Alicornutopia

Huh. It seems to think that your email isn't unique. Do you maybe not have one attached to your account? We started requiring them a bit ago, I think, but maybe haven't handled the case "created an account before that was necessary" properly.

If that's not it, I'll investigate in a bit.

Ooh. That could well be it.

ETA: Sure was! <3

Moriwen wrote:Trying to turn off the "notify when a favorite author makes a new post" option gives me a "we're sorry, but something went wrong" notice.

ETA: Actually I seem to get that when trying to edit any of my account options.

ETA again: On a non-complain-y note: Effulgence!!!! Reading Effulgence on the Constellation is such a delight! Duplicating characters!! Disabling the user character! Gallery groups!!!! I am SO EXCITED about gallery groups I am an iconoholic and I know it! Grouping in icon view!! I can go back to having icon view as my default now!!! Key traversal! I have been wishing for that!! Screennames resizing in the editor I didn't even know I wanted that but I did I was having to guess & check if my screennames were too long because I hate it when they resize!

<33333

Oh gosh I only just noticed your edits.

Thank you for the feedback. <333

There have been several times recently where I get the error message “glowfic.com’s server DNS address could not be found”. This lasts for a few minutes usually.

Are other people seeing this? It doesn’t happen on other sites, so it doesn’t seem local, but isup.me doesn’t see a problem.

When I started writing this message the problem was happening again, but it lasts briefly enough that it will probably be over by the time anybody else reads this.

Yeah, it's been noted in Discord a couple of times. The problem is due to how the DNS records are configured behind the scenes, and due to limitations of the DNS spec, meaning the root domain (glowfic.com without the 'www') can't be configured properly to remove this. There was an idea floated to move to www.glowfic.com and to redirect glowfic.com to it, which hasn't had any progress but should be possible. (We also haven't definitively chosen to do it, but from informal voting it seems like people want that.)

(Techically: Root domains are not allowed CNAME DNS types by the spec, apparently, and Heroku repeatedly switches IPs so needs something like a CNAME for it to be properly up to date. We currently use a PointDNS "ALIAS" type, instead, which mirrors the DNS records – sort of like a CNAME – except it mirrors the request instead of letting the client know to forward the request on to the other server, meaning it gets cached and then finds itself out of date. We've mitigated this by reducing its TTL but it seems like people still hit the problem every so often, then it doesn't resolve itself for a couple of minutes for them. Redirecting to www.glowfic.com would mean our root domain has a constant DNS, of redirection, then the subdomain has the CNAME DNS, so it should remove all the downtime.)

I’m surprised reducing TTL didn’t fix it; I thought all the various levels of caching respected that.

This is less annoying than the previous state of sometimes getting Bluefin Labs, but if Heroku constantly switched IP addresses it should provide a solution which doesn't break.

It suggests the ALIAS thing, but it doesn't seem to work properly due to the caching. We have TTL set to 60 right now, which I think is quite a lot lower than recommended (but I'm not sure), and I think putting it lower could just put more strain on the various DNS servers. I think all the levels are supposed to respect it, but I'm not sure if they actually do, and 60 may be high enough for it to be as noticeable as it is? (I'm not sure what the number actually measures but I'm guessing seconds? I don't really know.)

TTL is seconds, yes. I think caching can extend it a bit (one DNS server sees the record and caches it for a minute; 59 seconds later a computer asks and gets told the 59-second-old information with a TTL of 60, etc. through a couple layers), but I wouldn’t expect as many layers of caching as would be necessary for the delays I’ve seen.

In any case it doesn’t sound like the problem can completely be fixed without a static IP address, which Heroku probably charges a lot for, or getting the IETF to allow CNAMEs on the root of a domain.

Minor aesthetic point: In my current theme, which I believe to be Starry Light, when I load or reload a page there's a moment before the starry image appears in the header. During this moment, that region is drawn in a color that doesn't belong to the theme. It would be prettier if drawn in a theme color.

Throne and Aestrix were talking about this in Discord, I think they've fixed it already? Does it look better nowadays?