I don’t like cluttering your feeds with too many site updates, but with a few issues popping up this week, I wanted to check in and keep you in the loop.
First off, thanks for all of the support! I know it's stressful and frustrating when the site acts up, especially when this should feel more like a safe space. Your entries are always backed up, and we do our best to get things running again as quickly as possible when something breaks.
Here's why we made some updates:
Spam:
Every single morning, the moderators and I spend time reviewing reported content, deleting entries, and banning spammers. They don't belong here, and the invasion of comments has gone too far. (Shout out to those of you that are always on top of reporting it - thank you!)
New Features:
In order to add fancy new things like Circles/Topics or Image Hosting, we have to upgrade the security and speed of the site. That's what's going on now... ground work so that we can ensure the site is stable as we work on more features that have been requested for years.
Here's where we stand with the recent updates:
Cloudflare - hopefully better.
For login and signup, everyone will see the Cloudflare box. Sometimes you might have to check a box, but most of the time it should just take a few seconds to confirm you're a human. For comments and entries, only new users with no posts will see it. We're seeing a surprisingly high number of "unlikely human" users trying to get through, which could mean a few things - either there's still some bugs to fix or (more likely) we're successfully blocking a ton of spam attempts.
Access and redirect issues - resolved.
To improve speed, we rolled out some performance upgrades that went a little overboard and caused some access and redirect issues. Those should now be resolved.
Bookmarks - let's blame Josh.
We updated Bookmarks from 7 days to 365 days of history, which had unforeseen consequences of showing you... 365 days of history. It's now set to 31 days so that it's less overwhelming while still providing a buffer when you need to catch up. I'm also working on a way to not show posts from before you followed someone, and another feature to mark multiple as read.
Auto dark mode - should be working.
This is a feature I threw in last minute when I was working late at night and annoyed that the site was bright while the rest of my computer had gone into dark mode. Long story short, there are now 3 modes to choose from (on your Personalization page): light, dark, auto. Auto will adjust the site based on your computer or phone, while light and dark will keep it consistent.
Here's some things that need to be better:
Spam comments:
Right now, when users are removed, their comments stay visible. That's not great when we're deleting spam accounts because their trash stays visible. We're going to work on a better way to deactivate accounts, including removing comments when they get reported.
Counters:
Comment and bookmark counters take about a minute to refresh and put a lot of pressure on the servers. Honestly, I also have a hard time believing the numbers sometimes. This doesn’t affect your actual content, just the stats. There's better ways to implement counters that I'll be exploring.
Site speed:
When we rebuilt the site, the focus was on the servers and everything under the hood. We tried not to touch the layout or design, but these days that is often what causes things to fail when we make updates. Prosebox was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, and as a result, some things are built more complexly than they need to be today. Now that tech has caught up, we can start simplifying things to make future updates smoother.
That's all for now.
Josh asked me earlier today why I had a sudden urge to work on the site (after months, if not longer, of just keeping the lights on) and I didn't have a good answer. The site covers its own costs, which I'm grateful for - but that also means I usually have to prioritize other projects. What happens most often is that I fix one thing, and that uncovers a rabbit hole of other bugs I can't ignore (I've got a list of 20+ new minor ones right now).
For example, I’d love to be working on Circles… but instead, yesterday I was trying to figure out why the post entry form suddenly had giant labels for no reason.
How you can help:
If something seems weird, please keep reporting it by comment or email. And if you can include your device (iPhone, Mac, PC, Android) and browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, etc.), it helps a ton with troubleshooting!
Thanks again for being here, and for helping keep this little corner of the internet going. 💙
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Zoey says it's time for bed 💤
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