We moved over to a new server in addition to a new code base as part of this transition, so if you're reading this in the next few hours, I'm still here watching the error logs and live-tuning as you read.
Here's a short list of some of the changes that will be noticeable from this first update:
General
- Dramatically reduced the load burden of icons (Like the social media icons at the bottom right, the play/pause icons in the drawing tools, etc.)
- Fixed activity alert notifications occasionally sending users to a different language version of the site
- Added an “about” page to answer some of the common questions and misconceptions about the site that I see
- Built a lot of new tools for me and Sanne to moderate the site more efficiently with
Your Studio
- Dramatically reduced load times for the “Your Studio” page
- Changed the current day from the week day name to “Today” to make it clearer what the chart is showing
- Fixed display of goal text when the progress bar is not at 100%
- Fixed “X spent practicing this week” randomly being blank
- Fixed practice streak calculation
Achievements
- Fixed case where lifetime practice hour achievement award would not be awarded sometimes for weeks or months after a threshold was passed.
User profiles
- Fixed some spacing issues on user profiles
- Fixed a bug where if you entered a link to your Tumblr, it still wouldn’t show on your profile
- Added Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads as link options for profiles
- Updated the old twitter logo on profiles to the new X logo.
- Added a more obvious edit link to profiles when viewing one’s own
- If an account is closed for being empty (no forum posts, practice time logged, or drawings uploaded) and unused for more than 6 months, you can now reopen them by solving a captcha instead of having to write to me and wait for me to have time to help out.
Groups
- Added a search option to find a study group that suits you
- Fixed a translation error on announcement pages
- Fixed the text editor appearing on forum pages when you aren’t a member of the group (and so can’t actually post)
- Placed the “join” option on the main overview page of public groups when viewed by users who are not yet a member of said group.
- Group instructors can now see announcements that are scheduled for future publication, so they can edit them while they are still upcoming.
- Gave the moderation team better tools for cleaning up groups created by spammers
- Fixed some spacing and other display issues in groups
Forums
- Reduced load times for forums
- Upgraded to a more modern WYSIWYG text editor that does things like preview YouTube embeds as you’re writing.
- Switched to a new, hopefully more reliable and bullet-proof BBCode engine.
- When posting a reply to a multi-page topic, you should now be properly redirected to your reply, not to the start of the topic.
- Forum posts can now be held for moderation before they are shown to users other than the OP - this happens automatically when suspicious content is posted. With any luck, this will dramatically decrease the amount of spam you see.
Of course, the biggest category of changes I implemented were under-the-hood updates you won’t notice yet, but are crucial for the next phase of releases being made possible! ;)
If you find I've broken something that used to work as part of this update - especially since I had to move up the install date as an emergencty spam bot response - please report what's happening to me via the contact form. Thank you!
Kim
- Site admin
