⛑Recovery From Failure, 🧩User Experience Enhancements & 🏦 New Payment Methods

Scrolller Bi-Weekly Update April 4th, 2022

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our bi-weekly update. This sprint's main highlight is the updates on the user experience side, new updates on the premium community plan to add new data on Scrolller, global navbar experience, and why Scrolller faced a downtime last week.

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Newsletter Frequency Update

Bi-weekly → Monthly

We are updating the frequency of publishing the newsletter from bi-weekly to monthly. This will give us enough time to prepare for the newsletter and to ensure its quality of content. Thank you for looking forward to our newsletter.

User Highlight

This week's user highlight goes to "Walt". The summary of user feedback is as follows:

Is there a way for the scroller to save my place so that the next time I visit I can only view new posts in each category since the last time I visited?

Scrolller's Action

Walt, Your feedback is well received. This is a great feature suggestion. We would like to inform you that we have added this to our roadmap. The best way to achieve it is by implementing “History” for users’ viewed content. With this history, we can easily eliminate the content from the category that has already been viewed. We believe that implementing such a feature will enhance the user experience.

User Experience

406689 → 417357

Downtime on Scrolller

This week Scrolller faced several downtimes where the majority of our content was not properly loading for our users. This was caused by a couple of issues that somehow happened at the same time leaving Scrolller barely useable for our users. We thank our users for immediately reaching out to us as soon as they saw these issues. We want to shed some light on what happened.

• A group of aggressive bots started to scrape Scrolller sending millions of requests that consumed ~90% of resources on our servers. We want to let our users know that currently, we don’t have a public API and our servers cannot bear the burden of getting aggressively scrapped at the moment. But Scrolller believes in giving back to the community, as soon as we have the capacity to upgrade our servers we will enable a public API. That will help get data from our site without actually bringing it down.

• The content on Scrolller is not entirely hosted on our servers. We use content from other partner websites as we give them impressions and link back to them on each piece of content that is served from their end. As we resolved the issues with bot scrapping, we identified one of our major content partners disabled all content from their end for displaying on scrolller. This caused images/videos to try to get loaded and fail on the Scrolller homepage. We reached out to them to resolve this issue and got everything working again.

We are thankful for the valuable supporters that not only reached out to us about this problem but also helped in debugging process. Some users tested our site and gave continuous feedback as we resolved issues one by one. This made the recovery process much faster and easier for our development team.

We would love to have valuable suggestions on how can we avoid such incidents in the future.

Global Navbar Experience

In the Scrolller journey, We try our best to introduce features that make the Scrolller user experience more engaging and enjoyable. Scrolller received amazing feedback from our users on the launch of Navbar on the home page. The update brought all necessary controls within reach of our users.

Navbar enables our users to quickly access the most popular options to get an even better experience scrolling through content, but it’s not where we plan to stop. We want this handy feature to be implemented on every page. We are now planning to deploy this navbar on the whole website. Main collections, personal collections, search pages, and categories pages will benefit most from it. All the sort and filter options will be moved to the navbar for easy access.

As the user moves from the homepage to a certain page the navbar will inherit all controls of the page where the user will navigate. It will make the navigation better and more seamless.

Our Ui/Ux designer has been working on creating navbar designs for every single page on scrolller. Below are some designs on how our navbar will look and behave on various pages.

Turning on Scrappers

Scrolller has a massive amount of data stored on its servers. Scrolllers' goal is to be a go-to place for every content lover on the planet. To achieve this goal we need to provide the most engaging and quality content on our platform. But the biggest issue in this industry is that content gets old and users lose interest in such content. So, we continuously need to provide users with the newest and most engaging content every single day.

Blockers

Scrolller is in the process of transitioning from file storage to object storage entirely. Our previous file storage was not efficient. Switching the way we store our content requires us to update our scraping script to upload files to object storage instead of the file system. The greatest obstacle turned out to be the outdated Kotlin version of the script is written. This means packages that serve the purpose of updating files have a conflict, as they are written in the newer versions.

Solutions

Our team is focused on adapting the current script according to new storage so that Scrolller will populate with new content on daily basis for our users. To make sure we minimize the waste, we are trying to run scraper in the current version, but using Object storage. It will eliminate the need to re-write the whole code from scratch.

If this approach fails we will refactor its functionalities to a language that is more popular, as it’s hard to find Kotlin developers that can maintain such outdated code.

Fix for Sorting on Collections

Sort being one of our most used features on Scrolller is not working for our users for some time now. This important feature is highly dependent on the scrapper. The sorting stops working if the scrapper is not running.

Why sorting is dependent on the scrapper?

When the user sorts a collection as “NEW” the scrapper actually takes that information and visits the source to fetch all new content that has not been added on Scrolller yet. It allows our scripts to make informed decisions on what content to add rather than randomly picking up data. By turning on this important part of Scrolller, our sorting functions as Top, New, and Hot will start working as expected.

Please let us know in the comments, which tech stack is better suited for such technical challenges. It will help us onboard talented engineers that can make it happen.

