cohost dot org

happy january 24th! it’s not a holiday or anything, but we’re in the mood to be needlessly specific.

lots of performance fixes these past couple weeks while we continue work on tipping and some other new features in the background.

• we made notifications more reliable by fixing a design flaw in the way we count new notifications.
  • under the hood, we used to keep count by keeping a cache of all the notifications you’d gotten recently and counting how many of them you hadn’t seen yet. if we weren’t tracking a cache for you, we would ignore new notifications, which would prevent the “unread” count from being updated.
  • however, the cache can get discarded if the site needs to keep track of something else and doesn’t have the extra cache space, and the only way to get a notification cache when you didn’t have one already was to click on the notification page in the menu.
  • this poses an in-retrospect-obvious UI problem: if your notification cache gets disposed in favor of something else, how are you ever going to know to check your notifications again?
  • now we keep a separate count — which is tiny by comparison — and refer to that if you don’t have a cache.
  • we don’t want to break notifications worse on the way to fixing them, so we’re doing a gradual rollout on this change to field bug reports as we go, but we expect the rollout to be pretty quick.

it’s friday! no intro this week because we all slept bad last night. here’s what’s new:

• fixed an issue where when you paged through the bookmarked tag feed, it would reset the “show 18+ posts” setting to your account default.
• fixed an issue where when loading someone’s profile page, if you had the “page” parameter set in the URL on initial page load, it would be ignored and display their newest posts anyway.
• as we mentioned in passing a few weeks ago, in the new year (to avoid really breaking the site and then leaving on vacation for a week) we were planning to make some internal changes to hopefully improve the performance of the bookmarked tag feed in some cases where it’s slow to load right now, and we’re in the process of making those changes now. we’re not ready to declare victory yet, though.

we’re out monday for the federal holiday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is actually on his birthday this year due to the calendar working out that way) but we’ll be back tuesday. see y’all then!

it’s 2024! how exciting. we hope everyone enjoyed their break from cohost getting any updates while we were on vacation.

some big corporate news: kara celebrated its 1st anniversary at the company the other day, which means (after a pretty tight vote, only passed by 3) it’s now a part-owner of anti software software club! congrats on equal share in eggbug!

here’s what’s new:

• self-service page deletion is now live!
  • you can start the process in your page settings.
  • after you request a deletion, there’s a three day waiting period so you can cancel it if you change your mind or did it accidentally.
  • once those three days are up, we’ll process the deletion in our daily automated maintenance window. all the posts and comments on that page will be permanently deleted.
  • right now, only pages with a single editor can be deleted automatically, because managing multi-editor pages isn’t something we’ve built publicly-facing UI for yet.
  • if you need to delete a multi-editor page, you need a page deleted faster, or if the automated deletion process fails for some reason (it shouldn’t, but we’re not confident enough to say that it can’t), please feel free to e-mail us at support@cohost.org as before, and we’ll handle it for you.
  • we know this isn’t a particularly flashy feature, but it saves kara a lot of time.

hey folks! it’s friday! no one here is sleeping well so it’s a light patch notes, but here’s what we’ve got:

• more changes to the bookmarked tag feed to improve performance.
  • the goal here was to fix some situations where a bookmarked tag feed page could take so long to load that the entire site would become unresponsive.
  • we haven’t experienced any periods of site unresponsiveness long enough to trip alarms since this change was rolled out, so on average, we’re counting it as a success.
  • however, some people are still seeing poor performance, and the change to fix it permanently will be complex enough that we’re going to revisit in january, when there’s less risk of messing up Very Bad and needing to deploy an emergency fix on a holiday.
• fixed an issue with the post composer where alt text and audio metadata weren’t getting set properly if you added an audio attachment followed by an image attachment.