News

Details about today's moonID update May 21, 2019

TL;DR

Following the last update from March, we have rolled out a few more user-visible changes this time.

Here is a summarised list of the changes:

• Improve browser-side caching of static content
• Make the mobile/tablet experience less painful
• Group "My Games" by game name
• Loosen constraints to retain import information after deletion
• A few database performance improvements

Detailed Changes

The following sections are in-detail explanations of the changes that we've just deployed.

Improved browser-side caching of static content

Our front-end web server (nginx) is now using ETags, which basically make sure that browsers won't retrieve the content again if the file already exists in the cache and has the same ETag as the current file on the server, hence increasing page load performance in subsequent requests after the initial one.

The technical reason why we had ETags disabled so far, was that files inside of Nix store paths always have the same modification time and by default, nginx generates the ETag by concatenating the modification time with the file size.

To illustrate this: Let's say we have a file containing the text hello world, which has a size of 11 characters. This would result in the ETag 1-11.

Now let's assume the content of file got changed to adios world, which has the same length. The same ETag (1-11) as the one from the old file would be sent to the browser and the server will respond with an HTTP 304 (Not Modified), causing the browser to load the old file from the cache.

Static files (everything beginning with /static in the URL) are served from Nix store paths, which would mean that we'd always get the same modification time, even after an upgrade. This is obviously not intended and could possibly distort the site, which is why we've disabled it so far.

We've rolled out a patch which addresses the issue by using the hash portion of the Nix store path as the ETag.

Better user experience for mobile and tablet devices

Another quite visible change was introduced for mobile phone/tablet users, where we have changed the navigation/layout a bit to make it less frustrating to browse moonID on smaller resolutions (about time, I'd say).

At the moment the mobile view should be treated more like an interim solution, because it's nowwhere near complete and in some cases quite rudimentary, but we do have a full site re-design on our roadmap where we intend to support mobile targets from the get-go.

The "MY GAMES" menu is now grouped by game name

If you're playing on a lot of game worlds, navigating the My Games menu becomes quite tedious to use after a while, because the list is not sorted in a natural order.

In order to make the menu more convenient to use, we now list game worlds under their appropriate game name and they are also sorted naturally (or more accurately: According to a new rank field in the database table).

So let's say you're playing on a few German MonstersGame and KnightFight worlds, the list was looking like this:

• KnightFight DE 10
• KnightFight DE 12
• KnightFight DE 2
• MonstersGame DE 1
• MonstersGame DE 20
• MonstersGame DE 4

After applying natural sorting, the list now looks like this:

• KnightFight
  • KnightFight DE 2
  • KnightFight DE 10
  • KnightFight DE 12
• MonstersGame
  • MonstersGame DE 1
  • MonstersGame DE 4
  • MonstersGame DE 20

Retaining important information after deletion

Right now if you want to delete your moonID account, you need to create a ticket and the actual deletion has to be done manually on our side, which is not a very good experience and we think that users should be able to do this for themselves.

However, there are a few things we need to retain by law, for example the purchases made by the user on the account.

While you'll still need to open a support ticket for deleting your account, we now have sufficient tests so that we won't accidentally delete too much information. This allows us to add account deletion within the next few updates.

Database performance improvements

So far some pages have issued an unnecessary amount of database queries, up to several thousand per request.

We have improved those queries a bit and now almost all pages (only a few internal ones are more demanding) use less than 100 queries. We intend to lower this in future updates, but even getting from a four figure number down to two digits is already a huge improvement.

Comment in forum

Upcoming moonID Update with downtime on Tuesday morning May 20, 2019

Unfortunately, a few of the changes come with some fairly complex migrations we need to apply to our database. If everything goes as planned, the downtime will last only for a couple of minutes. If however all hell breaks loose and we need
to revert from database backup, the downtime could be up to an hour.

As usual, we're quite optimistic that everything will go as planned, but in case we're hit by Murphy's law we'd recommend taking a break on Tuesday,
May 21th from 02:00 to 03:00 UTC (that is 4 o'clock to 5 o'clock in German time) if you want to avoid moonID being unavailable.

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Supremacy 1914 now mobile playable May 3, 2019

The reintegration of the moonID toolbar is expected to be completed by Tuesday. We will keep you up to date.

https://bytro.com/2019/05/02/supremacy-1914-now-cross-platform-compatible/

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Conversion nameserver April 27, 2019

this weekend we are moving our nameservers together, so there may be downtimes on moonID or the games until Monday evening. If everything goes as planned, there should be no downtime. Please post any conspicuous events directly here in the forum.

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Premium Easter Campaign April 2, 2019

From April 1st at 10 p.m. until April 22nd at 10 p.m. we offer our Premium Easter Campaign. The premium promotion includes a 50% bonus on the purchase of all moonCoin packages.
Premium Easter Campaign

We wish you a happy Easter!

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