Futureporn.net July Update

This month brings new backend upgrades that will help Futureporn scale. gw.futureporn.net is back, this time as an IPFS gateway exclusively for patrons. The website's video player will automatically choose this gateway for logged-in patrons when no CDN video is available.

To make gw.futureporn.net exclusive to patrons, I had to make some modifications to the Strapi server parked at portal.futureporn.net. These breaking changes invalidated all patron logins, causing the video player to idle and not load any video. If you experience this problem yourself when trying to play videos, make sure to log out and then log back in to get a fresh auth token. With a new token, videos will load again.

This brings up a pain point I'm encountering while improving the website frontend. It's that too much of it is one-off, custom, undocumented, and inconsistent. It's like spaghetti code, and it's not even Mom's!

Get it, Mom's spaghetti? ...

Anyway, there's a lot of work ahead of me, and I'm so grateful for my patrons who are giving me the means to continue doing it.

My plan for August is to rebuild the website frontend, fixing things I designed poorly and paving the way for a multi-lewdtuber site. I've been putting off the rebuild for months, shoehorning new features and working around inefficiencies. It's been a great journey of learning and experimentation, but I'm realizing that I have a weak foundation and I need to strengthen it before I can continue.

I could get into the laundry list of the web stack that is and the ideal web stack that will be, but I think I'm going to skip that for now. I will summarize by saying I'm choosing widely used, well-documented industry standards for the UI. This is all in an effort to reduce custom code pain points that slow down progress.

Speaking of progress, you mad lads have been supporting me like crazy! We're seeing explosive growth, and we blew past the goal of funding storage and bandwidth for more lewdtubers. More lewdtubers are coming; the feature is a work in progress, but it's definitely not something I can rush. Things need to be redesigned to properly display multiple vtubers, and the supporting infrastructure needs improvements as well.

Since my last update, I've taken lots of cost-saving measures. I cut out a middleman by switching from Netlify to BunnyCDN. I consolidated many low-power virtual private servers and block storages into one cost-efficient, strong dedicated server.

I've been in a "move fast and break things" mentality for a while. I made several mistakes over the past 30 days that brought the website down for periods of time. In the case of BunnyCDN, I rushed the DNS switchover before I had a way to deploy the site there. At that point, I reconsidered my choices to rush the deploy on a Saturday because I was eager to save money. I asked myself, "What good is it if nobody can use the site on the weekend?" I reverted the changes and tried again a week later on a Monday.

I want to fulfill my dreams of creating the Galaxy's Best VTuber Hentai Site as soon as possible, but it's important that I pace myself and have a plan. There are plenty of performance issues that have yet to be solved, and a never-ending list of challenges to overcome. I'm putting in the work, and I'm going to get there, but I'm reminded that the journey is more important than the destination.

I was surprised to hear that my brother is getting married in August. I was presented with the opportunity for an all-expenses-paid trip to the venue. I haven't had a vacation in at least three years, so I jumped on the opportunity. I'm looking forward to that. I think I could benefit from the time AFK, and I really enjoy any chance to eat good food.

A past me would have said no because I'd convince myself I'm too busy building a business. Now I know that breaks are important. Breaks are what help builders use "Crocodile energy." That's a term I think I read in the comments of a HackerNews article about conserving energy. Crocodile energy is slowly moving forward until an opportunity for a giant leap can be made. That's what I'm going for-- small, persistent progress for grand results.

Let's take a moment to talk about some new stuff.

In last month's post, I forgot to mention a new feature, so I'll summarize it now. Patrons with the perk "Your URL displayed on Futureporn.net" can now enter that URL at https://futureporn.net/profile/. The URL will show up on the patrons' page when the website updates.

Poster images have returned! These are full-size variants of the small thumbnail images on the homepage. I had to fix some image caching issues for these to show up properly.

On select videos, patrons have access to storyboard images, also known as timeline hover previews. I didn't generate these myself; they are a service provided by our video CDN provider, Mux. I had to do some work with sending authentication tokens to Mux in order to get storyboard images to display, but they're a handy feature to see how the VOD progresses and find specific moments.

On the security front, I learned of a critical vulnerability in Strapi, the backend software Futureporn uses. I upgraded immediately to a patched version. Later, I did some work improving Futureporn's lighthouse score, where I saw a recommendation for adding CSP headers. These are meant to mitigate cross-site scripting and data injection attacks, which sounds like a great idea. I took the first step towards implementing those, but I'm doing so cautiously. If I get the domain names wrong, visitors' browsers will refuse to load important parts of the site. I have some more work to do there.

I think this wraps up July's update. There are no shiny new features this month, but there is plenty going on behind the scenes to ensure that we have shiny new features in the coming months. As always, thank you so much for supporting me in this endeavor. I'm excited every day to work on this project, and I'm looking forward to building all the things. I hope you'll stay with me throughout the process.

Any thoughts? Please leave them in the comments below. I always love hearing from visitors and receiving any feedback they have. Additionally, we have a Discord server with a suggestions forum. I also post changelogs on the server, so if you're interested in hearing more about what's going on, make sure to check it out. And if you join, don't forget to explore #bot-playground, where you'll find Miki bot, who runs a free anime card gacha.

Cheers!