Another week, another set of new bug fixes and updates for you all! Here is some of what was in the batch which went out earlier this week.
As always, thanks to everyone who's taken the time to report a problem which they've found!
"Expansion for" text for recent game expansions
The submission process for new game expansions allowed users to attach its "parent" game, but this wasn't being stored properly in the database. This has now been corrected. Please note that we're still cleaning up some of the already-submitted expansions, but any new submissions will work properly and we'll get the rest fixed up here very soon!
By default, the collections list is meant to be sorted by the date on which the collection was most recently updated. That was happening, but it was only considering the day, and not the time. So, if 24 collections were updated on 18 Feb 2025, those 24 would then be sorted by their collection name. We've fixed this so that they're sorted by last-updated, down to the minute.
This was a bug in the reporting of the time that a sponsor's PSIs were last fully-generated. Basically, it was causing all sponsors' PSI regenerations to appear as though they had last occurred on February 3rd (not coincidentally, the date of our last code drop). This has been fixed!
Show the title-type of items when adding to collections
A little quality-of-life improvement for people who frequently add films to collections. Now, when you search on a term, you'll see not just the title name and year, but also what type of title it is -- "Film", "TV Series", "TV Episode" and so forth.
Require Email Validation to use Criticker
This is one which shouldn't affect most of you! But it's a change which will greatly improve our efforts to combat spam reviews and ratings. From now on, in order to use Criticker, you have to at least verify the email address you've signed up with. Before, we had been allowing unverified users up to 100 ratings before insisting on verification.
Multiple performance enhancements
We continue to identify performance problems, and improve the site's overall performance as much as possible. In this batch of updates, there were a number of fixes designed to do just that, such as severely limiting the ability of bots and crawlers to scrape the site, and the caching of several static, heavy queries. This is going to require a little downtime at some point in the next couple days -- we'll post a banner soon with the exact time frame.