I can talk about the commit, and I can talk about the article.
We were getting crushed with scaling from 3M to 30M visits a month, and every day was a 16 hour day. The site was falling over on a daily basis, and the performance of the home feed was atrocious. The APM traces were full of loops. The muting and blocking features were incurring tons of additional queries. As I remember it, one night I decided to write a SQL query to replace it. I believe I thought the values were already being sanitized, but I have no problem agreeing that I should've looked into that further and made sure. I'm not a rails dev, and I'm generally negative towards rails and ActiveRecord. I wrote SQL for many years in the past, and as the folks who went through my stackoverflow saw, I am not unaware of the importance of sanitizing user input. I've written much code that properly sanitized user input, in various languages.
It's really easy to imagine that Gab is a large company, considering the breadth of their platform and products, but you'd be shocked and impressed. It's still really early days, like this is only Chapter 2 for us.. we're growing and will keep getting better.
This article is interesting to me for other reasons though: 1. there's been no confirmation this commit was related to anything that has happened. and 2. the person who reached out to Ars with the story, a link to the commit and a quote, is a former co-worker with a personal grudge. I can only imagine the glee with which he wrote that email.
For the last 2 days we were being extorted for nearly half a million dollars. I received a death threat today, first one ever. I think we're doing something important. Go ahead with your code critiques.
Have a great day,
Fosco