Oh no, Station died. Not bad for years of uptime with no issues... but it turns out I'm human after all. The recent post by @baran revealed a bug in the code that truncates homepage posts to 250 chars if they're longer. All fixed now and we're back. Apologies, folks.

2 months ago · 👍 dariolob, hacknorris, bavarianbarbarian, half_elf_monk, melyanna, psyko, uyasga, chirale, justyb, astreetsign, deerbard, baran, fripster, devyl, travisshears, virtueisdead, ivanodin, not4uffin, not4uffinonmobile

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11 Replies

But station wasn't completely dead — I could still access it "from air", posting posts... · 2 months ago

@melyanna Yes, I'll always prioritise making sure we're all still here. It was a silly bug once I saw it... it's code that truncates the frontpage posts to 250 chars, but the (Go) code actually checked the length in bytes before truncating it by runes (Go's way to represent Unicode code points), which is wrong. In theory that would create an attempt to truncate *larger* than the text was in special cases, and blow up. It took an entire post in cyrillic by @baran to make it happen :) · 2 months ago

@baran You're the only one that ever took it down :) · 2 months ago

My recent post? Wow. I'm proud) · 2 months ago

You brought Station back up so quickly, Martin! How long did it take to figure out what the bug was? Was it a difficult find or a "kind of obvious once you see it?" · 2 months ago

@hacknorris No, this was absolutely my fault, just quite an obscure edgecase :) · 2 months ago

@martin typical… something like y2k? · 2 months ago

@hacknorris Nope, just a very long-standing, silent bug that decided to appear after years of us being up and without any problems. Got to love the world of software :) · 2 months ago

thought it died permanently. lol. or i visited in wrong hour (myself i host a capsule and i shutdown server at nights - for many reasons, so could be timezone issue too)… · 2 months ago

@dariolob My pleasure! Thanks for the understanding. · 2 months ago

Glad it’s back up and running :) Thanks @martin for all the effort you’ve put into Station so far! · 2 months ago