December Updates
Posted by Ash Qin
on 12 February 2026, 7:20:51 pm
Apologies for the late post, as I have been quite busy with my day job among other matters. December is a month when everything runs a little quieter on the surface. Between the end-of-year rush and the inevitable "how is it already Christmas?", we have been focused on tightening reliability, and hardening the backend.
Table of Contents
HSTS policy extended
We've updated our HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy ℹ️ from 1 month to 6 months.
Once you visit Alpha-Fox, your browser will remember for six months that it should only ever connect to our site over HTTPS.
Offline API state reset fix
Thanks to Vala Avro, we uncovered a bug where Stargates didn't correctly reset their internal state when being set offline via the API. In practice, this could leave a gate "half-alive" in terms of state transitions.
This has now been corrected so that when the offline stargate API call is issued, the Stargate will force a disconnection for both Stargates (if connected) and properly return to a clean offline state.
Backend SQL refactors and request hardening.
A big chunk of December was the unglamorous but important work of making the backend more readable, safer, and less brittle under weird inputs.
SQL clean-up (readability + safety)
- ASN gatelog SQL refactored and rewritten for clarity.
- Blacklist SQL refactored and rewritten for clarity.
- Replaced some old dynamic SQL patterns (while handled well, it wasn't ideal) with an improved parameterised approach.
Request parsing hardening
We standardised parsing via consistent helper usage (string/int/float) and hardened request handling against nastier edge cases, including:
- Arrays where scalars are expected.
- Null bytes.
- Malformed input that previously caused warnings.
- Fixed gate name sanitisation (properly normalises newlines/tabs).
- Hardened region/address lookup with:
- timeouts and error handling.
- validated lookup response parsing.
- Addressing failures now reliably:
- report to Discord.
- return the correct LSL reset/sleep payload (instead of failing silently or returning an unhelpful response).
Stargate stability and wormhole failsafes
We also made improvements to the more subtle "state machine" parts of Stargate behaviour, the kind of fixes you only notice when things don't go wrong.
- Improved wormhole state transitions and added failsafes:
- The connection time is set once (more consistent tracking).
- Shutdown handling is more stable.
- The reset conditions are clearer and safer.
- Improved shield type change reporting and debugging.
- Stargate AFVI whitelist fetch is now cleaner.
Defensive parsing fixes and warning prevention
A lot of "paper cut" issues in logs come from malformed messages or missing fields. These don't always break functionality, but they create noise, mask real issues, and make outages harder to diagnose. December included a solid pass over defensive handling:
- Fixed gate lookup validity checks.
- Added guards around the retrieving gate information.
- Safer parsing/splitting for rotations and RLV to prevent warnings on malformed input.
- Hardened message parsing with additional guards to prevent harmless, but annoying, undefined offset warnings.
- Fixed a logic error on failed lookups; owner information is only fetched after confirming the lookup succeeded (relates to an issue Paul Hexem identified, but does not fully solve the issue).
Site improvements and documentation fixes
Not everything this month was backend-only, we also did some cleanup on the site and docs.
- Updated our markdown parser to avoid generating duplicate IDs (which were causing HTML DOM ℹ️ errors, not visible to users unless they were looking in their browser dev tools).
- Rewrote
/asn/db/ with improved internal structure.
- Rewrote
/asn/view/xxx/ with improved internal structure and a complete SQL rewrite.
API docs correction
Shadoskill Heckroth spotted that the Stargate Details API command was sitting in the private section of the documentation when it shouldn't have been. It's now been moved to the public section, exactly where it should have been all along!
Final Thoughts
Ignoring the development work, December was a busy month overall, and so we had little time to dedicate to more extravagant works. Much of the work we did though was the kind of work that doesn't always look flashy, but is essential to keeping our systems running smoothly and more maintainable in the long term.
--Ash Qin
Ash Qin
