hi again! it’s been a bit, but that’s just how it is sometimes.
since the last real patch notes post, most of Colin’s and Aidan’s time has been spent on dark mode; implementing what we have now required them to tear out a large chunk of the site style and create a working system for dynamic styling going forward, which ended up taking two weeks! while it’s not 100% done, we have the highest-usage areas of the site covered, future changes should be much more straightforward, and for the time being we’re leaving it there so we don’t spend the rest of the year on it.
we’ve done some digging into the occasional periods of site slowness recently and found some performance issues with the bookmarked tag feed that we believe are responsible for most of it. we thought we had a fix ready to go but unfortunately, while it does fix performance for the users who see the worst behavior, it seems like it makes things significantly worse for a lot of other people, so we’ve rolled it back and are going to keep working on it; if you’ve noticed the bookmarked tag feed being weird over the past day or so, that’s what that was.
also new:
- fixed an issue causing sharing posts not to work for users in the activation queue.
- improved keyboard navigation when viewing posts with automatic “read more”s. short version: it should work the way you expect now, mostly. long version:
- the extremely disorienting behavior of the post content scrolling around inside the box to make the focused element visible should be entirely gone.
- we’ve also fixed most instances of keyboard focus being able to enter elements hidden behind the “read more”.
- however, firefox appears not to remove scrollable elements from the tab order even if you set
tabIndex="-1"; posts with a read more hiding scrolling blocks (code and preformatted text, mostly, which can be wider than the post box) will still misbehave, requiring you to tab through all of those elements before your keyboard focus comes back.- unfortunately, a complete fix would require us to render the post once in your web browser, then completely delete the part of it that’s not visible on your screen so that the browser doesn’t think it’s there to tab into. this is both a pain to implement and would likely lead to noticeable performance issues in the browser, so we have opted to not do it.
- internally, explicitly-requested read mores are much more straightforward and shouldn’t cause any of the same problems; we encourage folks to use those rather than relying on the automatically generated read more for posts that have a clear-cut introduction. (to insert one, put a line in your post containing only
---, with empty lines above and below it. this is also in the markdown reference.)
- improved performance when generating the initial dashboard when not following anyone
- we had some latent issues here which could cause site slowdowns during periods with lots of sign ups — if, say, a bunch of folks from tumblr decided to sign up at the same time.
- our status page has incorrectly not been reflecting periods of increased latency since mid-August; we checked our status provider and the integration with our internal latency alerts had mysteriously disappeared without any notice. this issue is now fixed, and we’ve set up alerts for the status page on our internal chat server so we can make sure everyone else is getting notified. thanks to everyone who got in touch with us to let us know!
general eggbug plush update: currently waiting on our first prototype from makeship! we’re just as excited as you are 
that’s all for this week! thanks, as always, for using cohost 
