Our blog posts about Tryst.link have changed! Instead of blending product updates and community updates in one post, we've split them into two separate posts. This allows us to give more time and space to these important topics.
It also means product updates are now coming directly from me, Chris, Tryst.link's Executive of Product. I'll provide you with regular updates about new features or changes on site that impact both providers and clients, information about how to get the most out of Tryst.link, as well as giving you a behind the scenes look at what we do to build and support you and Tryst.link.
March & April 2025 Updates
- Were you confused by the FBSM option in the service type search filter? You aren't alone! Many clients also don’t know what FBSM (full body sensual massage) means, so they tried to find massage providers using keyword search instead. We figured we should help out a little, so we renamed the filter FBSM/Massage and saw a 20% jump in usage. And, if you stumble across any unfamiliar sex work jargon, we have a handy-dandy glossary!
- We improved the description of the message template feature - what providers use to display an example of their ideal message when a client initially contacts them - it's now clearer what this template is for and whether it’s available on your current membership plan.
- Platforms like Tryst.link are built on layers of different software that save us time by not having to build the common things every website needs, from scratch. One of those layers, Bootstrap - a kit we use for building the web pages you see - was updated by its creator and we implemented those changes into Tryst.link. You probably (hopefully!) won't even have noticed, but it really helps out our engineers who have to interact with it daily.
- We made a small update to the emails you receive when we send you a message from the team. You’ll now be able to reply directly to them and get assistance from our team!
- Ever needed to talk to our team about a photo but struggled to know which photo is being talked about? Well wonder no more, we show you the same ID our team sees on the manage photo page so you can be really specific.
- Have you purchased TLC with a credit card and then been logged out after paying? We noticed this started happening in March and after a lot of troubleshooting and diagnostics, we located the cause: a change our payment processor made. We’ve made a change on our side to handle it and you should no longer see this annoyance.
When Bugs Fly Under The Radar
Just like you, we hate bugs in our platforms, so we try our hardest to avoid releasing any. What we hate even more, is a bug that slips through the cracks and isn’t even noticed by our monitoring! It does happen from time to time and you may have noticed that we recently had a bug hang around for a few days before we became aware of it. This is unusual (and annoying), so I thought I'd explain what happened and give you a behind the scenes look at what it's like to support a website of Tryst.link's scale and how we respond when we become aware of an issue.
Tryst.link is made up of a couple parts, most importantly for this scenario is the part where searching and browsing happens (we call that part Discovery) and the part where you manage your profile and account (we call that part Manuka). For a few days, Discovery lost the ability to tell if a user was logged in or not, which varies from annoying (the menus don’t show you your information) to broken (you can’t see or manage your favourites), depending on how you use Tryst.link. We discovered it when an engineer was validating some other work and realised something wasn’t right.
How did this happen? As with all software, we need to update the components that make up Tryst.link. This bug was an unexpected interaction between a couple of different updates performed at various times in our various apps. More importantly, why did it take us six days to notice? We generally have monitoring in place that should have identified an issue like this. Unfortunately, it turns out those monitors weren’t doing a good enough job of ensuring Discovery and Manuka were interacting as expected. Not a fun discovery, but once we got the fix out, we took some time to talk about what improvements we could make to ensure a bug like this can’t escape us in future and have started rolling those out. Operation - Venus Fly Trap (cronch cronch cronch)!
Another important thing to check in cases like this is whether there were any other impacts we need to address. How we validate that will vary based on the scenario. In this case, we wanted to ensure that there was no noticeable drop in important things like how many daily users we see (both those with and without accounts), searches performed, thumbnail impressions in those searches, and profile views. None of these metrics were negatively impacted. We’ve also seen a return to normal for the main site function that did stop working: favourites.
Thanks for reading this month's Tryst.link product update! I hope you found it useful and maybe even learnt a thing or two about what we do behind the scenes to keep Tryst.link up and running. If there's anything about Tryst.link you'd like me to cover in these blog posts, email me at chris@tryst.link - I can't promise I'll reply to every email, but I will read them all!
And as always, https://help.tryst.link has loads of great product support information and is the best way to get in touch with our support team.
Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!
We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
