Patch notes

Change log 2017-07-22:

• Re-enabled wildcard support for search terms. If you write aw*th it should henceforth yield awarth, wheras *aw would yield a words ending with aw, e.g. aw, baw, daw, gaw, maw etc.
• Increased comment field size.
• Added a polyfill for requestAnimationFrame to enable scrolling animations for Android devices.

Change log 2025-09-17:

• Fixed a minor cosmetic issue in the activity feed, primarily preventing the duplication of trailing periods.

aldaleon

Change log 2025-09-24:

• Fixed the reset password feature. I apologise for not detecting it earlier. You should be able to reset your password again now.
• Implemented various caches and component-level memoization to speed up the website.

aldaleon

Change log 2025-09-28:

• Optimizations, optimizations and optimizations – I've been adding various performance and latency monitoring infrastructure to identify opportunities to speed up the website. I've also fine-tuned caching and fixed various database query ordering bugs that were impacting performance.

aldaleon

Change log 2025-10-25:

• Fixed a crash issue affecting Phrases. You can now browse all words again without it failing randomly.
• Integrated Quettali for automated inflections of Quenya's verbs! Try it out - look up any verb in Quenya and tap the "Inflect with Quettali" link. Example: caranya-! Thanks, chaered!

aldaleon

Change log 2025-11-11:

• Introduced bot protection for new account registrations. Hopefully this will remediate the worst of the AI bots that have plagued us lately.
• Disabled Sindarin auto-inflections as the underlying implementation still needs work.

aldaleon 🌺

Change log 2025-11-15:

• Expanded reCAPTCHA to logins to protect against bots leveraging identity providers like Google to get around our bot protections.
• Optimized our bundling strategy, reducing the client-side app by ~20%. I would expect a slight reduction in latency as a result.

aldaleon

⚠️ We've recovered from a major outage.

I do apologise for the long period of us either being intermittently or entirely unavailable! The root cause was simple - I was trying to optimize my server configuration to save costs. Unfortunately, the new server configuration (even though I doubled its capacity) couldn't handle the amount of traffic we get on a regular basis.

Learnings? PHP really doesn't scale well, even with cache configurations, FPM and webserver optimizations. The only long-term solution is probably to transition to another language and framework (like C# core), which would be a ton of work.

What does it mean for you? I've restored the service for now. Everything should work as it used to, though with slightly better performance.

As always, I really appreciate your continued support of this project. It's been 14 years in the making and it's frankly incredible that it keeps on going. I'm so thankful for your continued interest in Tolkien's universe.

Thanks!

aldaleon