happy friday! we know it’s been a bit since the last patch notes, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been getting a lot done in the last three weeks.
unfortunately we’re going to miss our goal of artist alley shipping by end of March. jae has been dealing with the worst-possible-timing head cold over the last week and has been working, as you might expect, slower than they’d like. things are getting close though, and assuming they make a recovery this weekend we expect to launch a pre-sale period by April 5 with listings going live by April 12. we’ll keep y’all posted on our plans.
colin is getting close to finishing the rewrite of the post editor to allow for inline attachments — just a few bugs left to squash — and we hope to start testing it by April 5. after it’s stable, he’ll be working on tipping full-time to get it over the line.
here’s what’s new:
- addressed a couple safety concerns users raised with asks:
- effective noon PDT March 29, you can no longer send asks containing embedded images, audio, or video; the concern raised here was that an embedded image in an ask could be used by a malicious sender to determine the IP address a particular user (the recipient) was browsing the site from, with no conscious interaction on their part beyond opening their ask inbox.
- asks can no longer be sent without any text, as a measure to mitigate spam.
- changed the anonymous ask UI to distinguish between logged-in anons (”Anonymous User”) and logged-out anon (”Anonymous Guest”)
- if you allow anonymous asks at all, we generally recommend requiring them to be sent by logged in users (”require anon asks to be logged in?” checked in the project settings) unless you have a specific off-site audience you want to be able to ask you questions. our ability to moderate asks from senders who are not logged in is very limited.
- changed how audio attachments are placed in a post in preparation for the new editor
- minor copy change around the setting to automatically show 18+ posts
- this was worded in an unclear way and became even less clear as we added surrounding settings. it should be better now. thanks to the users who pointed it out.
that’s all for this week! we’ll have more to share on artist alley early next week, and more to share on our financials in the coming weeks. until then, thanks as always for using cohost! 
this week’s patch note title is brought to you by notion’s really silly and obnoxious AI upsells:
