The Munch

Hi everyone! In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been able to gain a firmer foothold of our situation here at BDSMLR. We’ve been making fixes as best we can and we hope to be able to provide better, more permanent solutions to our problems soon. 

If you’re wondering what’s been causing these errors, we may be able to explain things by starting from the beginning. 

BDSMLR was built to provide a platform for BDSM enthusiasts to blog about their kinks. The site grew rapidly over a short period of time to include other kinksters outside of BDSM. 

In February, we acquired all BDSMLR assets, including the website and its Zendesk, Twitter, and Github accounts. We also inherited the technical debt accrued by BDSMLR over time. 

What’s technical debt? 

Technical debt happens when you ship a website or app quickly using easy but poorly designed code. Just like financial debt, it accumulates interest over time. As long as the debt isn’t paid, it gets bigger. In other words, as long as work is not done to perfect the code, more work will be needed to keep the website or app functional in the future. 

Here’s an analogy that might help. Think of “cleaning” a room by hiding everything inside the closet. It's fast, it's easy, and, for a while, the room will look "clean". But you can only hide so much junk before the closet bursts open and spills out its contents. 

It’s the same thing with technical debt. The early stages may seem like smooth sailing. But as the debt starts to grow and goes unpaid, everyone will notice it in the form of bugs, errors and, eventually, major engineering failures. 

On your end, you experience this in the form of features like chat and posting becoming unreliable or going dark for days. Most of these issues are due to the poor architecture and legacy code. This is why when we fix one thing, another can break. For example, we recently fixed the messaging system so you can now send and receive messages, but there are still some errors coming up with chat, including notifications and messages that won’t go away. 

Previous development was also done separately on the main domain (bdsmlr.com) and subdomains (ex.: themunch.bdsmlr.com). For instance, some bug fixes were made on the main domain but not on the subdomain, or vice versa, thus creating even more debt. This is why some of you experience certain problems that others don’t. The code is, literally speaking, pretty messy.

But technical debt is not a dead-end situation. There’s a way out of it, and that is to pay the debt incurred. In other words, we have to do the development work that needs to be done to clean up the code. 

Our goal is to rewrite the website and make it proper this time. Currently, we are working on fixing some of the most urgent issues to improve the UX, but we’re also investigating and planning the architecture changes. So far, our small but efficient engineering team has completed the following:

1. Fixed UI issues in some places to provide a better user experience,

2. Made bug fixes for several features, including broken chat, ads, and features that were not showing up properly in web browsers with ad blockers installed.

3. Set up a dev environment to have the ability to test features before shipping them instead of applying all the changes as hotfixes straight to the live website.

4. Transferred images to an external server. 

5. Currently optimizing database requests. This will fix the empty box that some users see instead of posts. This will also resolve a tags issue that has been allowing posts with blocked tags to show up for some users.

6. Investigating alternatives for Wasabi, our cloud-based storage provider, as we’ve been encountering issues with it that are causing some images to not show up.

Although we’re still understaffed, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to address the most pressing issues as soon as we can. 

We hope we’ve been able to explain the BDSMLR situation without getting too technical. As we’ve said before, communicating with the community is important to us, and we’ll do our best to keep the updates going. 

Our goal in the long run is to provide a platform where you can freely express your kinks, grow your audience, and earn from your BDSMLR blog. At the moment, our main priority is to make sure the website is working properly for all our users. 

- The BDSMLR Team