Hey there!
Jacob (aka JJ15 ASMR) from TinglyTube here! 🌙
I wanted to give everyone an early heads-up that TinglyTube will undergo a temporary downtime on March 29, 2024, starting at 9:00 PM UTC.
The reason for this temporary downtime is that CentOS 7, a distribution of Linux, that our server currently runs, will reach its EOL (End-of-life) on June 30, 2024. After this date, it will no longer receive security updates, patches, or new features. To ensure the continued stability and security of TinglyTube, we must transition to a new operating system.
We don't have an exact timeframe for when we'll be back online as there is some manual action needed on the part of our server provider to fully complete the migration, however, we're hopeful that this process shouldn't take longer than 24 hours but do ask that you remain patient.
If you'd like to be notified before the migration starts and once it's complete, you can check out, and optionally, subscribe to our Statuspage for updates.
Lastly, please feel free to contact us via our Support/Feedback form if you have any questions or concerns.
On February 4, 2022, at around 6:30-7 pm (EST) TinglyTube suffered an approximately 10-hour outage until it was brought back up around 5 am today (February 5, 2022), but how and why did this happen?
Well, while TinglyTube has a small but incredible development (and engineering) team, they are mostly off on the weekends unless specifically called in, leaving me (JJ15ASMR, Co-Founder, CEO, & CTO of TinglyTube) to be the "first responder" to any issues that arise on the backend of the site before our development team is called in to assist.
And there's usually never been an issue with it being that way, however, it relies on me to be awake during a majority of the day and constantly checking in on TinglyTube as I usually do. However, my second semester of high school started this week which has required me to start waking up much earlier again than I was during break (I go to online school which makes it better though :) because of this, I've been getting quite tired in the evening's unless I force myself to stay awake until a more proper time to fall asleep, but considering it's a Friday with nothing else I need to do, I decided to lay down for a minute, but setting no alarm for myself, that turned into a full 10 hours of sleep... all while TinglyTube went down shortly after.
And remember what I also said about needing to also constantly check in on TinglyTube? Well, that's a very important part of the equation because we don't have any server monitoring system in place to automatically check and notify us if something is down, not responding, or not working. Which should be in place, and is my fault for not. The closest thing we have in place is Munin, which is a simple open-source resource and network monitor, it doesn't alert us, but it does track and create graphs representing resource and network usage, which is how we have this graph showing our shameful downtime gap:
As said before, this is my fault completely as TinglyTube is my passion and I am responsible for making the big decisions regarding it which include how our infrastructure is set up and monitored. And I am extremely sorry to the TinglyTube community and our team for this horrible mistake of not having a monitoring/alert system in place.
Obviously, an apology is not the only thing needed to make this right, something also needs to be done to prevent this in the future, so as such, a proper monitoring and alert system have been set up this morning that will notify I and our development team through a variety of ways (email, SMS, & phone) in case of a future outage or other issue(s) so that they be fixed in minutes not hours.
As for "why" this happened, we're not entirely sure yet, there are so many moving parts that play a role in making TinglyTube work that could have malfunctioned or possibly been overloaded, but the biggest priority was getting things back online, which was actually quite simple in a way because all that was needed was a forced restart of our server, and things were back up and running within about 20 minutes once everything started back up again. We are investigating to find the root cause though because if it's something we can also fix and prevent in the future, we will.
If you have any questions or concerns about the downtime/outage, please contact us via our Support/Feedback form and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
- Jacob Daniel (JJ15ASMR) Co-Founder, CEO, & CTO.
It's been almost 6 months since we first teased the idea of introducing a Dark Mode to TinglyTube and we're excited to announce that today... Dark Mode is finally here on TinglyTube! 🌗
All users, signed in or not can activate it from the Language Selection menu as shown below, once you activate it, it will apply only to the browser you used to activate it, and it will stay that way for one year (through the use of a cookie), after that it will change back to the default Light Mode, and if you want to keep using Dark Mode, you can simply just re-activate it.
We hope that you're as excited about Dark Mode as we are, and we hope that it will make your experience on TinglyTube much better, especially at night!
Our developers spent a long time finetuning Dark Mode and testing it to make sure that it works properly, however, if you experience any problems or bugs while using it, or just have some general feedback about it, feel free to let us know via our Support/Feedback form, we're always listening to your feedback and ready to help!
The biggest question we get asked a lot is if TinglyTube has an app, with the answer to that being no, however, we are an 'app' in a way... a Progressive Web App (PWA) that is.
The difference between an App that you might download from the App Store and a Progressive Web App is that a Progressive Web App is actually just a website that is ultra-optimized for use on mobile devices and requires no download of it by the end-user, most modern websites that you visit are technically PWAs, with some (such as TinglyTube) catering more to the ability to being one. By us being a PWA, we save both time and money since we only have to develop one version of TinglyTube while a native application, on the other hand, would require us to develop two separate versions of TinglyTube (programming-wise) for iOS and Android, we also save a small amount of money by not needing to pay to submit to it the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
And just like an actual native app, you can technically 'install' TinglyTube on your device (it's really just a link to our site on your homescreen) if you use either Chrome or Safari as your mobile browser, you can find out how to do so in this help article.
But on to the actual point of this notice, we've recently made some updates to TinglyTube as a PWA to help it look and function more like an actual native app, here's what we did:
Over the past 6-months since TinglyTube re-launched, there have been many instances where a user has signed up and wasn't able to receive emails from us due to them signing up using a school, ISP, or Hotmail email address, and here's why:
School Email Addresses:
Almost all elementary, middle school, and high school email addresses are configured to not accept emails from domains or IP addresses outside of the school network, this is done to prevent spam and other malicious emails from being sent to students. Some colleges will also block emails originating from off-campus domains or IP addresses.
ISP Email Addresses:
If you're using an email address issued/powered by your ISP (Internet Service Provider, such as Comcast or WOW!) you may not receive emails from us as ISP's are usually more aggressive than much larger service providers (like Google or Yahoo) about identifying and blocking emails they think are spam. Another reason why is since we, like many other small startups, don't have our own datacenters and servers, so we must instead rent our server from a server provider who does, and since most server providers reuse a pool of IP addresses, if someone before us had our IP address and was sending spam, and it resulted in our IP address being blocked, we would therefore be blocked as well if we weren't able to easily contact the corresponding service provider and get ourselves unblocked.
Hotmail Email Addresses:
Similar to how some ISP's may block our server IP address due to prior misuse, Hotmail does the same, although they aren't blocking us specifically, but block our entire server provider's network!
And that's all of the reasons why you shouldn't signup with your school, ISP, or Hotmail email address. If you've signed up with one of these types of email addresses, don't worry, just send us a private message (this is because we won't be able to communicate with you via email through our Support/Feedback form) here on TT and we'll change the email address on your account to one that can accept emails from us.
