r8r: Project Changelog

This document provides a high-level overview of the r8r application's version history.

Version 2.9.6 (Data Integrity & Self-Healing)

• Date: 2025-10-21
• Summary: This is a critical data integrity release that implements a "self-healing" mechanism for all content profile pages.
• Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed "Missing Image" Bug: Implemented a new, robust data fetching action that acts as a transactional hand-shake. If a user visits a page for an actor, movie, or TV show that has incomplete data in the database (e.g., a null image URL), the system now automatically detects this, re-fetches the complete data from the source, saves it, and then serves it to the user. This completely resolves the long-standing bug where profile pages would sometimes be missing their main image.

Version 2.9.5 (Data Integrity & Admin Tools)

• Date: 2025-10-19
• Summary: This release fixes a critical data consistency bug and adds a new, dedicated tool for administrators to fix actor profile photos.
• Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed Data Inconsistency: Resolved a major issue where actor profile pages would sometimes show a photo while the homepage would not. This was caused by the profile page incorrectly fetching live data instead of using our database. All pages now correctly and consistently use the data from our database.
  • New "Fix Profile Photo" Tool: Added a new, simple tool to the admin panel that allows an administrator to fix a missing actor photo by simply entering their ID.

Version 2.9.4 (SEO Link Integrity)

• Date: 2025-10-17
• Summary: This release fixes a critical issue where some links to movie and TV show pages were broken after a recent SEO improvement.
• Bug Fixes & Improvements:
  • Fixed Broken Links: Corrected the link generation for "Related Movies," "Related TV Shows," and "Known For" sections on profile pages. These links now point to the correct, SEO-friendly URLs, resolving all 404 errors.
  • Sitemap and SEO: Updated the site's sitemap to include the correct, new URLs for all movies and TV shows, improving how search engines find our content. Added a robots.txt file for better search engine crawling.
  • Clickable Version: The version number in the site footer is now a clickable link to this changelog page.

Version 2.9.3 (Build Stability & Data Integrity)

• Date: 2025-10-14
• Summary: This release focuses on improving the stability of the application by fixing several critical build errors and data integrity issues.
• Bug Fixes & Improvements:
  • Resolved several build-time errors to ensure successful production deployments.
  • Corrected a major regression where newly saved actors were missing their primary photo.
  • Added comprehensive internal documentation for recent data-healing features.
  • Cleaned up temporary and unused code from previous tasks.

Version 2.9.2 (Data Healing Tools)

• Date: 2025-10-14
• Summary: This release introduces two new powerful data healing tools to the admin panel.
• New Features:
  • New "Heal Content" Page: Added a dedicated page that allows an administrator to fix a single content item by re-fetching its data.
  • New "Multiple Item Healer" Page: Added a new page for bulk data correction, allowing an admin to fix multiple items with missing data in a single batch.
• Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Made the bulk healing process more resilient to prevent a single failure from stopping the entire batch.
  • Fixed server errors related to page redirects and client-side component rendering.
  • Added extensive internal documentation about the debugging process for these new tools.

Version 2.9.1 (Admin Workflow Improvement)

• Date: 2025-10-07
• Summary: This release improves the admin panel's content discovery workflow.
• New Features:
  • "Show Only Unsaved" Toggle for Discover: Added a switch to the "Discover" section to hide content that is already in the database, making it easier to find and add new movies and TV shows.

Version 2.9.0 (Admin Tooling & Data Integrity Overhaul)

• Date: 2025-10-02
• Summary: Introduced a "Data Health" utility to the admin panel and improved the "Related Actors" feature.
• New Features:
  • New "Data Health" Page: Added an admin page to scan for and identify actors who are missing related profile suggestions.
• Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Improved the algorithm for finding related actors to be more resilient, ensuring more profiles have suggestions.
  • Added a link to the new "Data Health" page in the admin dashboard.

Version 2.8.4 (Search Overhaul & Documentation)

• Date: 2025-09-29
• Summary: This release documents the complete overhaul of the actor search functionality.
• Improvements:
  • Performance-Optimized Search: Re-architected the actor search feature for near-instant results for common searches and robust, accurate results for all others.
  • Formal Search Documentation: Created internal documentation to explain the new search system.

