Recent Outages and API v2

Many of you may have noticed that our servers experienced some technical difficulties during the first weeks of July. We were just as frustrated as you are, because we know itemdb is a very useful tool in everyday Neopian life.

These outages were caused by a number of different factors, and we are going to do a brief post-mortem. I will try (but cannot promise) to keep it less technical and easy to understand.

As a result, the site would be unavailable for hours until a manual reset released the connections and allowed it to work again. To summarize what we have done over the past few weeks:

• We added new monitoring tools, and we now have alerts in case the site goes down again.
• Along with the alerts, we also added an automatic reset if the site is unresponsive for more than 10 minutes.
• Strengthened our anti-bot systems. In the last 24 hours alone, we have blocked more than 150,000 suspicious requests.
• Fixed several code paths that could trigger dozens of simultaneous calls to the database.

When we say bots, we do not mean the bots that terrorize your restocks, but rather—and especially—bots that extract website content unethically to use as training data for AI models.

After all these measures, we saw a significant improvement in the site’s overall performance and reached 99.877% uptime. This brings us to a more technical topic:

API v2

Our API was built around exactly which data we would display, filter, and sort on the site—which is why our ItemData type has several properties that do not make much sense outside itemdb (HSV, LAB, RGB colors???).

This becomes a problem for large lists — such as the approximately 3,674 books in the Book Award where the uncompressed response can exceed 4 MB, while most applications and scripts are generally concerned only with the price.

That is why we developed a new version of the API. Its main changes include:

The main endpoints are already available in our documentation. Internally, we have already migrated some of the heaviest pages (ahem, the lists page) to v2, and payloads are about 3x smaller. Version v1 will continue to be supported, but we recommend migrating to v2.