Changes to DealerRefresh

[Alex Snyder]

P.P.S. After these kinks are sorted, I am going to get back on improving the widget at the top of the forums list with the most recent threads

Kinks have been smoothed. That was a PITA

Now it is time to improve the activity widget on the home page. Going to add some functionality from the old version. I built this on our staging server first, so this is the difference between staging and what you're experiencing now.



Here we go... deploying.

 

[Alex Snyder]

This thread is turning into a little diary along with the changes.

We just experienced a 30-minute outage due to a series of stupid things.

I mentioned the former agency that used to maintain DealerRefresh hacked our ad positions into the main site code instead of building them as widgets for placement amongst all the other Xenforo components. Because of this, Claude has to write its own special hacks to move widgets around the ads.

I wanted to remove the new Visitors Online widget from the thread pages. I only want that widget on the home page because something special is planned for the thread pages. When Claude added some code to remove it from the threads pages it broke a line in the main site code. On top of that, when he restored from a backup, he deleted the entire page of code instead of just that single line. This is where AI breaks <----lesson

Fortunately, we have a staging site where we build things first, and we were able to resurrect things from there.

A word of caution to dealers who wish to vibe code can be found in this post. If I didn't have 16 years of experience as a technology vendor, I wouldn't know about structured databases and pre-planned runs that can be reversed via multiple paths. Technology is frighteningly fragile. The trick to keeping it resilient is having escape and rebuild plans.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Boring IT stuff

Made a fresh backup to store online and offline. Then made a new replication of the production site (this site) on staging. With everything fresh and virtually identical in staging, I started doing some significant cleanup work that successfully ran in staging. It has now been put in place in production.

Deleted ThreadLoom and finished cleaning up old ModernStatistics add-ons that were still throwing errors into the logs. Had to patch some other add-ons that were tied to their data.

The error logs are looking clean for the first time in years!

 

[Alex Snyder]

Something very cool with lots of legs

Claude and I wired up an API to Haiku and Sonnet. The initial purpose is to provide an AI summation of every thread on DealerRefresh. The summation will have two versions:

1. summary for humans
2. bot-driven summary to help crawlers find content better

As of this post, half the forum has been summarized. At this rate, it should be done around midnight. This first run is being done with Haiku, which is a little more technical. Older threads will keep this summation. Sonnet will take over on threads that break 5 comments in the future. Sonnet will make summations that sound more like a journalist and be more human-friendly. It would have cost 10x as much to run the entire forum through Sonnet, but ongoing costs should be manageable.

Here is what a Sonnet summation looks like on staging right now:



I have many ideas for utilizing this in more ways! Big thanks to @awolniewitz for doing this on Lovable first. It was a fantastic idea

 

[awolniewitz]

@Alex Snyder in the zone! I love the energy. Excited to play around with it on mobile. What's next on the wish list? A dynamic roadmap of sorts where we could follow along would be cool.

 

[Alex Snyder]

I love the roadmap idea. That sounds like a new thread.

Since we have this thread rolling on the initial changes and migrations, I might close this thread with a final piece that came up as an oops this morning.

Both Jeff and I have grown tired of MailChimp. In our excitement at gaining so much control over all our systems, we killed Threadloom and then put MailChimp on pause. We forgot about another piece, Mandrill, that was part of our MailChimp account and wired into Threadloom. It sits in the background and sends all the password resets, notifications, and other email communications we all get daily. However, it isn't sexy or in our management faces. When I looked at the error log, there were over 15,000 emails that got stuck. Oops

Once I get this ironed out, I can close this thread, and we can get into your DealerRefresh roadmap idea.

At the moment, I'm waiting for our new email delivery system to verify we are legit.

 

[Alex Snyder]

At the moment, I'm waiting for our new email delivery system to verify we are legit.

We good. I'll start a new thread for the roadmap.