Pale Moon forum

Alright boys and girls, gather round. It is time for me to devulge a secret about the Pale Moon Add-ons Site that you almost certainly don't know unless you were in my channel with the other cool kids. Ever since Search became a thing and we reached a certain number of extensions on the site it was switched to category view only. This is of course because the sheer amount of data of a big query and post-processing it DOES take a lot of cpuz and ram to do.

HOWEVER, given the critical time we are in I am gonna divulge the secret that listing all the extensions on one page on the Pale Moon (operating mode) of the Add-ons Site has always been possible despite the default of displaying categories. While searching is still preferred as is going through categories for a limited time only and in the best interests of The Project here is how you can do it.

https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/?all=1

That should ease the burden of finding replacements for unmaintained Firefox extensions which are popping up all the time now.

NOTE: This is a limited time allowance and will go away eventually.

NOTE: This is a limited time allowance and will go away eventually.

Why?
It is a very useful feature.

I already said why. It takes a lot of processing power and ram on the server every request to get a massive query result with 230+ extensions AND process that data and shove it out the door on one page.

It would be easy to use it as a Denial of Service attack but given current events I am willing to take that risk.

I am monitoring:

People know about this now? This could be pretty hard on the server...

New Tobin Paradigm wrote: ↑

2021-04-28, 15:46

I already said why. It takes a lot of processing power and ram on the server every request to get a massive query result with 230+ extensions AND process that data and shove it out the door on one page.

It would be easy to use it as a Denial of Service attack but given current events I am willing to take that risk.

That does sound like it would take a lot of processing power and RAM to allow users to make a massive query result, process the data, and put it all on one page. I might be missing something here, but it doesn't really doesn't seem necessary to build the page in that way since the contents would be fairly static until extensions are added or removed.

Couldn't that page listing all extensions be regenerated on the server whenever extensions are removed or added, and simply served up as a static list to users? That way the same team of people responsible for approving or pulling down extensions would be the ones controlling when the processing power and RAM got stressed to rebuild the lists rather than having the website's users hammer the query function to generate their own unique copy of what is essentially the same list every single time they want to view a category or a list of all extensions.

That approach wouldn't work for a search, of course, but if we're just talking about category view or a list of all of them, then allowing the site users to run a query on their end at all seems like an unnecessary risk. As the list of extensions grows, it seems like we might eventually have the same problem with individual categories that have tons of extensions that we have now with a list of all extensions.

It might even be possible to cache the results of past queries so that if users ask for the same information and the tables it accesses to generate the data haven't been modified since the cached page was generated, it just serves up what's in the cache rather than generating a new version of the page.

There might be some implementation details I'm unaware of that make this approach unworkable, but it sounds to me like the problem of fetching those lists using a ton of resources on the server could be solvable.

New Tobin Paradigm wrote: ↑

2021-04-28, 15:36

While searching is still preferred as is going through categories

Any chance that the next version of Phoebus will allow to:
1) search by developer name; and
2) automatically make the official name of each extension searchable (without the developer needing to separately add that as a search term) ?

There will be About Developer pages which will list all their extensions. The second could be badly abused where the Add-on name could become a long string of keywords. See some of Riiis's extensions for that bullfuckingshit.

Thanks for the response.