Announcements

Very easy upgrade to the latest version of Lemmy, v0.19.5. Major updates from this and the previous point release:

• Local Only Communities: Local communities will not federate, they're "local only" :P. This is good for meta discussions and I might make this community local only, for instance.

• Post hiding: you can now hide posts as a dropdown option!

• Vote display user setting: There is now a user setting to change the way vote counts are displayed, called vote display mode.

• Improved moderation tools: URL blocklists can prevent links to specific sites (we have no use for this right now), plus some improved report history and mod history.

• Federation with Wordpress and others: We will now federate with some other software, like Wordpress. Kind of cool.

This community is amazing and we barely have to do any moderation. There are some new tools here but we have no intent to become "heavy handed" in any way. Continue being amazing people!

We finally upgraded from v0.18.5 to the new point release, and are now on latest v0.19.3!

The major changes that come with v19 are:

• Instance blocking for users! I think this one was requested for a long time by many users but now you can block instances yourself in user settings. If you block an instance, any posts from communities on that instance are hidden for you.

• Better 2-factor authentication. We've had this turned off because it was just broken previously but I'll be testing this today and if it's working, will enable it.

• Better remote following. You can subscribe to communities on other instances from those communities in a more natural way. This is now similar to what Mastodon does.

• User data export/import. You can export your data! If you ever want to leave your account at mtgzone.com we'll be sad but you can not import community follows, blocklists, and profile settings into a new account somewhere else.

There are some other server improvements too but these ones are the most relevant for y'all.

As always, please let @andrew or @mike know of any issues or bugs or suggestions!

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

Unnecessarily detailed dev ops notes:

If you noticed some hiccups this morning it was because the first upgrade failed on mtgzone.com after working smoothly on our stage environment. I had to roll it back and try again shortly after.

I think in retrospect, it was a database migration that was just taking a very long time and should have perhaps just waited longer. I did inadvertently wait about 5 minutes the second time while checking the logs and lemmy reported no errors then 👍

cross-posted from: https://mtgzone.com/post/307797

Announcement Date: December 4, 2023

Standard:

• No changes

Pioneer:

• Karn, the Great Creator is banned.

• Geological Appraiser is banned.

• Smuggler's Copter is unbanned.

Modern:

• Fury is banned.
• Up the Beanstalk is banned.

Legacy:

• No changes

Vintage:

• No changes

Explorer:

• Karn, the Great Creator is banned.
• Geological Appraiser is banned.

Pauper:

• Monastery Swiftspear is banned.

Effective Date:

• Tabletop and Magic Online: December 4, 2023
• MTG Arena: December 5, 2023

Very easy upgrade just now to the latest version of Lemmy (0.18.5), I doubt anyone even saw the maintenance mode message!

This was mostly a security update with really just one addition:

This release fixes a problem with federation of moderation actions performed by admin accounts. Specifically there is an check when receiving remote federation actions, which is incorrectly rejecting them in some cases. The problem is fixed by this release.

This should be the last release before the larger v0.19 release that will introduce some new features finally! Please take a look at the full v0.18.5 release notes if you’d like more info.

We have a new Matrix chat channel!

We set this up for anyone in the community interested in more real-time discussion or to get to know other community members.

This post links to the space to join. Right now there's just one room, which you can access directly here: https://matrix.to/#/#mtgzone:matrix.org

All feedback welcome, as always!

Upgrade to the latest version of Lemmy (0.18.3) was extremely quick and painless! 🙌

This was mostly a backend optimization release, improving a lot of the database queries and reducing the overall database size by a significant amount. Please take a look at the full release notes if you'd like more info.

After a few hours of downtime last night it looks like our server migration and update to the latest Lemmy v0.18.2 was successful.

If anyone is experiencing any issues or quirks please let us know here or at our Mastodon account if that's easier.

For the curious, we moved from Digital Ocean to Hetzner, which will help us scale better in the future at a much cheaper cost. We also cleaned up some database inconsistencies that may have been introduced in a previous failed/buggy update. Cautiously optimistic that everything is stable!

Hi everyone, I apologize first off for the random website downtime and connection issues you might be seeing. We've been attempting to update the Lemmy software this website uses and migrate to a new server and unfortunately have been experiencing some issues.

Given the bugs we're running into and how long this is taking, our plan is now:

• Keep the site on version 0.18.0 for the time being as it's stable

• In the background, work on a separate server with the latest Lemmy software and make sure our existing database can import correctly into this latest version. When all of the tests on that are good, we can make the switch to that new server.

I'm unfortunately not sure why the updates are failing but we've been working with the Lemmy admin community and I'm confident we can get this resolved.

There is unfortunately one known bug on our current site: saving your profile for some reason is returning an error that the "user already exists." We'll be working on this separately but there's a good chance this might just exist for the next week or so until we can get the full migration done.

Thank you all for your patience and involvement here! All feedback is welcome as always.

Andrew

New accounts now need to answer a short question

We decided to turn off open registrations for the site due to a massive influx of bot/spam accounts last week (about 27,000+). We originally made registrations completely open (no email verification or application) as a way to help foster new users but didn't anticipate this!

New accounts now need to be approved by an admin after answering one "application" question ("what's your favorite card, with a link to scryfall"). This should completely mitigate the spam account registrations going forward.

Removing the spam accounts from the database

Concurrently we're cleaning up all these spam accounts. It's a large number but the query we're running looks to only hit these bots and not any real users, and I'm going through the entire list to spot check as well. If for some reason you were affected by this though, I apologize and please reach out asap and/or register again!

Hopefully the new account changes aren't too annoying for new users and will completely stop the irritating spam.

Have a great Friday/weekend!

I spent some time modifying the default "darkly" theme to support wider monitors and make some usability/readability improvements.

It's called "mtgzone-dark" and is currently the default theme for new and logged out users. If you're on the previous default and would like to test it out head over to your personal settings and select it in the dropdown next to "Theme" towards the bottom!

After some debugging over the weekend and into this morning we finally have federation working as it should!

Now if you search for any community or user @mtgzone.com from another federated instance (Lemmy, Mastodon, or any app in the fediverse) you'll be able to correctly follow it there.

For instance, if you have a Mastodon account at mastodon.social, you can login there and search for either https://mtgzone.com/c/mtg or @mtg@mtgzone.com and click to follow this community from your Mastodon timeline.

For the curious, ChappIO and @megan@sunny.garden in this GitHub issue finally solved this one.