Year in Review - 5.0 build 335

This December marked 3 years of Plan development. It has been an interesting year. Year in review post below, change log for this bugfix update at the bottom.

I was going to write about what was done this year, but that became a 2 page essay so I scrapped it. Then I tried to write about the amount of work that went into this year, but that turned into another long essay.

Long story short, this year I worked on 5.0 update almost every weekend from April to October. The work didn’t start in April, but February, when the redesign was only on the design table. Soon after 5.0 was released, some cool milestones were reached, such as over 1000 servers running Plan, Top 30 of Spigot plugins by Rating and Plan also appeared in the background of LinusTechTips video for a few seconds. Removing installation roadblocks for minigame networks was also successful. (I know this because someone got a Bungee server with 925 Plan servers in the database soon after the update according to bStats).

This recap is going to be a bit more personal this time, because while doing this review I realized that I’ve felt burnout creeping in for some months now. It makes sense, considering that Plan development has been almost half-time job on top of university studies. On 14th I started Christmas vacation from Plan Discord support and after a few days off, the symptoms seem to have subsided. - I think changes are needed next year when I’ll come back after new years.

You gave some awesome feedback and positive words in the satisfaction survey though! The average for How well did we do this year? was a whopping 9.2/10. Overall satisfaction also increased from 8.2 to 8.7 from last year. I’ll address some of the things that were brought up here:

• The settings for data removal are not clear - you need to change stuff under Time.Thresholds on all servers to prevent unwanted removal of data. At least /Plan/serverConfiguration helps with this somewhat until better grouping of the settings.
• High Memory usage - This has been reported only by some users, so I suspect that it is due to Plugin integrations. If you’re having a large memory usage try disabling all Extensions in the Plan config (bonus points if you can figure out which one it is and report it)
• There was a suggestion to track custom PAPI placeholder values over time - Sounds like a good idea to keep in mind. This would need some additions to the DataExtension API, as currently dynamic data or graphs are not supported.

The survey and I seem to be on the same page on where to focus on next: Extensibility and Extensions. Performance optimizations came in 3rd spot. I’ll probably keep January off from development while figuring out sustainable form of support, so that’s what will be on the menu when I get back on the horse.

I hope to see you when I get back. Thank you for amazing 3 years and hopefully many more to come.

New

Added Access-Control-Allow-Origin option for Webserver (#1251)

CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) was preventing Plan data to be used on custom websites. To allow Plan data be used on other pages (for online graphs and stuff), config setting Webserver.Security.CORS.Allow_origin added with default value '*'.

Bugfixes

Punchcard bugfixes

• Fixes Punchcard not using the TimeZone specified in config (was using server timezone) (#1250)
• Punchcard now displays from 12 am to 11 pm. Previously it showed from 1 am to 00 am. (#712)

Relative path to session buttons by @jyhsu2000

• Fixes the Player page and Server page links inside sessions when Plan is behind a reverse-proxy using a subdirectory (eg. www.something.com/plan/)