We have been working on rewriting the site from the ground up and are now proud to make it public. It is not yet finished, and likely will not go live for quite a while, but we wanted to go public with it in order to gather feedback for continued development.
This rewrite was needed for a variety of reasons. The current site is closed source, with dated technology/practices and extremely difficult to develop for as it hasn't undergone any significant development since it was founded. The new site should be far easier to develop for as it uses a modern tech stack, with modern best practices. The goal is to be in a position to develop the site as the needs of the community change.
The current site has a lot of long unaddressed security concerns, such as not using https, that the new site addresses.
Additionally the new site features responsive design, properly supporting mobile and tablet screen sizes.
There’s too many other advantages of the new site to list them all here.
A live demo of the site can be found here:
https://demo.tasvideos.org/
The demo site regularly imports data from the live site. Anything that changes on the demo site (forum posts, submissions, page updates) between imports is lost when the imports happen. It can be tested thoroughly without any damage/effect to the current live site.
Note, there are currently issues with this test site going down every so often and not coming back up. We look to resolve this in the near future. (This is not a symptom of the code itself, but with a “demo” quality server setup, that we put in for now)
This website is open source and the git repository can be found here:
https://github.com/adelikat/tasvideos
The technical details of the site:
Backend: .net 5
Frontend: Vanilla JS
Database: Postgres
OS: Ubuntu
Please file an issue report on github if you find a relevant bug. Otherwise leave feedback below.
EDIT: Important information that was left out but relevant: Once the new site is ready and all data is properly migrated, it will become TASVideos.org. The old site will be archived.
EDIT2: Issues that must be addressed prior to going live can be found under the
2.1 Release Milestone.
EDIT3: There is now a new url for the demo site:
https://demo.tasvideos.org/