Before 19 October this site had a normal day of somewhere between three and seven hundred visitors. In October alone it had 250k+ page views, with the busiest single day at about 65k visitors. 2k+ of you signed up. I want to be careful with those numbers, because page views are not people and a visitor counted on two days is counted twice. But however you count it, it was far more than one person and a laptop were ready for, and the first thing I want to say is thank you. For coming, for the messages, and for the patience while things broke.
And things broke. Most of the last ten days went to finding out what, and almost all of it came from phones.
The biggest was the simplest. iPhones and iPads have no pointer lock, the browser feature that captures the mouse for looking around, and a tap on the place asked for it anyway. On iOS that is not a polite refusal, it is an error, and it fired on every tap. At least 1,400 people hit it in the first four days. The fix is a check before the ask, and it treats a refusal on any browser as "no lock today" rather than as a failure. As I write this it is still in the working tree, being tested, not on the live site.
The second was leaving. Leave a place within about fifteen seconds of it loading and the streamed town kept running after the page around it was gone, then tripped over the missing camera. That was around 1,100 sessions in two days, on every kind of device. It shipped on the 20th. The week before, a place with one file that kept failing could hold the loading screen up forever; that one now gives up after 25 seconds onto whatever has drawn.
The third was mine to see and not yours: I went blind. The analytics service has a monthly allowance, and on 22 October the surge used it up. Looking at what had used it, most of it was not decisions but noise: frame-rate samples from every single session, one view event counted three times per visitor, one error repeating seventeen thousand times from twenty-seven people. So the next build sends far less, a small sample of sessions for performance and each repeat once. It is also still in testing. The privacy opt-out in Settings works exactly as before.
The last one is a lesson about asking. Of the emails that came in, nearly all came from the screen shown to browsers that cannot run the live demo yet. The form at the very bottom of the home page, under ten screens of scrolling, collected four. Same form, very different place. So the ask moved up to sit right under the places, and there is a small one beside the loading screen and the pause menu, each of which stays closed once you close it. That is in testing too.
There is also a Share button now, in the pause menu and in photo mode, so a link drops a friend into the same place you are standing in. That one I am just glad to have, because a lot of you were already sharing screenshots.
None of this is glamorous, and I am not sure yet that I have caught the worst of it. But it is the most useful week this project has had, and it happened because you showed up. Thank you.