Version 2.8.3 (Database Optimization & Bug Fixes)

• Date: 2025-09-23
• Summary: This release implemented a database optimization to fix performance issues with the "By Rating" and "By Height" pages.
• Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed "By Rating" Feature: Resolved a critical bug where the actor rating filter returned no results by adding a pre-calculated index field.
  • Optimized "By Height" Feature: Applied the same indexing pattern to the "By Height" page, fixing all related performance issues.
  • New Backfill Utilities: Added one-click actions to the admin panel to build the new indexes for existing data.
  • Fixed Stalled Search: Corrected a UI bug where the actor search page would appear to stall if a search returned no results.

Version 2.8.2 (Admin Panel Architecture & Stability)

• Date: 2025-09-22
• Summary: This release completes the architectural overhaul of the admin panel, fixing the last remaining pages that were failing in production.
• Bug Fixes & Improvements:
  • Fixed "Birthday Pre-Calculator" Page: Refactored the server logic to resolve production database connection failures.
  • Fixed "Vote Action Debug" Page: Applied the same architectural fix to ensure it loads reliably.
  • Admin Panel Hardening: All pages within the admin panel now adhere to a consistent and robust architecture.

Version 2.8.1 (Social Media Tools)

• Date: 2025-09-13
• Summary: This release introduces a powerful new Social Post Generator to the admin panel.
• New Features:
  • Social Post Generator: A new page for administrators to generate branded social media images for actors, movies, or TV shows.
  • Customizable Image Templates: Users can select from standard social media aspect ratios.
  • AI-Powered Captions: Integrated AI to generate witty, engaging social media captions and relevant hashtags.

Version 2.8.0 (Critical Bug Fixes & Stability)

• Date: 2025-09-12
• Summary: This emergency release addresses a series of critical, cascading failures.
• Bug Fixes:
  • Removed a flawed server-side implementation that was the root cause of the admin panel failure.
  • Fixed the "Related Actors" display on actor profile pages, which was caused by an unreliable date parsing.
  • Restored the "Data Health" admin page link.

Version 2.7.5 (Search Performance Overhaul)

• Date: 2025-09-11
• Summary: This release completely re-architects the actor search functionality.
• Improvements & Bug Fixes:
  • Optimized Search: Implemented a new server-side search strategy for near-instant results on common queries.
  • Fixed Multi-Word Search: Resolved a critical bug where searching for actors with multiple words in their name was failing.
  • Fixed Duplicate Name Results: Corrected an issue where the search would only return one result for names associated with multiple entries.

Version 2.7.4 (Performance & UI Polish)

• Date: 2025-09-02
• Summary: This release significantly improves the performance of the "By Country" discovery page and refines the main navigation.
• Improvements:
  • Instant Country Page Load: Re-architected the "By Country" page to be fully static for near-instantaneous load times.
  • Navigation UI Cleanup: Shortened the main navigation links for "Top 100" and "Bottom 100" to "Top" and "Bottom".

Version 2.7.3 (Build Stability)

• Date: 2025-08-31
• Summary: This release focused on resolving a critical build failure caused by a route conflict.
• Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed Sitemap Route Conflict: Removed a duplicate sitemap file that was causing the build to fail.

Version 2.7.2 (Bug Fix)

• Date: 2025-08-30
• Summary: This release addresses a critical JavaScript error that could prevent the homepage from rendering correctly.
• Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed Homepage Rendering Error: Resolved a variable scope issue that could lead to a crash.

Version 2.7.1 (Documentation & UI)

• Date: 2025-08-26
• Summary: Replaced the unstyled, static changelog page with a new, dynamic page that matches the site's styling.
• Improvements:
  • New Dynamic Changelog Page: Created a new page to display the project's history in a styled, responsive format.

Version 2.7.0 (Data Integrity & Stability)

• Date: 2025-08-26
• Summary: This critical release addresses a persistent data corruption bug that was causing user vote counts to be reset to zero.
• Bug Fixes & Improvements:
  • Fixed Vote Reset Bug: Corrected the root cause of vote counts being reset. Data-writing functions now preserve existing vote counts.
  • Fixed UI Display Bug: Resolved a UI bug in the voting widget that caused vote counts to appear as zero.