Slipmat Week Notes 32/2026

Site Development
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Good Hello people of Slipmat!

The velocity of the development is apparently still not slowing down, at all. Not sure if good or bad :thinking: This week we fixed every single Sentry issue which means that every known production bug has now been squashed. There were also several quality of life improvements for artists and event workflow. There should be no more blockers to open up registrations and artist creation for all users within the next couple of weeks.

Currently the best way to help with the development is to use the site and keep reporting any issues. Keep inviting your friends to the events as well, and especially all v2 users who are still missing out! :victory_hand:

New Features

  • Our MCP server AI-tool has had a major refactor and updates. You can now instruct your favourite AI to read public user profiles and artists fans.

    The security model is tightened a bit; only owners are allowed to use this tool. This keeps the security simple and robust. We’ll most likely implement a more fine-grained permissions for things like reading stats or updating events (for marketing purposes) etc but for now only owners can use AI-tools. (Artist can have multiple owner-class members so Daft Punk is still covered!)

  • Artists can now see event chat logs on the archived event page in a separate tab. The whole event chat is there, exactly as it was during the event. You can also download the full log as a text file.

    The MCP server also knows how to read and search the chat logs so you can ask your favourite AI questions like “list all the music links posted on yesterdays event” or much more complex things by combining the public user data like “where are my most chatty listeners from based on yesterdays event”. Dumb example but the point is that the MCP server exposes lots of interesting data for your AI to use.

  • Artists can now create Polls during live events. This first iteration is super simple by design: create a poll with a question + 2-10 choices for answers, pick either one or multiple answers per listener. Listeners can then vote, ad the results update in realtime. You can close it whenever you like and hide/show it on the event page as you wish.

  • Artists can now delete, cancel, and hide events. Deleting is possible only for drafts and scheduled when there are no RSVPs. If the even has RSVPs, you can cancel it with an optional message to the listeners. Finally, like on v2, you can also hide any ended or cancelled event you want from your archives and statistics.

  • New Stream Dashboard is now available for artists when streaming. This is designed to be THE one place to manage and monitor your stream and the event when live. So, instead of opening the public live page like before, just open the dashboard instead.

    This is the place where you can manage the request system and shoutouts, manage polls, see the event and crew chat, and do other things like set event redirects and in case of emergency a technical hold while you attend more important things. Stream Dashboard monitors your stream health as well and gives you textual AND visual information as soon as there’s something wrong (like if the stream disconnects, bitrate is too low or if you’re sending audio as mono) and it gives you clear advice on what to do (or ability to hit just one button for technical hold which immediately informs the users and sets the live page in a special “We’ll be back soon”-state.

    This page is designed to be used via a full-screen desktop or a tablet, and you do not need to have any other page open when streaming as you can also chat from here as well. Like everything else we publish for the first time this is also a work in progress and will improve and evolve over time, but it’s already miles better of what we’ve ever had before!

  • You can now create and manage API keys yourself directly from the account page. (You need to enable experimental_features in your settings to see it.) This allows you to start building with our APIs with no human interaction which is sometimes nice when you need the break for the humanity :sweat_smile: Note: for security reasons this feature works only via the account page, it cannot be used programmatically. The key itself is of course the opposite; it’s meant for scripting and automation.

Enhancements

  • The open source playlistparser-library has been upgraded once more. Actually, twice! :sweat_smile: It now parses properly Engine DJ history exports that refer to cloud-sources that are not available in your local library.

    The tool also added a cli command that makes it possible for you to run it without installing using uv-tool: uvx playlistparser parse myplaylist.csv outputs text version of the result. This upgrade is also mirrored to our PlaylistConverter tool and the artist event setlist uploads — both of which use this library under the hood.

  • Event setlist modal now allows removing individual tracks from uploaded setlist. This makes it much easier to use for example history files as your setlists as you can just click and remove any ghost-tracks you tested pre-set or on a muted player during the set.

  • Request system exposes now a “queued” state that in ui is labelled as “Playing soon”. This enables new workflows and better communication back to the requester and voters for the “yes, this is a good fit wor the show and will play at some time, please don’t keep asking every minute”-situation. (This is especially handy in offline events where drunk people keep indeed askig it over and over again; our APIs allow you to build an automaticly updating ‘Coming Up Soon’ screen for the booth, for example.)

