Sylvia Lilith

hey there! another week of mostly bug fixes and cleanup this week. here’s what’s changed:

• added confirmation dialogs for a few different operations on the site that we’ve received reports of people accidentally activating and regretting having done so: publishing a draft, and unfollowing, silencing, and blocking pages.
  • we also fixed the bug where you would only get a confirmation dialog before discarding a post if you closed the post composer with the Escape key or clicking on the backdrop, rather than clicking on the X button.
  • the confirmation dialogs we had before were all originally implemented with different code, so adding more was also a good opportunity to get them all on the same codebase and make them all look slightly more presentable.
• fixed the behavior of the “view temporarily” button on the profiles of pages which you have silenced or blocked.
  • previously, clicking the button would just show you an empty page. this originally broke as a side effect of fixing some more serious bugs in how blocks and silences worked a while ago. the fix was surprisingly complex and not many people seemed to use the button, so it took a while to get around to it.
• external links no longer have rel="noreferrer" applied.
  • when you click a link on the Web, the Web browser tells the page to which you’re going the URL that you came from, using the “Referer” header.
    • we know it’s misspelled. that’s just how it is.
  • by default, when you open a link offsite it opens in a new tab. more than 99% of cohost users use this default (but you can change it in the settings page if you want!). for users with the “open external links in a new tab” setting turned off, the Referer was already being passed along.
  • for historical reasons, in web browsers older than about 2016 it’s insecure to open links in a new tab without setting rel="noreferrer", so some of our “avoid making silly mistakes” tooling told us to set it and we listened. all of the browsers cohost supports are far newer and provide secure behavior with an alternate setting (rel="noopener") which doesn’t clear the Referer.
  • we’ve received feedback from some artists using analytics tools for their personal web sites, as well as the tools built into platforms like Itch, that they were incorrectly seeing a very small number of referrals from cohost. this change means that off-site analytics should correctly display traffic coming from cohost, giving an accurate sense of reach.
  • if you don’t want this information to be passed along, plugins like Referer Control for Chrome or Referer Modifier for Firefox will let you turn it off.

we also fixed the bug where you would only get a confirmation dialog before discarding a post if you closed the post composer with the Escape key or clicking on the backdrop, rather than clicking on the X button.

Given that I posted whining about this a grand total of two (2) times, I am going to obviously assume this was entirely because I bitched hard enough it got to staff’s attention and that no one else was involved in this process.

(But for real thank you for fixing)