Sprint 13 – I Need a Break

email, game night, security, spam, stats, validation

July 5th, 2020

It’s not me, it’s you… just joking! OR AM I?

At the start of the last sprint, I was starting to feel burnout on the horizon, so to keep momentum I did one big push the last two weeks and got two lots of “releases” ready, one for this update and one for the next.

Next sprint, instead of developing stuff, I’m going to take a break and do some game night videos, some community research, gaming and sleeping hoping it’ll help me get back in a good mental space 🙂

With that said, it’s still been another incredible 2 weeks working on SoSa!

This picture is unrelated, I just really wanted to use it

Before we get started, thank you to Kira, Anthony, Joseph and Justine all for becoming Patreons this sprint! we’re now up to 12 / $226 a month which is enough to cover a couple of servers.

If you’d like to support SoSa and get some perks when we relaunch, behind the scenes content then please consider becoming a Patron, here!

So! here’s what i’ve been working on this sprint!

Game Night

Thank you everyone that’s coming along to these, it’s a lot of fun having you and a good way to spend a Sunday evening.

Next SoSa game night we will be playing Jackbox Party 3, 4, 5 and 6!

Sunday 26th July 1900-2100 GMT / 1200-1400 PT / 1500-1700 ET

You don’t need to buy anything this time around, it’s free to take part and you just need a mobile phone / web browser.

Games are max 6-8 players but unlimited audience players, so if there’s a lot of us we can either split ya’ll into groups or just take it in turns who plays!

You can grab a ticket here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sosa-plays-jack-box-party-tickets-112353648788

E-mail Validation

Spam accounts can be pretty annoying in a lot of communities, so to help reduce these we need to make sure people’s e-mail addresses are in a valid format, the domain exists (eg gmail.com, hotmail.com, somecustomdomain.com) and it’s got a good trust rating.

This sprint, not only did I introduce e-mail validation which checks the e-mail address conforms to RFC 822, but also I do something called a whois check on the domain name, which tells me who owns the domain and how old it is.

Later I can use this information to check if the domain is trusted and enforce additional security on any e-mail addresses that look questionable as well as randomising the user journey to stifle bots.

Username validation

Stupidly, when I created the registration system a user could have a blank username or one with unusual characters, emojis etc, which one of our testers took great joy in exploiting…

I’ve now restricted usernames so they have to have to be in the English Alphabet or contain an underscore, dash or numbers. They’ve got a minimum length of 3 and a maximum length of 20 characters.

We will probably tweak these rules as time goes on to fit people’s needs. This won’t effect “nicknames” that can be anything you like.

Registration and Forgotten Password Emails

So you’ve just registered on SoSa and you some how have forgotten your password already. It’s fine, you’re an idiot. I’m not one to judge!

In both cases, you need an e-mail! One to tell you that you just registered with SoSa (incase you forgot) and another to give you a code so you can reset your password!

This sprint, I made the API send both of these using AWS SES and the good news is Amazon agree’d to let me send 50,00 e-mails a day! so prepare your inboxes!

Release 1.0.4

Just like last sprint, you can access what’s included in this sprints release here: https://blog.sosa.net/alpha-release-1-0-4/

Stats

Another great sprint in terms of the numbers!

LinkedIn grew from 409 to 462

Patreon gained 4 new Patrons! Thank you Kira, Anthony, Joseph and Justine

Our Beta List grew from 311 to 316

Last but not least, our Google search performance is getting worse and personally I blame Trump!

Sprint 13 – I Need a Break