JumpInChat update — Work in progress

Firstly, apologies for the radio silence recently. Work is still ongoing, though mostly behind the scenes and mostly large and complex tasks which are taking up a large part of my time. Since I’m not expecting a major feature or change to land any time soon, I’ll give you a heads up on what’s currently happening.

Two pieces of work on in progress currently. These are a redesign of how the rooms interact with the media server, and an improvement to the payments system to comply with the new SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) coming into force on the 14th of September this year. Since they both require major rework of integral parts of JumpInChat, I’m spending quite a bit of time on them to make sure as little goes wrong as possible.

Media server

As it currently stands, each room is assigned a media server (one of two at present). All users will automatically join that server and all published broadcasts will pass through it. This works just fine for now, though it doesn’t give much room to scale. If a room suddenly gets a surge of activity it may overload the server, resulting in performance degradation for that room and any other room using it.

Instead, I’m redesigning media server connections to spread users to different servers, regardless of what room they are in room. This will better balance available server capacity, and also allow more servers to have a greater effect should they be required. If a single room is doing far too well, another server act as a relief to all new users joining rather than them being stuck on just the one.

As you might imagine, broadcasting is rather integral to JumpInChat and isn’t something I want to change on a whim. Since this project requires some extensive redesign, as well as additional infrastructure, I’m taking my time to ensure the current feature set works like it does currently.

Payments upgrade

Enabling Multi-factor authentication for payments was always in the backlog of things to do. I have, due to deadlines previously described, given it more importance to make sure that support is still possible. Much like the media server project, this will take a bit of time to complete, as there is many moving parts and a bunch of new considerations. It also involves money that isn’t mine, so care is of the essence.

What will actually change, as far as currently plans go, is the checkout itself will no longer be hosted by myself. Instead, Stripe will provide a hosted checkout which will collect payment and personal information as required. It will additionally handle any bank authentication that is required, something not possible with the currently payment process I have implemented.

What this will mean for new and current supporters will be a new payment page, largely consisting of a button to open the checkout, and possibly a requirement to authenticate currently recurring payments. Though this authentication need only be done once, if at all.

Other small changes

I have updated a few other things given the chance. These were mainly small additions and improvements around support:

  • a button to open a gift support page was added to the room chat bar, ala discord. This will allow easier gifting of support to the current room to allow perks such as custom emoji.
  • when gifting support, the user you are gifting will be shown on the checkout page.
  • fixed site bans, and made them more reliable when users are in multiple rooms

If you want to get more frequent updates and site news, be sure to follow the Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Vivaldi

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