Philomena open beta / breaking API changes

Introducing Philomena

Over the past 6 months, the developers for the site have been bootstrapping an entirely new backend for the site named Philomena. This was deemed necessary due to unavoidable shortcomings of the previous Ruby on Rails backend, which we are planning to deprecate and release the source of within a few weeks.

The alpha testers and I believe we have gotten the release to the point where it should be usable for average use over the Rails application. You can try out Philomena using this link. (It is expected that you'll have to log in again.) Please report anything you consider to be a bug, but before you do, please also read the following:

- The scraper does not work correctly, and does not fetch Tumblr posts at all. This is due to an unfixed bug in hackney. When this is fixed I will let you know.
- A few things, like user settings, have been moved around due to the way Ecto/Phoenix handles model updates. Some settings are not yet implemented in the interest of current development priorities; however the ones most people use should be correctly implemented.
- Pages don't have titles yet. We will fix this eventually.
- The beta site may be down occasionally (502 Bad Gateway) as we work out issues with our deployment strategy.

API changes

In the interest of preserving API compatibility, we will attempt to rewrite requests to our exisitng Rails JSON API for as long as is reasonably feasible after the migration (~ several months). We hope most applications will be able to migrate over to the new API format before we remove the Rails app completely.

As before, you can use the filter_id parameter to override your current filter, and the key parameter to authenticate yourself to the API. Here are the new API routes:

[example] GET /api/v1/json/images/:image_id
[example] GET /api/v1/json/search
[example] GET /api/v1/json/oembed

There is also a POST route which takes a query parameter named URL. However, it depends on the scraper; do not expect it to work reliably until the scraper is fixed.

POST /api/v1/json/search/reverse

I want to help, how do I do that?

Use the beta site. Report any missing features or obvious breakages here.

If you think you are seeing something you aren't supposed to see, you can contact me privately here, on IRC, or on Discord. The sooner I know about it, the better.

Welcome to Philomena!



^{Next week is finals week. Please don't kill me if I'm not able to fix things as quickly as I'd like.}

>Doesn't name the new server "Chrysalis", to use web and swarm analogies
What a nerd.

@ArmadilloEater
… It's called philomena because it's a Phoenix application.

Woohoo, API fixes!

When do we get proper docs?

I, for one, welcome our new Arizonan overlords.

To report the thing I already reported so it isn't reported again: no "Last Message" link for PMs.

@byte[]

So, when we cross over to the new backend, will the domain name stay the same?

First post.

Second post.

@Mildgyth
Yes, it'll be switched out and users will not have to do any extra work to use it.

However, the philomena.derpibooru.org domain will remain around for at least as long as we continue to run the old Rails API, in case someone hardcodes the domain into a program and doesn't update it when we switch the domains.

Numerical buttons and next/last (/images?=pageX) lead to 404

There's some minor differences in CSS (decreased row heights on forums, for example), but nothing major. lol

Philomena appears to show new uploads immediately on the front page, unlike the old software which hides new images for 2-3 minutes.

Edit: welp, next/prev buttons are broken.

Edit: Philomena sorts badges differently! Panic!

Edit: There's a comment search. And the comments page shows actual image thumbnails again! uwu.

Image tooltips are missing, so can't see directly their tags.

@JP
We will delay the front page by 3 minutes later.

@Shydale
@JP

Should be fixed now

@JP

Edit: There's a comment search. And the comments page shows actual image thumbnails again! uwu.

FRIG

@JP
Not sure why the tooltips are missing, the alt attribute is there. Does it need a title attribute too?

Seems like mouseover for post details (size, tags etc) isn't working

@byte[]
Yeah, title is needed.

@JP
Added.

@byte[]
Awesome.

@Shydale

It's working for me.

Few more missing things:

- The "Tags" link in the main menu bar isn't a dropdown anymore. Tag aliases page is 404, but tag help page works.
- "History" buttons no longer show edit counts
- No "Random image" or "Show hidden" buttons on the front page.

@JP
- The search replaces most of this (not all of it, I realize, but nobody ever visted those pages, so…)
- I am reluctant to add this without a database change for a counter cache, which I don't want to do yet (it'd incur downtime.) Yes the old design is bad.

Ignoring some minor CSS problems, the three biggest things I've noticed are:
- Artist profiles are missing the "Recent artwork" section.
- Tags without a detailed description suddenly show the "Toggle detailed description" button.
- Searches and tag pages don't display the "Searching for x"/"Images tagged x" text next to the page navigation buttons anymore.

Deleting notifications seems to be buggy. They disappear from the screen, but come back as a notification when I refresh/go to another page.

Spoiler thumbnails on images in forums are comically huge.