Well, it’s flair stuff so I guess it made sense to some extent.
Another thing would be custom titles.
Sounds like a bug 
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Or it could be a Feature™
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Would it be possible to merge the different versions of 星の王子さま?
The gradings are all pretty different right now, and I don’t see any explanatory text on any of the individual book pages as to why they’d need to be split off.
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I’m not sure there’s a system in place to only merge the gradings right now, but merging the books I think it would not be a good idea, as they have different formats/pages.
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They have different translators so they may indeed be different difficulty levels. Different kanji usage and/or furigana is possible as well
Edit: I think I asked Brandon about this in the past, although maybe for a different book and it came down to there being different translations
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Interesting; I hadn’t considered the different translators aspect. Are there other such books represented thus on Natively?
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@eefara @cat Right, 星の王子さま has different translators so they are fundamentally different texts in my mind… thus leading to different listings.
There are a variety of western books with different translators & editions on Natively, another example Anne of Green Gables. You’ll note there that some of those books are children’s editions though, so they would definitely be different difficulties.
Ultimately, I just think we should only have one listing for a text if all the editions have the same text. If there are editions with substantially different texts (like translations, or children editions) then we should treat them as fundamentally different books.
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For anyone experiencing slowness issues today, sorry! Trying to figure out what’s going on 
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As an update on this, it appears to be a spotty network issue from amazon around my database, which is unfortunate as there’s not much I can do here.
I will keep trying to see if there’s anything I can do, but we may have to wait it out
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Yes… it’s been going all day. I don’t know what to do to be honest 
I’ve logged super simple db queries taking insanely long due to I presume to be connection issues. I didn’t change anything recently, so it’s just amazon. Tried restarting everything as well… but it just keeps going on, ugh. No cpu or memory issues on the machines, or traffic spikes.
If any techies has any bright ideas, let me know 
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Silly question, is the server activity so big that it needs to be in AWS infrastructure?
Anyways, seems like AWS is in “good health”:
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
So I wouldn’t be so sure it’s connectivity issues.
FWIW amazon ‘health status’ is usually a joke, just always shows green. Twitter is usually a better barometer, but i’m also not getting a lot of success there either. There definitely is some connectivity issues (I’ve logged a simple query taking over 5 seconds) but it’s complicated to diagnose, since the requests keep dropping off at different places. A database connectivity issue makes sense, but yeah, nothing is 100% certain. Still trying to work it through.
You could probably run locally of course, but AWS has a lot of benefits. I am starting to tire though of these server issues. I may just need to hire someone more experienced than me to resolve these things. It’s pretty intolerable the current situation.
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Sometimes it’s not that much cheaper to run things locally in a redundant way.
I used to have a popular website before getting rid of it, and while it was a challenge to balance things, I never moved it to the “cloud”.
A few uneducated options:
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Putting some cache in place for some database queries that are not that critical, to reduce the reliance on them. (For example, does it need to check for available gradings everytime you visit the frontpage even if you haven’t added a new book lately? Does it need to check your feed everytime?.. etc)
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I haven’t tried this myself, but maybe running the website behind a service like Cloudflare?
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Yeah I have a database cache.
Potentially, I haven’t used Cloudflare either. This outage will prompt me to once again have to reconsider things. Ugh.
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Anyway, hope it gets better soon!
I remember staying up late figuring out when things were falling apart and it sucks!
Just a security tip, it is highly recommended that the server never spit server versions or operating systems, so I’d take a look at the error handling and anything that could give a hint on what it runs.
This avoids targetted attacks based on vulnerable versions of things if they have detected them on a scan.
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You’re right of course, I should fix that nginx error handling. I do have normal 404 & 500 handling when things aren’t broken, but right now that handler is sometimes failing.
Not a huge concern, but you’re right I should probably fix.
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A static 404/500 with an invisible frame/iframe to a script that pings you that something went wrong should suffice (probably off-site, since things already broke enough that you are getting served a static error page instead of one being handled by the application).
Also the database of the forums I assume is on a different place? Because this seems to be working properly.
Yes. FWIW, i’m now like 99% certain it’s the database connectivity, will try to resolve by making a new instance or upgrade or something. I will see. Been a bad day all around here. 
Edit: Doing a db update just in case, you will see the site is even more broken
Edit 2: Update didn’t work so trying to upgrade the machine, will be down for a little longer. If that doesn’t work, I will try to alter the connection and see if that fixes it. Like I said before, this is a database slowdown issue, most likely a connection issue on amazon, so trying a few things. Hopefully not down for more than another hour, but I’m working on it.
I’m sorry everyone. I will need to rethink how I handle these issues so it doesn’t happen again. 
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