An Update About Recent Content Visibility Issues
“One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.” —Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda
You may have noticed that your Adventures or Scenarios were out of order this week. We apologize for the issue. It was due to an error we made while finishing up a project that, ironically, was intended prevent this very issue.
This goal of this project was to split a data field into two. We were using updated_at for when the system made updates to either, which is a standard approach. We were also using updated_at whenever players made changes to their Adventures or Scenarios and referenced it for sort orders on profiles, home page, etc. We’ve learned this wasn’t ideal, as it had mistakenly led to issues in the past where system updates and data migrations have changed the sort order of Scenarios and Adventures.
As part of this project, we created a new edited_at field to be used for when players changed their Adventures and Scenarios, reserving updated_at for system changes. The code change to start writing to the edited_at field was introduced to production with our recent release. When players made changes, it also updates the updated_at field (which is the intended behavior as it should reflect any update).
The next step was mirror data from updated_at to edited_at. The plan was that once this data was fully copied, we’d switch to read from edited_at going forward. Unfortunately, we unintentionally updated the updated_at while copying the data. This led to the sort order of some player content showing unexpected results.
We’re now accelerating the last step of the project so that we’re reading from edited_at. Since this is happening earlier than expected, edited_at still isn’t fully mirroring updated_at. We’re currently finishing the data migration to copy data from updated_at to edited_at. Once this is complete, everything should go back to working as expected.
We've pushed some hotfixes throughout the week that should have resolved the sort issues you were experiencing. However, it may take a while for the data migration to complete. We hope this will be the last time we have to talk to you about updated_at being unintentionally changed again.
Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns. Again, we apologize for the fire drill and hope this added context helps ease any concerns you had earlier.