May 23 Platform Update — Save VODs, chat-synced replays, dashboard fixes

What's new — May 23, 2026

A weekend ship: Save VODs is now actually wired up end-to-end, replays come with the original chat scrolling in sync, and a pile of "the button doesn't seem to do anything" issues on the creator dashboard got patched.

📼 Save VODs is live

Flip the Save VODs toggle in Dashboard → Stream and your next stream's replay shows up on your profile under the Videos tab.

- 72 hours for everyone - 7 days for VPZONE+ subscribers - Off by default; you opt in per channel - Backed by a new dedicated storage server — paid for entirely by VPZ+ supporters

Replays are signed-URL gated and auto-expire when the retention window ends. Nothing is kept beyond what you ask for.

💬 Chat replay synced to your VOD

Click a saved replay on your profile and you now get the full chat replay scrolling alongside the video. Subscriber stars, owner crowns, and per-user colors are all preserved. Scrub the timeline and chat keeps up.

🛠️ Dashboard channel-actions — silent failures patched

A few buttons looked like they were working but the writes were quietly failing or returning the wrong data:

- Live streams listing — was querying a column that doesn't exist on the streams table; now joins the live viewer count off the channel row. - Chat moderation — Delete message — was returning "success" even when the database refused; now surfaces the real error. - Chat moderation — Unban — same silent-fail pattern; same fix. - Dashboard cleanup — four unused dashboard components were removed to stop confusion about which UI is the real one (-989 lines of dead code).

🚀 Infrastructure

Earlier this weekend we also upgraded the Canada and Europe ingest/transcode servers to more powerful CPUs — smoother encoding, lower latency, more headroom for new streamers. Again, made possible by VPZ+. We see you, we appreciate you.

What's next

- More dashboard polish (better error toasts on the few remaining silent paths) - A "create clip from a saved VOD" feature on the way - Multi-bitrate (ABR) playback for low-bandwidth viewers

If you spot something behaving oddly, ping us in Discord. Thanks for streaming with us.