Development Blog – Full30 Upgrades and HD Video [May 2020]

2020 has been an absolutely insane year. To say that the on-going pandemic didn’t impact us would be an outright lie. That said, we’re still chugging along, and thought it was about time for a development update. Transparency is key, and we’re working hard to get that way on a more permanent basis.

Below, you’ll find a complete list of all the projects we have completed, and all of the projects we are currently working on.

How the Pandemic Impacts Us and Development.

Development Post for May 2020

For the sake of transparency, this needs to be stated. COVID-19 has had a drastic impact on the economy across the board. For us, this has impacted us two-fold. For starters, we have moved our entire staff off-site, and into remote positions. While this does slow down the work-speed, because remote meetings are time consuming, it has not put a complete halt to operations.

The second major impact for us has been the total re-allocation of our site-wide giveaway. Generally speaking, our giveaway goes towards getting medical supplies to first responders. Throughout COVID-19 however, our focus has shifted towards getting first responders proper protective equipment. If you’d like to help us get PPE out, check out this link.

Front-End User Upgrades and Improvements.

At the beginning of May, The Gun Collective posted a video that hit us directly in the feels. While it hurt to hear it, we knew he was right. We’re going to go ahead and post an embed of that video right here in the event you didn’t see it. It’s a well put together video, with well deserved criticisms of not only our competitors, but us as well.

We hear you loud and clear TGC. We’ll be better, because the firearms community deserves it.

HD Content is Back.

The first, and we believe most important, site upgrade after this video was released was the restoration of HD Content. We are currently working on a script that will be chugging through back-loaded videos and restoring them to 1080p as well. This feature was cut before as a stop-gap to lower the overhead during leaner days, but we are past that now. All current and future videos will be viewable in full HD. 4k and 1440p are not available at this time, but it is something we are considering in the future.

Full30 Site-wide Search Feature.

One of the more difficult front-facing tasks that we have to undertake is the building of a front-facing search engine on the web-page. For smaller sites, this is a much simpler task, as there are far fewer keywords that need to be searched and sorted. We have started a full re-work of our search system, and day-by-day the search algorithm continues to improve. Expect this tool to become more and more efficient as time passes.

Address Book Shareability.

Development Update May 2020

A new user feature that we are extremely excited about is the address book shareability feature. In addition to the traditional ways of sharing Full30 videos, you are now able to share a video with your friends directly through e-mail. This tool took a little while to get set-up in a manner that was fully secure, but after 60 hours of living on the struggle bus, one of our developers was able to get it up and running.

If you encounter any bugs with this feature, please use the bug report form here. This will immediately notify our development staff, who will begin to troubleshoot the issue you may have encountered.

Back-End Performance Enhancements and Development.

We’ll keep this section brief, as there’s not much here that directly impacts creators or users of the platform. As you all know, we’re a fully self-built platform. There is very rarely an occasion that we look to a third party for a solution to our problems. We believe that independently creating and building our platform is the only way to maintain any sense of freedom or liberty. As a result, we sometimes have to double back on ourselves to fix old issues that are creating new problems.

For example, a line of code from 2015 in our code broke. This caused a site-wide outage of video advertisements across the platform. It took over 120 hours to squash this single bug, but we did manage it. As a result of this, we are currently working to upgrade our entire back-end to a more modern system. This modern system will give us new tools that will expedite our abilities to develop front-end systems for you all.

All of that said, we won’t bore you with the nerdy back-end stuff that doesn’t impact you. Here’s some gun-porn instead.

Development Blog May 2020

Mobile Application Update and Development.

Over the past month, development has moved along in a very rapid fashion on the mobile application. We know, we’ve been promising this thing since like 2016. We get it. You’re probably tired of hearing the old trope of “Soon™” from a group of developers. That said, this is what we got wrapped up this month.

The integration of user features has been fully fleshed out. That means, when the app releases into beta, you will be able to like, comment, and subscribe in the same manner as you would in the desktop view. The framework for automatic log-ins, as well as smoothing out the video player has also been completed. Before we launch the mobile app into beta however, we need to fully go through and double check all of our work one final time to make sure nothing is broken, and everything is working in an optimal fashion.

We’re hoping to launch the test flight beta tests of the app in the very near future. All of our e-mail subscribers will get a notification when that happens. Like-wise, creators will be given access to a link that they can share with their supporters.

There are two incredibly difficult tasks that have to be accomplished before we can launch the app to the general public. First, we need to test the mobile app on a variety of different devices. This is why we’re doing a public test-flight to gather as much data as we can, from as many different platforms as possible. Second, we have to get past the barriers of the Apple Mobile App store. We’re confident in our abilities to do the second, but the first will be a much larger task that will require the work and assistance of the entire community.

Here’s some screenshots.

Full30 App Development

Final Rounds on Target.

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you’re a new creator looking to come onto Full30, we want to hear from you. UGC automation is still a work in progress, so for now we have to manually approve channels. This is a fairly simple process for the creator, but slightly time consuming for us. If you’re looking to get your channel set up here, please feel free to shoot an e-mail to [email protected]. Josh will get you all set up and running.

In the coming weeks, we’re also looking to be releasing the monetization process for new creators. Currently, this stage of the business is being re-visited by our owners. It will have minimal to no impact on creators who have been with us for a very long time. This is primarily being done to give our new creators a clear path towards being monetized on our platform. More information to come on this in the future.

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