After a few days of work, Neregate is back on track.

How exciting it is to manage a website, running into problems one after another.
I’ll be catching up on posts and emails a bit later, but for now I’ll list the most significant changes that were made during the maintenance.

- Neregate now uses a cache system that covers the entire blog. I didn’t want to look into this before because of the complexity of the site (mature content filter and cache conflict with each other).
Since I had to do it to reduce the load on the database, I managed to code something to make them coexist nicely with each other. The only drawback is that users with mature content filter turned off will still download 18+ posts on pages, but won’t see them. Couldn’t find a better alternative (and I doubt there is one) yet. Hopefully there aren’t that many 18+ posts so the load won’t increase much.
The good point is that cached pages will load almost instantly, improving browsing speed on already visited pages (by you or somebody else). Cache is purged every few hours or so.

- Reworked the content warning filter, which no longer requires a page reload, and works with the cache as well. Gotta find a solution for users with JavaScript turned off, as they won’t see the warning :/

- Recent charts have been compressed from PNG to JPG, to reducing download time (which is taking processing slots). The JPG compression used is optimized for the web and provides excellent quality and compression, so the quality difference won’t be that big between now and before. About two thirds of the bandwidth are taken by charts (~1TB per month, out of ~1.5TB total), so this is small change for a huge server-side improvement !

- Hotlink protection is active. Any website trying to like to my images directly will now feel the wrath of Nyaruko.

Currently working on implementing a new image slideshow for the main page. The current one is a pain to maintain, and keeps breaking over and over (like now.. *cough*).
Because of the load, I’m starting to wonder if I should just remove the image galleries permanently (they’ve been offline for a while anyway).
Will be catching up later on other fixes and posts, as I need to get back to work. There are other background changes, but nothing users should be aware of.

Cache system is quite delicate to handle on Neregate so if you have any trouble or find anything wrong, please get back to me asap so that I can look into it. Thanks !

Btw, that ain’t news, but new banners.