October 2022 Update

It's been a while since the last update post, longer than we planned for sure...

Certain events last year really threw things off for a while, and the CC fraud issue last month was a real kick in the teeth. It can be hard to stay motivated when things get shitty, but as always, we pulled through! 

The past year has brought huge increases in traffic, and corresponding server load issues. Things seem stable for now, but it's always fun to see what will break next~ >_>;

We expect to bring some more hardware online in the near future to help with load, improve resiliency, and to allow faster expansion of coverage. Probably early next year if all goes well.

In other news, the new site design is still in progress. As always... ;_;

Latest progress involved tweaking the design of the user page to be a bit nicer looking, which was completed as part of the new upgrade payment system. We also finally redid the login/registration page to not be a complete un-styled disaster. Only took about 9 years~

And speaking of YEARS, The site's 14th anniversary was Oct 21st! I have attached an image of usage over the years. Google analytics is really terrible at showing these long time durations, but this summarizes it fairly well. Usage keeps rising, which is both exciting and difficult to deal with at times.

14 years is a long time, and I wanted to quickly share a bit of our early site design. A proper history post will hopefully come eventually as well~ To start with, let's be clear, modern browsers don't do the original design justice, I need to get a screenshot from an old browser on an old OS. It was never great, but the font for the logo is all screwed up and input fields are shown totally wrong... To be fair, it probably started breaking for some browsers around 2009 or 10, and I left it broken for a very long time, so this is what most people saw... >_>;

https://web.archive.org/web/20081101084957/http://saucenao.com/

I found an old set of "Torsten's Sauce Guides" from summer 2011 while looking through my vast image collection. One page is attached below, confirming the brokenness of the index page, and also shows the top of the old results page! I'm having trouble finding other examples of the results page, though I must have some from the design process somewhere... Note the good/not good at finding section, we've come a loooong way since 2011~ ;)

IIRC, Chrome broke the logo font and file input box appearance before Firefox did. I only fixed the logo using an image once it stopped looking right for me a long while later~ The input box issue was harder to fix, so it never was! ;)

https://web.archive.org/web/20110404092953/http://saucenao.com/

Amazingly enough, we kept that same semi-broken index page, with only minor tweaks, until 2021 when the current one was deployed! A few other alternative versions were developed over the years, but most never saw the light of day~

The original results page was replaced around 2013 with what is essentially the current version. It works, mostly, but is not great on mobile... That new design should be finished soon, I hope???

It is truly thanks to all of you that we have been able to continue for this long. Back in 2008, when throwing the initial site together, I never could have imagined that it would still be around all these years later.