A shoutbox that does not become a spam channel
Rate limited, length capped, link stripped, moderatable, and cheap to poll. The five constraints that keep a chat box usable.
Tagged “ratio”
9 entries
Adjust a member's balance without losing the trail
Every manual adjustment writes a ledger row and an audit row, inside one transaction. An admin panel that edits a balance directly is how books stop balancing.
Stop two cron runs from overlapping
A non-blocking file lock in three lines, and why a database flag is the wrong tool for this particular job.
Suspend an account without deleting it
A status column, one check in the session guard, and a shadow-banned tier that keeps working while earning nothing.
Credit maths for a traffic exchange
Send N, receive M, and keep the difference as the house margin. The one transaction that moves credits between two members without leaking any.
Run a cron job on hosting that has no cron
A key-gated HTTP entry point plus a lock file, so an external pinger can drive your scheduled work without letting anyone else drive it.
A migration runner that is safe to run twice
Numbered SQL files, a table of what has run, and a splitter that does not break on semicolons inside strings.
A shortlink API compatible with what faucet scripts expect
Faucet software already knows how to talk to shortlink providers. Match the contract they expect and operators can point their existing config at you without writing anything.
A settings table with typed access and one query per request
Everything an operator might want to change belongs in the database, not in code. This is the small layer that makes that painless.