As promised in the previous release, there was more to come concerning the schedules on cam detail pages. This release, Chaturfier 2.8, delivers on that promise with a complete overhaul of the schedule, which has been renamed to Sessions. This seems more appropriate as the Session overview shows recordings of a broadcaster's session meta-data, such as online times, number of viewers and position. It also shows when the cam was "hidden", meaning either in a private session, group session, away or hidden show - basically non-public.
Despite exhaustive effort to retain existing schedule data, this eventually proved impossible. So at the time of this release, all session overviews appear empty. Over the course of the following days and weeks, this information will become available again as broadcasters appear online.
What is new, besides the look and feel, is that number of users and the broadcaster's position on Chaturbate are now recorded during a session. This information is available on the Session detail page in the form of charts, which is accessible by clicking on a specific session. Note that for sessions with less than a maximum of 50 viewers, this information will only be retained for about 24 hours after the session. In other cases not more than 4 weeks.
While the times mentioned in the session summary will be in the timezone you selected, the charts are always shown in your local timezone (that is, the horizontal time-axis), despite of the timezone chosen in the session overview.
The session detail page also shows images captured during that session, if any.
The cam detail pages now also have a chart of the maximum number of viewers during a session. These charts will start showing up, once enough information has been gathered. This may take a while, in some cases.
All these charts are meant to give some insight in how well a broadcaster is doing and are potentially more useful to the broadcasters themselves than their audience.
The change of the way sessions are handled touched a LOT of code, including the way online and offline events are handled. This resulted in the fact that, for a moment, all broadcasters appeared offline and then came online again. This in turn triggered a lot of notifications to be sent all of a sudden, something Twitter is very sensitive of. As a result some Twitter notifications were not sent while other notifications were sent again at the time of this release.
Besides the session overview and detail pages, this release contains many other changes, optimizations and fixes:
- The number of images shown on a cam detail page has been restricted to 12, a "more" link will lead to the rest;
- All images (though explicitly NOT the images of live cams) are now lazily loaded, which is especially useful on mobile devices or slow connections;
- The stats page now shows some information about online broadcasters and their viewers, this updates every few minutes (the idea was to show this information in a chart as well, but the contrast was too stark);
- The Chaturfier Channel on Telegram is now public and Chaturfier's Telegram bot will post weekly, monthly and yearly statistics there as well, as was already done on Twitter;
- Improvements to the cam selection algorithm for images, resulting in a preference for broadcasters who have fewer images instead of those who already have many;
- And much, much more...
In fact, so much more that this is release 2.8, skipping 2.7 altogether...
Enjoy!