I introduced a bug in the last update of music4dance and then went on vacation.  This is a pretty classic software engineering blunder and I’m very sorry for the trouble it caused.  The good news is a bunch of people noticed it and cared enough to report it. Thanks, everyone for that and I’ll be sending you your bug bounty shorty!  The bad news is that I had another series of other issues that meant that I didn’t actually see the feedback until I found the bug myself.

In any case, the bug is now fixed and things should be back in working order.  The reason that I didn’t notice the bug as I was testing is that I was working on a feature to help show member activity on songs to improve the feature I talked about in a previous post and the bug cropped up for people that aren’t logged in which I failed to check with the very last change.

It’s entirely possible to set up a system where automated testing would catch this level of bug.  And I certainly have that kind of testing in place for the sites that I build in my day job.  But that kind of testing costs both in my time and dollars for infrastructure.  Since music4dance isn’t even a break-even proposition without adding more infrastructure, I will probably leave that level of testing on the back-burner for a while.  The good news is that I checked and the last time I had this level of an issue with the site was well over two years ago.

Speaking of the finances behind music4dance, I will take this opportunity to note that if you find the site useful I’d really appreciate your support.  While financial support is always welcome, I know everyone is not in the position to provide that so there are plenty of other ways to help the project. I’ve listed a bunch of them on the Contribute page.  Please check it out and do what you can.

Again, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience that this bug caused and wish everyone the best dancing during the upcoming holiday season.