Neospring maintenance downtime explanation (November 19th, 2024)

Hello,

As some may have noticed, Neospring was down for ~40 minutes on November 19th, 2024 at 21:40 EST. During this time, I migrated the entire database and server from a cloud VPS to a computer here!

This was done to help save some costs and increase some speeds, but it comes with some caveats:

• Downtime may become more unpredictable and frequent, but I'll try my best to prevent this!
• I'm now fully responsible for managing the server hardware itself, but expect an announcement ASAP if anything is to go wrong.

Anyway, moving everything at 10 PM was fun. Also fixed some small bugs in the site while I was at it!

Thanks.

Oh, no worries! It's perfectly fine, I'm always happy to help!

Fixed

Fixed!

They make everything harder.

1. usernames cannot have whitespace at all, that makes absolutely 0 sense and is really stupid (it makes profile loading not work properly in some browsers)
2. display names cannot be just whitespace because then it completely ruins the point. With a blank display name, it's even LESS accessible and completely ruins site functionality. It also just looks so incredibly dumb to just have an avatar sitting there with nothing to describe it

Emojis aren't copied with stuff because they're not a single character, so they don't slice in strings well. I'll maybe get around to fixing it eventually, but it's not high priority

I’ll fix it ASAP. New system will likely be replacing it with their username and not display name, and then marking it with a really clear warning that they’re annoying and refuse to make their username accessible.

Hold tight, it should be fixed before the end of the day! Thank you for your patience.

Wow this is super weird. Thanks for letting me know, will fix as soon as I’m able. Just as simple as not allowing you to respond to questions that don’t exist, which I’m not sure why we don’t do already

img {
    pointer-events: none;
}

@font-face {
    font-family: IM_Fell_DW_Pica;
    src: url("https://files.catbox.moe/t5505e.ttf");
}

* {
    font-family: "IM_Fell_DW_Pica", sans-serif;
}

#names h3.username {
    animation: typing 4s infinite running;
}

@keyframes typing {
    from {
        width: 0;
    }

    to {
        width: 100%;
    }
}

After properly formatting, you'll find you never closed the * selector. Your CSS actually looked like this to the browser:

* {
    ...
    & #names h3.username {
         ...
    }
    
    @keyframes {}
}

The animation was not playing because @keyframes cannot be nested in a selector.

I'd say read a little bit more about CSS before attempting to do more complicated CSS things, such as animations. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

Side note: also fixed the font-family you're applying to *, as you never set a default font family in case your font failed to load. This means you would end up with the user's default serif font had the font failed to load.

Side note number 2: you should use quotations in url(), as the first parameter is a string.

Side note number 3: you should specify font names in quotes, as they can otherwise be replaced by a font with the same name that is already installed on the user's system. This isn't really an issue with a very non-standard font name, but it's a good practice.

Hope that helps!

After a space after infinite

Should be fixed now, sorry!

The animation needs to have running to actually play.

Added. It's in your profile settings.

The theme doesn't really have anything to do with that. It takes a second, but it works fine for me on the default dark theme. You may need to clear your browser cache

We try to look for people with good qualities, such as being level-headed and not really too involved with the users on the platform. We were planning on making an actual thing of guidelines for becoming site staff, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. Thanks for the reminder!

I do plan on adding one! History is being worked on. For now, my advice is just try to live with the small mistakes, they add character.

History (undo/redo) coming ASAP!

Fixed. Note the button will still be visible to you so that you can set a status, but other users will not see it if the text is empty. Also added a button to clear your status in the ellipsis menu in the status dialog.

I plan on adding a setting soon to change it to something custom, so hold tight until then!

Reports can be created anonymously.

Timeline loading (really slowly) has been fixed! We were previously sending a request to the database to get the like state of every response visible on the page. This behaviour has been offloaded onto the client and will now only run when the like button is in view.

Neospring v1.16.0

Full changelog Support us

Neospring v1.16.0 has been released! Here's a quick summary:

• Better icons
• Prefer "Inter" font
• Show if responses have already been liked
• Don't show responses from users you've blocked on other profiles or circles
• Response "Boost" button
• Better homepage
• Better default themes
• Better circles

Thanks for using Neospring! Don't forget, you can support us at https://ko-fi.com/neospring and get some fun benefits if you include your username and contribute $10 or more.

Previous release (v1.15.0)

Unfortunately no, as this completely defeats the purpose of anonymous. Please report the question and we'll handle it for you.

Oh, interesting. I was thinking about adding an escape for this (something like replacing width < with width <), but then I looked at the site's CSS and realized I've actually never done media queries like that.

I normally do media queries like this:

/* 900px and above (same as >= 900px) */
@media screen and (min-width: 900px)
/* 901px and above (same as > 900px) */
@media screen and (min-width: 901px)
/* 900px and below (same as <= 900px) */
@media screen and (max-width: 900px)
/* 899px and below (same as < 900px) */
@media screen and (max-width: 899px)

Allowing Rainbeam instances to communicate with each other

Hey!

Over the past few days, I've been working primarily on federating/decentralizing Rainbeam servers. To do this, I've drafted the Citrus Protocol.

This protocol allows Rainbeam servers to communicate with each other through sharing schemas which document return objects and API endpoints. Rainbeam servers will now publish their citrus.toml file at /.well-known/citrus/citrus.toml, as well as all of their schemas at /.well-known/citrus/schemas/structs/**/*.

This is all still very much a work in progress, so expect many things to change. Currently, GET requests sent to the responses API will now return the response ID in the CitrusID format. This means that response IDs are now shown as neospring.org:RESPONSE-ID.

In the coming days, I hope to finalize this protocol draft and start actually forwarding requests to remote responses.

Currently, response IDs given to methods in the rainbeam-core Database are converted into a CitrusID (using the WIP client available here), but then just have their server_id field discarded. Soon, I hope to begin actually paying attention to this field and forwarding requests using the client to remote servers.

Thanks!

Posts from blocked users should now no longer be shown in the posts timelines. I hope to expand this to global question timelines in the near future!

*It's not based on Activitypub because the Actvitypub protocol is too complicated and would require rewriting a large part of Rainbeam's core.

I know what's causing the notifications disappearing thing, so I'll fix that ASAP. I'm not able to reproduce the issue of notifications not being sent when added to a chat, though.

Something to note is that messages seen in the chat window automatically have their notification deleted!