Site Remake Hits Beta! Plus DMs and Privacy options (Patreon)

The site remake has hit beta!!! 🎉🎉🎉

The term "beta" has been a bit mangled by marketing people over the years so let me clarify what that means. The site remake is now in feature freeze. No new features will be added between now and launch.  Everything I needed to include before the remake could officially launch is now there. But we still have the final stretch ahead of us.

Now it's time for a big round of polish, bugfixes, and testing. There's still a bunch of bugs to fix on our Trello and I have my own list of technical details to address. The good news is neither list has to be cleared entirely before we can launch.

So here's a rough sketch of the plan going forward:

• Much smaller, more frequent updates for bugfixes and polish.
• Clean up the mobile UI. This has been a bit neglected and I know it's pretty bad in some spots.
• Switch from closed to open beta. Opening up the demo to everyone, including non-patrons, let's more people help test  ̶ ̷a̷n̷d̷ ̷w̷i̷l̷l̷ ̷f̷i̷n̷a̷l̷l̷y̷ ̷l̷e̷t̷ ̷i̷P̷h̷o̷n̷e̷ ̷u̷s̷e̷r̷s̷ ̷i̷n̷ ̷o̷n̷ ̷t̷h̷e̷ ̷a̷c̷t̷i̷o̷n̷.̷. (Apparently a Safari update has already fixed the iPhone issue, hooray!)
• Continue testing/fixing
• Finally, once things are good enough, I'll wipe the demo site clean and try a test move of the current database into the new one. Repeat until I'm happy with the results and it's launch time!

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New to the Patreon? All patrons can check out the demo at backloggery.club. Non-patrons can look around but won't be able to use an account if they register. 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.

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This was one of the longer updates in the making and while it may not be that flashy, there's a lot of important features added. A lot of the below features were arrived at based on years of seeing how assholes operate on social platforms. The options below are pretty comprehensive, but there's still more things I'd like to add in the future. Still, this should make for a solid foundation to help ensure everyone can enjoy themselves with as few unwanted intrusions as possible.

DMs

DMs are now possible. To prevent the cliché of creepers sliding into your DMs (which make up about 99% of problems on the current site), DMs are now only allowed between mutuals (accounts that follow each other).

Privacy

Users now have much greater control over who can view their information and interact with them. Possible options include:

• Any one
• Logged in users
• User accounts older than one month
• Users you follow
• Mutuals
• No one

Blocking

Pesky turtle kings still getting you down? Give them the old block. Blocked users lose all access to your account. If they are following you, they will be removed from your followers. Multitap entries from them will also be hidden. Blocking will prevent you from accessing their profile as well.

Blocks are largely discreet. For example, if a blocked user tries to view your profile, they will get a generic privacy message as if they didn't meet the requirements for the above general permissions.

v0.12.0 Patch Notes

New Features

• Direct Messaging: multitap posts between mutuals can now be sent privately
• Account Privacy: a wide array of privacy options are now available to user accounts (see above for more details)
• Account Blocking: other users can now be discreetly blocked to prevent unwanted interactions (see above for more details)
• Easier Mentioning: a searchable dropdown list of users you follow has been added to the multitap post composer

Improvements

• Multitap: better handling of focus and cursor position when inserting emojis and mentions

Bug Fixes

• Games: platform selection is now properly enforced when adding games
• Profile: page notes are no longer able to overflow and break the layout in FireFox