JumpInChat Update — Support the site

Support the site

I’ve added a way for users to support the site via donations, which will be used to pay for site hosting. Links to the donation page, hosted on Ko-fi, have been added to the room header, as well as the home page. It simply allows you to “buy me a coffee”, or two, by sending $3 my way via papal.

Currently, there is no way to attribute these donations to your own account. However, it’s a first step to allow fans and supporters to help out. There will be an in-site donation mechanism in the future, which will allow your generosity to be reflected on your account.

Add setting to force log-in

A new setting has been added to your room settings to force users entering your room to be logged into their account. This was added as a means to hopefully prevent some recurring trolling that was happening in some rooms by making ban-evasion harder. Since bans are enforced by username as well as IP addresses or session tokens.

Update UI

I’ve made a few improvements to the interface, some more noticeable than others. Most apparent perhaps is the reversing of the cams header, where the broadcast button is now on the right side of the page. This was changed because it struck me that actions feel more natural on the right, but also as it allows for text content on the left. As a result, this allowed me to add the current room description in the header.

A slightly more subtle change is that the cam audio volume and chat notification sounds will now be remembered.

More YouTube fixes

Some YouTube bugs have been fixed that were affecting video resumption and pausing. Namely, videos could start some time ahead of where they were supposed to. This was ultimately due to the user’s own clock being incorrect, and the start time being calculated within the browser. This has been changed so that all time calculations have been moved server-side.

Another issue meant that a paused video, once resumed, could start ahead at a time equal to the length of time paused. Basically, this means if a video played for 30 seconds, then was paused for 1 minute before being resumed, a new user would see the video start at 1 minute and 30 seconds instead of just 30 seconds.

Additionally, I noticed that people were pasting full YouTube links into the search input without much success (since it only searched via the ID of the video). IDs will now be parsed from full links.

Media server reconnection attempts

A somewhat experimental feature has been added to the media server, whereby it will attempt to reconnect if connection to the server has been lost.

Improve server stability

One major issue that affected server stability was that connection to the logging server was a single point of failure. Simply put, should the logging server be unavailable or unable to be connected to, it could cause servers to hang. I’ve made several improvements to hopefully prevent this, such as ensuring the log server stays on-line as much as possible by clearing out old data on a more frequent basis (preventing it crashing due to having no disk space) and making connection non-blocking (unsent logs will be discarded rather than wait for the server).

As always, go to https://jumpin.chat and make a chat room, invite people and have fun and stuff.

The only way I can make this thing better is having you break it! Or even better getting even more people using it who then also break it!