Problem: Showing private posts on profiles is scary and may give people
the impression that these posts are visible.
https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/113
Solution: Hide private messages when rendering public profiles and
change the method name to be very clear that it only returns public
messages.
Problem: Stopping the networking would sometimes allow peers to remain
connected, which was confusing.
Solution: Upgrade to latest SSB-CONN to pull in a bugfix for this
behavior. Huge thanks to @staltz for the quick fix!
Problem: On short pages, like the search page, there's no scrollbar
gutter on the right side of the page, which moves everything a few
pixels to the right. After banging my head against this for an hour I finally
realized that it only happens when your viewport is taller than the
content on the page, which creates the scrollbar. This was reported as:
https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/96
Solution: Change the display so that we consistently show a scrollbar
gutter on the right side of the page regardless of whether we need it
(e.g. on very short pages or on very tall monitors). This means that
when we center the content on the page it won't move depending on the
height of the page, which was frustrating and janky.
Problem: The `<section>` elements on some pages have different sizes,
which means that the sidebar is doing wonky stuff.
Solution: Make the sections all have a consistent width. Note that
there's still a few pixels of jank on the 'search' page, I'm not sure
why that's happening. The element inspector is reporting that everything
is the same width but that isn't true.
Problem: Putting the navigation at the top of the screen makes it
impossible to use when you're scrolling through a page, which isn't a
good user experience. It was never meant to be permanent, and I think
everyone has pointed out that it's been a pain.
Solution: Super simple sidebar nav when people are on bigger screens.
This doesn't solve the problem on mobile, and it doesn't incorporate the
'popular' page's interval settings, but I think it's a step in the right
direction.
Problem: Using all-lowercase-everything isn't really a standard around
the web and it might be better to use consistent capitalization. This
was brought up in: https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/98
Solution: This changes the main navigation to use links with the first
letter capitalized, like how Patchwork + Twitter + Mastodon + etc do it.
This means that we're consistently using sentence case everywhere, which
I think is our best option. Originally I tried experimenting with
all-caps for actions, which I found aesthetically pleasing, but you have
to reduce the font size to make it look good (bad!) and I was reading
that all-caps text is harder for friends with dyslexia or vision
impairments.
Problem: We were overwriting SSB-Tangle with itself, which is fine, but
kind of confusing and requires some knowledge on what is and isn't safe
for Secret-Stack.
Solution: Only inject SSB-Tangle if it doesn't already exist, which
makes the code easier to reason about.
Problem: The --offline documentation doesn't mention that networking
status can be changed, which may give the false understanding that the
networking is permanently offline when you use that flag.
Solution: Add a note that mentions that the 'meta' page lets you change
your networking status, and that --offline is only applicable to the
starting state of Oasis.
Problem: Sometimes you want to disconnect from the network but you don't
want to have to restart Oasis with the `--offline` flag
(https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/89). Sometimes networking gets
stuck and you need to run the equivalent of `ssb gossip reconnect`
(https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/63).
Solution: Buttons on the 'meta' page that let you start, stop, or
restart SSB-CONN whenever you want. Note that this commit includes an
update to SSB-CONN, but this version and the previous version both have
a bug where hitting 'stop' twice in a row will throw an error. This
commit implements a workaround for the bug, but it's something we'll
want to remove later once the underlying bug is fixed.
Problem: Patchwork is missing a plugin that we need to set the `branch`
property when posting a message. This property is important because it
helps us sort threads, so we're throwing an error when it isn't
available. See: https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/21
Solution: HACK THE ~~PLANET~~ API. This commit injects the plugin we
need via Oasis, which is a bit of a duct tape solution but it *is* a
solution.
Problem: When we don't have any documentation for variable types it's
difficult for both humans and machines to parse our code.
Solution: As discussed in https://github.com/fraction/oasis/issues/78,
adding some JSDoc information on function signatures would be a nice
step in the right direction and could make debugging easier.
Problem: CG's dependency, CSpell, had problems with Windows support, so
I was using a forked module as an alias to circumvent the problem. This
only works on very recent version of npm.
Solution: This morning the CSpell maintainer resolved the problem, so
the latest CG doesn't have to depend on an alias. This commit runs `npm
update` to get the latest version of CG so we don't have this problem.
Problem: The /inbox page was being rendered super slowly because it was
reading through tons of messages.
Solution: There isn't a way to query the database for "private messages
for me", although maybe there should be, but one way we can get
something close is querying for "messages that reference me". Every
message that's encrypted for us will have a `.value.content.recps`
property that includes our feed ID, so we just have to filter out the
public messages and we're about 4 times faster than the previous
implementation.
```console
$ hyperfine 'curl -I http://localhost:4515/inbox' 'curl -I http://localhost:3000/inbox'
Benchmark #1: curl -I http://localhost:4515/inbox
Time (mean ± σ): 3.352 s ± 0.093 s [User: 2.0 ms, System: 4.3 ms]
Range (min … max): 3.231 s … 3.483 s 10 runs
Benchmark #2: curl -I http://localhost:3000/inbox
Time (mean ± σ): 811.8 ms ± 88.3 ms [User: 2.7 ms, System: 2.9 ms]
Range (min … max): 709.1 ms … 972.5 ms 10 runs
Summary
'curl -I http://localhost:3000/inbox' ran
4.13 ± 0.46 times faster than 'curl -I http://localhost:4515/inbox'
```
Christian Bundy
Jonathan Dahan
Jonathan Dahan
Cinnamon