  • Improved the load time of the whole Slipmat app for authenticated users. Opening the site happens now much faster than before.

  • All backend and frontend dependencies have been upgraded, with some minor refactorings due to major version upgrades.

Bugfixes

  • There was an issue with the playlistparser library with modern Traktor playlists that messed up track ordering and counts. This was fixed in a separate playlistparser upgrade and as a result the PlaylistConverter is now fixed as well. Thank You Don H for the bug report! :folded_hands:
  • Chat message sending is now more reliable. Also, previously when a message failed to send, each subsequent retry for that same message automatically failed as well. This is no longer the case.
  • Chat messages are now escaped properly, meaning that all links and special characters show up properly now and nothing gets broken. The system double-escaped some messages before which is why some links and messages got broken special characters.
  • Fixed an issue with MCP server GitHub issue search. This works now properly.
  • Fixed two separate issues with shout-out recordings and playback.
  • Fixed an issue where website deployment resulted in random errors for users who had the website open but idling for a long time. This one was a bit hard to find but we now force-refresh your browser if you leave it open on Slipmat for a long time and come back to it after we have deployed a new version of the site in the meanwhile.
  • Fixed several issues in chat message enrichments (where messages with links get metadata like the page social preview image and short description text). This is now more robust and all known issues are handled silently so the logs are not filling up with unnecessary noise for things like “the site was down when we tried to look at it”.
  • Fixed several various minor issues where Roadies (basically just Slipmat slang for currently just ‘operator on artists events’ – but can be other things later if wanted) were treated as artists in various places the frontend but correctly not in the backend. We’re consistent now; roadies are just crowd control helpers on live events.
  • Fixed an issue in starting Ad Hoc events.
  • Fixed an issue in stopping the recording in the audio recorder tool for Firefox.
  • Fixed legacy v2 artist profile bio rendering; the legacy bios display correctly now.
  • Fixed several instances of unnecessary automated Sentry issue reports being sent from unnecessary situations. This lowers the amout of Sentry reports and makes it much easier to see and react to real issues.

Frankie Streaming Server Updates

  • The Frankie encoder has been updated to deliver better performance and lower latency with the cost of slightly worse video quality for lower video settings.

    Our aim will never be best possible video quality because we simply don’t have the means to do that with shoestring budgets but the default encoder sends the original video you send untouched to the listeners who can ingest it so it already is the best it can ever be. The only quality that suffers is the smaller/mobile sizes that need to be re-encoded and compacted. Important: audio is never touched at all, it’s always pass-through!

  • Frankie has a new code_encoder which is meant for situations where you want pass-through video and audio. This is not suitable for most normal uses as the lieteners must be able to ingest your stream as-is. What you can use this for is things like remote-video parties, and special screen sharing or live coding events. This, like all Frankie details are documented on the docs site.

Under the Hood

  • We’ve exposed new public API endpoints for working with events and requests These allow, amongst other things, you to post messages in chat, read and manage requests, and read event chat through the API using your API key. There’s API documentation in the docs which explicitly encourages you to experiment and tinker with your and our data as much as you like. And as always, all comments and feature requests are welcome :slight_smile:

Known Issues

While we don’t have any known open bugs at the moment, there’s still a lot of sharp corners around various UIs across the site and applications. Designing and itrating UIs is superduper difficult and slow. It also just doesn’t work without actual hands-on experiments and usage, which is why every single suggestion and bug report is extremely helpful and appreciated.

One of the biggest challenges at the moment is that we don’t really have a coherent template/UI system ready for any of the big surfaces like public event pages, artist pages, account pages, etc. We have some building blocks but all pages vary somewhat and event hings like buttons are still evolving. Every single week some of the pages and UIs are getting more love but I personally still feel the pain when I see those unfinished and inconsistent UIs all over the place. It will take more time than the rest of the features but we’ll get there eventually!

Once More About Slipmat Security

This week the Web developer community got bitten once more with a worm attack that stole developer credentials by infecting hundreds of software packages (which is the most likely way for a site like Slipmat to leak any private data). Slipmat was not affected. We use a packagemanager that by default does not run any postinstall scripts that allow attacks like this, and we have implemented a cooldown period for all dependencies which means that we can only install packages over a certain age so that these kinds of attacks become practically impossible.

Information security is becoming more and more important aspect of our everyday lives and we want to build Slipmat in a way that keeps you and your data secure.