This week we looked at the performance of all parts of the platform, and determined what we can do to improve the speed of the system. We also improved the forum and wiki with things that make it more human-friendly. In the background the work on the new characters continues.

This week's blog post elaborates on If you stat it, they will kill it!

Forum

• Threads with a duplicate name are now handled differently. Instead of not allowing the creation of a thread with a name that is already used, the system now allows the second thread to be created, and assigns it a unique name "behind the scenes". (It does so by adding (n) to the thread title, with an n chosen to not overlap with any other name. You can link to the unique name just as you can link to wiki page real names.)

Wiki

• "Show Differences" is now smarter about numbers. Previously changing a "100" to a "101" would lead to the difference showing "10" in both and than the removal of "0" and the addition of "1". This is clearly no how humans read numbers. This has been improved to show a change of the whole number.

Performance

• We improved the performance of the deep search, getting you your results faster.

• The performance of long threads has been improved significantly by being smarter about the "last edited" information that we want to display.

• A generic performance improvement has been applied to all pages that have links to other pages. In particular the wiki indexes benefit from this since they often contain large numbers of links to tags and links in the descriptions of the things they are showing.

Bugs

• Fixed an information disclosure bug in deep search. There was a possibility to search through protected forums. This has now been fixed for the forums, and any future things that we make searchable.