so be prepared for bugs and failures

The information displayed in the ID cards may change at the margin. The address book will be completely redone (and significantly modified).

After several days of work, all the codes relating to profiles, distribution, year management, houses... have been rewritten. This was not done without a few bugs, but the result was well worth it since it slowed down the most popular pages (forums, topics, and profiles).

The page generation speed has been greatly accelerated. For those with good connections, this must be largely felt

My work will continue on the few pages of the site that are slower than the others

I also wanted to do it for a very long time: the address book is now completely redone. The previous version was very heavy (especially because all users were on the same page) and quite complex to manage. I hope you will like this new version There is no longer a "real time" filter, but the whole thing seems to me to be much more responsive.

I remind you to send me your bug reports by owl if you encounter any!

The search engine has been changed.

While research used to take several seconds to, sometimes, several minutes (!), and was consuming many resources, it is now a matter of a fraction of a second!

Unfortunate (and transitory) consequence: the pages allowing you to see your RP and those of your classmates are temporarily disabled, until a solution is found to make them work with this new system. It is also possible that I may have to shut down (tomorrow or the day after tomorrow evening) the server, a short hour, to perform a particularly heavy request on the database.

In the next few days, I will also add some small options in the search page.

Thank you for supporting the bugs and slowdowns of the last few days; as you may see, the site is very much accelerated, so it's well worth it!

The address book now displays all members, including those who have not yet posted a message, as soon as they are sorted

Profiles have also been greatly accelerated, especially for users who have a lot of messages.

In addition, the points, which were broken for a few days, has been repaired. Sorry!

I proudly announce that the Marauder's map is back!

Edit: on the phone, you can now zoom and see the names.