Slipmat Week Notes 5/2026

Site Development
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Good hello peeps!

This has been a pretty tough week development-wise. Slipmat is such a vast project that sometimes working on it it feels like trying to drink a sea; you never see any progress no matter how much you do.

I created a new v2 Feature Parity project board on GitHub that visualizes the status of shipped v3 features in relation to v2. We also have a public v3.0.0 Milestone that tracks all v3 tickets. The current estimate shows that there’s still roughly 50 developer workdays of work to reach v2 feature parity. I hope these two pages help me focus the development efforts (and visualize them for everyone else). I’ll tackle at least few of these issues each week but it’s still going to take some time!

New Features

  • Chat now has a /refresh command that force-refreshes the page for everyone onthe channel. Useful for example when your video stops mid-stream and you want to make sure everyone catches up when you finally get things back on track (v2 feature parity!)
  • We now have a start of a homepage for authenticated users. This is an experimental first step and will be improved in future releases.
  • You can now friend users (friending and blocking allow features like private messages in chat). At the moment this is only visible from the new experimental homepage and on your user account page for pending requests. We’ll make these better (for example show on user profile in chat and on live page) in the future, this first step lays the groundwork.
  • You can now mark interest in upcoming events by setting “Coming”, “Maybe” or “Can’t go”. This gives the artist an indicator about popularity of the upcoming event and also enables us to build social features like showing which events your friends are attending.
  • These Backstage artist and site news are now synchronized to the new site
  • Chat now has private messages behind a feature flag. Meaning that the feature is disabled by default but if you want to test it early, you need to explicitly toggle the feature flag on from your account settings. After setting the flag you can start private chats with friends (only friends!) by typing /msg nick your message! in chat which will open a new private channel tab.

Bugfixes

  • Potentially fixed a font issue caused by incorrect CSS. (Potentially, because never couldn’t reproduce the issue on any device.) Thank You Venus Ursa and others for helping debug the issue!
  • Chat now properly scrolls to bottom when changing channels both in desktop and mobile
  • Closed event chat channels no longer linger in the chat sidebar
  • Made a MAJOR refactor in the event warmup background tasks; the tasks are now much more resilient to all kinds of random issues (server restarts, server, crashes, timezone changes, clock changes, event, reschedules, event timezone changes, etc) and retried several times after event creation and rescheduling for maximum resiliency. This means that events will now automatically enter into warmup at the exactly right time every time :tada:

Enhancements

  • YouTube video links are now fetched and displayed properly in chat. Also the other rich previews now look better, especially on mobile.
  • Anonymous homepage looks a bit better, although not nearly enough for public consumption.

Misc tasks:

  • Updated Frankie to use latest ffmpeg and nginx
  • Created an admin tool for examining scraper inputs in production. This helps immensely in debugging issues that only happen in production but never locally in development mode
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