What Happened
A not-that-technical explanation for the curious.


Background knowledge: CORS
Browsers by default stop javascript from doing HTTP requests to other origins (e.g. boba.social fetching posts from facebook.com), unless the destination server (i.e. facebook.com) says the requester (i.e. boba.social) is enabled for "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing". This is to avoid random websites fetching data they shouldn't have access to and stealing all your info.


The Freaky Chain of Event.
To try and improve our unstable embeds data retrieval, I deployed a new embeds server with a new hosting. 
For other technical reasons* (which are also funny but require more jargon), the new server didn't have the correct CORS setup.
This meant that all the requests from boba.social to the new server were therefore rejected. EXCEPT MINE.
My requests succeeded because my browser is set to ignore CORS and just fetch whatever I want. This is because I develop with BobaBoard running on my own machine, which gets CORS-rejected basically always.
This means that the feature was working perfectly, even though only on my browser. Which, as you know, is all that matters.

* the reason the CORS setup was wrong, is that Heroku uses a git-like mechanism to deploy services, and my "configuration file" was in .gitignore. So, in short, my configuration was not uploaded and, without complaining, the server used the default setting of blocking all CORS requests. Fun times.

Thank you for coming to the boba tech-talk.

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