Closing the Loops on Partially Completed Features

The Scrolller team is focused on the enhancement of user experience on Scrolller. Before we move to any big features, we are now fully focused on the completion of essential options for our users and closing the loops on partially completed features. Some of these features as exclusive content and categories filters have been on our roadmap. We can see the users have shown quite a lot of interest in these features.

Exclude Filters

We know that sometimes some specific images, videos, or even whole collections can trigger some users. We are adding necessary functionality that will allow users to exclude such content from their-scrolling experience. These hidden contents and collections will appear in the excluded content section of filters. Users can always choose to see that content again by removing it from exclude list.

Filters on Categories

Scrolller is working on adding the SFW and NSFW filters, making it easier for our users to explore their interests. These filters will only display categories that match users’ content preferences. The team is also looking into expanding SFW categories so our users can enjoy SFW Scrolller equally as they enjoy the NSFW side of Scrolller.

User Experience

• Content Recommendation Emails (Done)

• Making Scrolller Resilient to Failure (In Progress)

• Scrapper Updates (In Progress)

• Filters for Excluding Content (In Progress)

• Filters on Categories (Back Log)

• Scrolller APP (Back Log)

Revenue

Updates on Discord Community

One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. Scrolller has been working on revamping its community experience completely and now features a completely reorganized discord server. There are many updates to the server to encourage interaction between community members.

Previously our server lacked the necessary rules that were causing some sub-par quality content to be posted there. Now users have to accept a set of rules before being able to talk, discouraging raids on the server. There are roles to change your name or to be pinged for certain things. E.g events, question of the day, newsletter.

The general structure is overall improved by providing our community members with opportunities to enjoy quality memes, cool pics and videos, awesome collections, and opt-in and out of the NSFW channels. The community is thriving through these changes.

Ceph Issues and Way Forward

Scrolller experimented with Ceph to increase the content load speed for our users. This experiment was thought to be successful until we started adding new servers to the cluster. It proved that object storage is the way to success for us if we want to host tons of new content on Scrolller. It also proved that hosting such massive object storage servers by yourself is very expensive.

Since we faced some issues with our own Ceph cluster, we are testing the outsourcing of the object storage to an external provider. It will eliminate any risk of downtimes or losing data.

Our current data servers will be used as caching server front-ends. Once this solution proves to be efficient, we will host additional cache servers in other regions across the globe. For the end-users, the website will open faster, because it will load from servers located in close proximity to them.

Introducing Crypto Payments

Scrolller has completely revamped the subscription process for our users. They can easily manage their payment methods and subscriptions. Previously we only supported credit cards. There was no support for Crypto payments. This is getting changed as Scrolller is working on introducing virtual payments via online payment platforms like Paypal. Scrolller understands the pain point of our users that wants to subscribe to the service but don’t have a credit card. These features are currently under development and will soon be released for our users.

We would love to have your feedback. Your valuable suggestions will help us in improving the website for users all over the world.

Roadmap for Growth in Revenue

• Implementing a new Payment Service Provider (In Progress)

• Implementing new modes of Payments (InProgress)

• Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)

• Monetization Optimizations (In Progress)

• Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)

Outreach Team Updates

Reorganization and Efficiency

The outreach team has been reorganizing to easily shift focus between the different objectives.

Right now, as they continue to advance towards their goal, the members of the team reorganized their tasks in order to achieve maximum results from their activities, even though it was hard, they pulled through and began to reach, slowly, outreach goals.

To do so, they had to redefine their vision for the future and start building toward it. As always, communication was key to this part of the “rebuilding”.

They are continuing to use Reddit as a priority regarding social traffic, focused on sharing Scrolller to all the people that haven’t got a chance to know it. The vision is to continue getting traffic, without dropping the ball on our Content Creators project.

Looking forward to seeing positive results out of every little change made on the workflow and finally getting to where they want to be. Hyped up about what’s coming to the Scrolller team and the places we can get working better and better every day.

Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic

• Implementing Reddit (In Progress)

• Content creator's outreach (In Progress)

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Karol — Organizing development team and leading from the front.

Valentin — Taking complete ownership of the outreach team.

Tomas — Working on WDSLL for Social media outreach of Scrolller.

Tim — Researching on new potential categories for Scroller.

Sergiu — Working on Scrapper updates.

Mannan — Working on hiring new talent and making sure to consistently deliver new features to our users.

Chris — leading Scrolller team by example, working on generating revenue for the company.

Emmanuel — Helping in improving UI/UX for feature development.

Ai — Getting used to my new position, working on getting community members to talk to one another.

Have any feedback for us? Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections. We like hearing any feedback you have for us.

Road Map

You can share feedback with us about any of the new features below. Using this Airtable Form. Looking forward to your comments

This week

• Implementing a new Payment Service Provider (In Progress)

• Implementing new modes of Payments (InProgress)

• Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)

• Making Scrolller Resilient to Failure (In Progress)

• Scrapper Updates (In Progress)

• Filters for Excluding Content (In Progress)

• Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)

• Filters on Categories (Back Log)

• Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Backlog)

• Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)

P.S. As a reminder, subscribe to our newsletter if you are yet to walk with us on this Building Scrolller exciting yet challenging journey.

Until next time, happy Scrollling!