Release 2026-09-12

Features and fixes

• Load shedding: The site should feel faster during traffic spikes: load shedding now heuristically targets scraper-shaped traffic first. We validated the format with previous logs (so real users shouldn't be impacted), and it only applies to logged-out traffic, but let us know if you see bad behavior here! Relatedly, load shedding wasn't properly identifying logged-in users coming back via "Remember Me" after inactivity - fixed. Bots also get a proper response of how long to wait, since apparently crawlers should respect that better than us blocking them outright.
• We're upgrading our Redis cache version since the old version is going end-of-life. You might see temporary downtime after this release, but not for long! (These caches are tiny.)
• We show a clearer error page if the database is down (shouldn't happen too often).
• Upgraded several dependencies, including security updates. This includes one important for JavaScript, "gon", so let us know if you see anything break there.

Development Work

• MinIO (our fake S3 for local testing) is deprecated, had to switch that out.
• Dev-triggered FlatPost regeneration should now be faster.
• Upgraded some important test gems: simplecov 1.x, haml-lint parallelism.

Late note: on 2026-08-08 we also fixed a bug where load shedding was broken [thanks Vona!] - the code was misconfigured and let every request through. That fix plus some other dep updates (esp loofah, rails-html-sanitizer) were release previously, and the load-shedding improvements above are extra changes from this release.

Full GitHub changelog here: changelog