New Server, More Self-Reliance & Faster Search
After more than 1½ years without updates to demoparty.net, once Evoke 2026 was wrapped up it was about time to finally show a little bit of love to the site.
Today, we completed the move to a new server! Beyond upgrading the hosting itself, a big focus of this overhaul was greater self-reliance: reducing our dependency on external third-party services and commercial APIs where possible, in favor of running our own lightweight, privacy-friendly tools.
More In-House, Less Third-Party:
- No More Google: We replaced both Google Maps and Google reCAPTCHA. Maps now use fast vector tiles with full dark-mode support (loaded lazily only when scrolled into view), and our contact form is protected by a self-hosted, invisible Cap instance—meaning no third-party requests to Google and no more traffic-light puzzles.
- Retired Foursquare: Since Foursquare put its API behind a paywall, we removed the integration altogether.
- Self-Hosted Tooling: Behind the scenes, we moved away from several external cloud platforms where it made sense—switching from Sentry to a self-hosted Bugsink instance for error tracking, and replacing Zyte’s cloud service with our own local Scrapy setup for automated data imports.
What Else Improved for You:
- Faster, Smarter Search: We moved from Elasticsearch to Meilisearch. Search results now pop up almost instantly, forgive typos (searching for “asembley” will still find Assembly), and support filtering directly by type (e.g., type:event or type:user).
- Snappier Images & Smaller Assets: Party flyers and banners are now processed on the fly via imagor and automatically delivered in modern WebP/AVIF formats. We also trimmed down our icon fonts to only include the glyphs actually used, reducing overall page weight (and maybe sneaking in a few visual details along the way).
- Safer External Links: Our link crawler is now much more resilient when checking external party websites (including Wayback Machine fallbacks), and submitted links are automatically checked against the abuse.ch URLhaus malware feed.
Under the Hood:
While we were at it, we brought the entire codebase up to date—upgrading to PHP 8.4, Symfony 7, and Vite 8, moving from traditional web hosting to a containerized setup, and migrating our repository and CI/CD pipelines from GitLab to GitHub.
If you spot any broken links, missing images, or glitches after the move, please let us know via the contact form.