You might be wondering if James and I are putting our feet up for Christmas, because there haven't been many new features added in the last week.

We have been working on TopAnswers though; on something essential but not very visible. After importing 170k messages into a chat room here, we noticed quite a performance hit in some areas, which prompted a rethink of a lot of our logic. Mostly that's meant writing custom SQL and wrapping it in a function rather than directly querying views from the application layer[^1].

This work is nearly done, and you might have noticed page load times are a bit quicker as a result.

You may also have noticed various regressions — unfortunately this kind of re-jigging is prone to that. There will probably be a few more today and tomorrow until it's finished. Please let us know if you spot anything broken.

Hopefully we can soon get back to doing what we really want to spend time doing: adding features like [pagination for the question list](https://topanswers.xyz/meta?q=456#question) and [improving the look of the notification and chat panels](https://topanswers.xyz/meta?q=242).


[^1]: because predicates weren't getting pushed down the way I hoped