Demo Update v0.5.0 - Emails Again (But It's Good News) (Patreon)

New to the Patreon? All patrons can check out the demo at backloggery.club. The demo's data is not connected to the current site and will not carry over to the public release. You can see current plans and known issues on the Trello.

Emails, now in color!

The next update was planned to be allowing guests/non-patrons to browse the site but not make accounts. However, this got derailed when my host announced they were making changes to their email services.  

They're switching us to private email IPs!  

...  

That's right. All this year, especially early on, when we were having all kinds of email delivery problems, those miserable idiots never once thought to mention my emails were coming from a shared IP with a bunch of yahoos who were probably spamming ads for boner NFTs.

*sigh* 

On the bright side, many of the improvements I made trying to fix that unfixable problem are now required, so it wasn't wasted effort and saved me some headaches this last couple weeks.  And we've already seen a big decrease in complaints about missing emails. Hopefully that ongoing nightmare is now well and truly behind us.

While I was back in email land, I went ahead and implemented HTML emails. Making the template was a bit of a pain since email client HTML standards are really behind the time (think table-based layouts). But from what I've read Microsoft is more likely to flag plain text emails as spam and we've had an especially hard time with their emails services so it seemed worth doing. Also, it looks nice! Check the patch notes below on details to help test them.

And now back to your usual patch notes.

v0.5.0 Patch Notes

New Features

• General: Added a contact form. I now recommend using this instead of Patreon DMs when possible as Patreon is weirdly bad at notifying me of new messages.
• General: HTML emails. Fancy! Only implemented on the Password Reset form (accessed via the login page) for now. Give it a try and let me know if it doesn't look like the image above. Email clients are notoriously inconsistent at rendering HTML and it's hard to test on everything. Particularly interested on feedback from Outlook users. If all goes well, it should be fairly simple to convert the other emails over.

Tweaks

• General: Automatic textbox resizing has been redone to simply enlarge the text area when you click it instead of growing as you type. I liked the old method quite a bit but for some reason it only worked in my dev environment and not on the demo site. Would like to revisit this someday post-launch.
• General: Added Asia to the region list.

Bug Fixes

• General: Fixed various timezone errors (this fix has actually been live for awhile now)
• General: Email IP privatization. Email delivery rates should be greatly improved.