Meetup Events Officially Rebranded, Meetup #9, & Song Information Project

This week, we completed the rebranding of one of our audio-based events. Formerly known as Gensokyo Radio’s “Discord Stage Events,” these are now known as “Gensokyo Radio Meetup” events. We’ve begun to propagate these events as podcasts to the same major platforms as our Live shows, so expect to find them on your favorite podcast platforms in the near future!

We also held our 9th Meetup event on Sunday, so if you missed out, you’ll be able to catch it next weekend on our website, or later today if you’re part of Three by Seven’s campaign.

New music from Iemitsu was added to the station and website this week, with much more on the way from a variety of circles. We also worked on a few minor bug fixes site-side. These addressed a display issue with disc, track, and catalog codes which became more apparent with multi-disc albums (particularly albums with greater than 10 discs like the one we added from Iemitsu this week). We also fixed a number padding issue where albums with greater than one hour of music would sometimes display a single digit in the minutes section (1:7:09 instead of 1:07:09).

We wrapped up the primary design for this year’s custom postcards this week, and are working on completing the design for the reverse side of the card before submitting a print order. It’s exciting to bring these back, and we hope listeners are looking forward to nabbing one of these as in previous years.

Shirt samples are currently shipping out to our studio. Once they’re here, we’ll go over things like print quality, time to fulfill, and do some comparison against their existing store counterparts. All of this is to determine whether we’ll be able to use this provider for filling out-of-stock items and items which aren’t suitable for our usual pre-order process. When we know more, we’ll let you know.

We began a new process for gathering song information to fill in some gaps which listeners have been bugging us to do something about for the last couple years. This side-project is still in an early phase, but by the end of it, we hope to have information such as arranger, vocalist, and original song filled in for virtually every song we play on the station. Stay tuned for more info as the project matures over the coming weeks.

Finally, we dealt with an unexpected challenge yesterday (which is why this update is being published on a Monday). Our systems experienced an unmitigated DDoS attack which targeted our account registration and recovery systems. Those responsible were able to generate dummy accounts with the intention of spamming random email addresses, generating thousands of emails through our systems. Our infrastructure handled things fine, but the influx of traffic managed to hit the limits of our available server process nodes. As a result, regular users were experiencing request timeouts and other 50x errors. We have since mitigated relevant traffic, with account registration and recovery temporarily disabled. We’ll be reviewing and hardening a few internal systems before making these available again to prevent this type of abuse in the future.

Another busy week! We’ve got several things in progress, so stick around for more news, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #51]