[MeFi Site Update] October 26th

October 26, 2022 12:47 PM

Hi there, MetaFilter! You’ll find some updates regarding the site below. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions.

- General updates
This update is a bit short since the SC, Jessamyn, and the staff have been focusing a lot on budget, expenses and fundraising and you can learn more about it in the recent Fundraising post. It is thanks to the contribution of our members that the site stays afloat and we are doing everything we can to optimize this from all possible angles. If you want to help fund MetaFilter you may do that here. Thank you in advance!

- Site changes.
frimble has been working on reducing our AWS expenses. Thanks to this we can safely assume that next month our website hosting expenses will be decreased by a couple thousand dollars per month.

- BIPOC Advisory Board
The 10th Board meeting just happened last Saturday with huge advances on what are the Board’s mid term Goals and Activities as well as reviewing and advising regarding recent moderation policies and decisions. More details to come as the Board is still working on this.

If you have any questions or feedback not related to this particular update, please Contact Us instead. If you want to discuss a particular subject not covered here with the community, you’re welcome to open a separate MetaTalk thread for it.

posted by loup (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 12:47 PM (24 comments total)

frimble has been working on reducing our AWS expenses.

Have you deleted all the CSS because nothing is displaying properly for me right now?
posted by Lanark at 3:11 PM on October 26, 2022 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I just refreshed and all sites aren't displaying formatting.
posted by terrapin at 3:28 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Amazon cloudfront.net is down so I think this is bigger than just mefi.
posted by Lanark at 3:32 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Same as above folks, adding that firefox dev console shows

pageload092414.mod.js
libscript20200213.2012.js
members20200213.2012.js

from cloudfront are not loading, and

matomo.js

from piwik.mefi.us is also taking the afternoon off.

And there is a CORS error on icons.svg.

I don't see any CSS loading errors, but the sheets are definitely also playing hooky.

Maybe someone needs to kick a box at cloudfront?
posted by maxwelton at 3:36 PM on October 26, 2022

Everything is displaying just for me on desktop and mobile.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:45 PM on October 26, 2022

The site is showing up in black and white for me (Firefox on a Mac). It's very disconcerting. In Chrome, the colors are right, but the formatting is off.
posted by hydra77 at 4:05 PM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fine for me in CA as well. I heard rumors of a widespread DNS provider issue, not specifically an AWS issue? Try doing a domain lookup if you know how and see if that works properly?
posted by team lowkey at 4:05 PM on October 26, 2022

Oh, trying in a new browser breaks the site, I must just be working in cache.
posted by team lowkey at 4:22 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

team lowkey, I think that's my case, too. Everything's perfect on my usual mac-in-firefox, but other browsers and iOS not so much.

(Also thanks for the update, loup!)
posted by mochapickle at 4:49 PM on October 26, 2022

Opening in a private browser also breaks the site for me.
posted by General Malaise at 4:51 PM on October 26, 2022

MeFi and Ask seem to load fine for me. All other sites are borked.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:53 PM on October 26, 2022

Also having trouble here. It started in the early afternoon PDT and from what I can tell in my browser's inspector, the specific host on AWS Cloudfront that serves up images/etc isn't responding to my browser's requests (specifically for me, the host d217i264rvtnq0.cloudfront.net appears to be failing DNS lookups).
posted by tclark at 4:55 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's sporadic. Some pages load fine, others don't, some that loaded fine reload badly and vice versa.
posted by trig at 5:32 PM on October 26, 2022

Finally starting to look professional around here.
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:52 PM on October 26, 2022 [6 favorites]

(As per "professional white background stylesheet" snark.)
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:32 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Does anyone have a screenshot of the black and white because I’d love to see that
posted by one4themoment at 6:39 PM on October 26, 2022

Thanks for the bug reports, everyone. Staff is aware and looking into the Cloudfront issue -- we've got a *possible* lead on the problem, should have a better idea what exactly is going wrong in a few hours. Thanks for your patience.

(Also, I'm not in webdev myself but I'd guess the variance in working vs. not working is probably a cache issue; if one of your devices is loading the stylesheet okay it should continue to work as long as you don't force-refresh or clear your browser cache.)
posted by Rhaomi at 7:34 PM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just for fun, but it's possible to use the Stylus extension and an archived copy of the css to partly work around the issue locally.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:46 PM on October 26, 2022

Yay!
posted by maxwelton at 12:15 AM on October 27, 2022

I am pleased to hear that you are working to reduce AWS spend. It’s a work hobby of mine to reduce my systems AWS costs, which is actually a pretty satisfying activity! I filled out the form to offer to help dig into cost controls if you would like to do more moving forward.
posted by rockindata at 4:12 AM on October 27, 2022 [16 favorites]

Currently, the cover images on the front of FF are all broken, even when the image loads fine on the actual post page.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:49 AM on October 27, 2022

I'm very glad that hosting expenses have been cut by $1000s per month. Here's to hoping that provides a lot more leeway in MetaFilter's finances.

From where I am (UK), I haven't noticed any CSS problems or pages not loading - maybe the issue is one localised to N. America?
posted by wandering zinnia at 3:03 PM on October 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yah, not sure if this is helpful, but I've had zero issues with the site during these changes.
posted by Alex404 at 1:30 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Thank you for the reports. frimble has been tackling these issues and fixing them if you are still having any issues or stumble upon something else, please Contact Us and I'll file a report for you.
posted by loup (staff) at 8:31 AM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]