Future

Things to think about...

Posting UI

• Cleaner attachment interface
• Cleaner location controls
• Kill the focus-setting?
• TinyMCE

Caching

HTTP caching ...

Storage cleanup

The way we handle file storage for avatars, background images, and attachments is pretty wonky right now. Consider some things...

• unified internal API for storing, fetching, getting info about, and displaying files/images
• pluggable backend API for actual physical storage
  • local filesystem (back-compat with current system)
  • database (no permission / script execution worries)
  • remote storage (S3, etc)
  • explicit support for using a caching-style CDN (we store ourselves, but send out URLs that go through the CDN's fancy caching proxy)
• support for multiple simultaneous backends, rolling conversions of files from one backend to another

Some convenient factors in our favor:

• file contents are immutable; once uploaded, a given file stays the same until it's deleted
  • (when replacing an avatar, the new avatar has a new filename and new URL.)
  • makes caching, distribution easy
• deletions usually aren't time-critical; an old avatar that sits in a CDN cache for a while is no problem

Related things to consider:

• global/site quotas?
• garbage collection for things like remote avatars?