Sunny Tuesday, Slippers!
I needed to take a little break from everything so it’s been a couple of weeks since the last notes. I’ve also been a lot less present here on the Backstage and on our Discord chat as I’ve been away from home and generally trying to take a couple of days off to clear my head. I hope everyone here is okay and the sun is shining there, too!
Development notes
Everyone has probably noticed the sluggishness of the site for the past week and a half but it seems that not everyone noticed the update about it. To put it short, we’re in the middle of a major server transition and normal operation will resume very soon. So again: if you have been experiencing issues on the site lately, they are most likely due to this migration process that will be finished this week. In other words, no need to panic!
Most of the recent development time has been eaten by the upcoming festival but there’s some very cool stuff in the pipelines. I think we might not be able to push everything online this week but for example, a new tipping system is almost finished and it will be automatically available to anyone with a PayPal account. (We are not accepting any new users to the old system anymore so please wait for this next update.) The new tipping backend also allows us to enable event ticketing. It will be available for Rockstar and Superstar subscribers and it allows both support (optional) tickets and ticket-only events.
We hope to get to test this out with the upcoming festival (in the form of optional support tickets).
There is also some long-awaited features for listeners coming soon, but they will need to wait until we get the Slipmat Festival out of the way first. Lots of small updates to be expected this week.
If you are unsure if it’s you or Slipmat that is not working properly, we now have an official status page live at https://status.slipmat.io – you should remember that URL (status dot slipmat dot io) or maybe bookmark it so you can check there if something is not responding as it should.
Tips for DJs
Learn to create better bug reports
Slipmat is still in private beta and every DJ is expected to report bugs so we can find them and fix them. Most of the reports we get are missing key details and in many cases, not a single point from the documentation is followed. Please, read How to Report Issues and put just a little bit effort in your reports, it saves so much time from everyone as we can easily verify and find the issue in hand.
As public shaming, here is an example of one of the worst bug reports I’ve ever seen:
This is the equivalent of a customer asking the DJ “Hey, play that good song. You know, the good one!” Please do not be that person.
It’s totally okay to not know everything and it’s not important that all your vocabulary is spot on or technical details pixel perfect. What’s important is that you try to explain in your own terms as clearly as possible what happened, what you expected to happen, when, in what URL, and if possible, with a screenshot or two attached. Again, this is explained in more detail here: How to Report Issues
Finding bugs is a good thing because it means we can fix them. All reports are appreciated, but please, put a little bit effort in explaining as no one here is a mind reader.
Remember that You have a voice
Our community is different from the competition in that we’re not driven by money, we’re driven by you. There are downsides of not being backed by a corporation but there are upsides as well. We should embrace the good bits and try to work together to push this site in the right direction.
Everyone is good at something. If you want to help the community, help with whatever you are comfortable and good at and let others figure out the rest
Okay, that’s it for this week.
I’m very excited about the upcoming festival. It’s getting a little bit hectic but come Friday, we’ll be ready. I think I need to watch Fyre again, tho