September Update – State of Mixtape and current events

September Update – State of Mixtape and current events

It’s been a while. So much happened in April, I broke the post into 3 different posts and then just was too overwhelmed to finish them. The summer has brought various fixes to our Accounts SSO (Single Sign On) system. Also a lot of GitGud support issues.

Stuff being discussed in this blog post in order:

  • Twitter accounts in jail
  • Cloudflare removing us
  • Server resource needs
  • GitGud sign on issues
  • Tavrn.gg testing
  • Mixtape’s upcoming update

Twitter Jail

Twitter locked all our social media accounts in June. For a while we did not have access to them and only recently regained access and control over them. You can check them out here:

Sapphire Social Media: Facebook, Twitter

Mixtape.moe Social Media: Facebook, Twitter

GitGud Social Media: Twitter

Bye Bye Cloudflare

2 weeks ago CloudFlare sent us a termination notice related to Mixtape.moe. We are no longer cached by CloudFlare. This has been a long time coming, but thankfully we had prepared. Currently with our spread of servers, we are able to handle the brunt of the bandwidth needs. However this doesn’t come without some downside. The extra traffic will affect some loading times, but we’re quickly resolving this with better scaling setups to distribute the loads.

The need for better and more resources

Then we found out our primary storage server seems to be capped at 250mbps when we’re paying for 1gbps port. Asking about this got the capped set to 100mbps and support asking if we want to format our server. So getting data off this server has us fighting with download requests. This is nothing new to us and we’ve had to deal with this before. We’re going to be deploying a few more servers to help distribute this load.

We’re likely going to need to bring on additional servers to speed up the network. We’re also working on additional tools to help sort out this mess. Any donations would be helpful.

GitGud Sign On Issues

In July, we had a bug crop up on GitLab that caused our crafted Account system to be disconnected from GitGud’s GitLab account system. During this time we had people signing up on GitGud without going through the Sapphire Accounts setup. When we restored Sapphire Accounts logins, these people couldn’t login because of this. We’ve been fixing these on a per case basis. We’ve had a banner message about this up for months. If you still need help logging into GitGud, come onto our Discord and ask in the #support channel.

Tavrn.gg testers wanted

We’re looking for people to test out early versions of Tavrn.gg in browser and on Mastodon clients. Ask about it in our Discord. Check out the #tavrn channel for more information and ask where to try it out. We have a lot of issues to fix and features to develop so be mindful of this early access.

Mixtape’s Upcoming Update

Changing Mixtape is not an easy thing. We have millions of users that use the site from around the world. Any downtime at any time is a major issue. We’ve been churning on this Mixtape update for a while. It’s not very easy to work on it on the side since we are not paid to work on Mixtape (and other Sapphire projects/sites). Because of our resources in both manpower and money, we spend a lot of our time handling fires instead of making new features and improving. We hope to deliver on this soon, keep a look out for a blog post about all the new changes to Mixtape for this update when we finally release it. I know it’s been a long time coming, but bear with us.

The main new functions the newer Mixtape will bring:

  • A whole new front-end design on our new Sapphire CSS framework
  • A rewritten backend system from the ground up based on Go
  • Accounts via Sapphire Accounts
  • Save uploads
  • Delete uploads
  • Group uploads
  • Upgrade to increase upload sizes
  • Upload Pastes to Mixtape
  • File viewing/preview in browser
  • A better and easer record & upload tool

Some or all of these will be on the new Mixtape update at launch and we’ll update from there. Changing out the entire system will be the major challenge.


Thank you for taking the time to read this update. We’ll be providing more details on what is happening on a regular basis. Please check our social media pages for important updates and news on the fly.