cohost dot org

business news: @aidan is now officially a co-owner of the company! congrats and/or condolences!
HUGE change to how we cache data about posts that makes everything way faster. we’d had a blind spot in our knowledge of database development that has now been filled in.
- deployment took longer than expected and unfortunately made posting Not Work for like 15 minutes but it’s fine now.
  - lesson learned: run big database changes against more faithful clones of the production environment, to get reasonable estimates at their performance characteristics instead of just guessing based on how they ran on a slice of the database from months and months ago.
fixed some issues with embeds causing a lot of flashing
tweaked the long post collapsing threshold based on feedback
fixed a bug where notifications would sometimes display “ERROR STATE” when there simply wasn’t any text to show
made fairly substantial changes to how post publishing works
- fixes a bug that most people would have never experienced but that the three of us experienced literally every single time we posted

that’s all for this week, thanks for using cohost! :eggbug:

#cohost corner

cohost dot org @staff8/17/2022, 8:09 PM

cohost patch notes vol. 27: One Thousand Paper Cuts edition

huge week with a ton of small fixes and improvements. extremely exciting stuff.

first, on activations: we’re floating around the cap again so, while we’re still doing daily activation batches, they’re smaller than they were previously. we’ve got some work in progress that will (hopefully) give us another boost in cohost Plus! subscriptions so we can start activating more users again.

more exciting news: starting in september, @jessfromonline will be joining the team part-time for the next few months! she’ll be focusing on bug fixes (she’s got a few in this week’s patch notes already!) so that colin and jae can focus entirely on Features and other big chunks of work. we’re thrilled to have the extra set of hands moving forward.

now, patch notes!

changed where the post composer takes you after saving a post:
- draft? takes you to the drafts page
- everything else? takes you where you just were
added a preview of where a manual “read more” will sit in the post composer
changed the post editor and profile editor to warn you if you’re trying to leave without saving
changed the behavior of the dashboard to only refresh when you ask for new posts, instead of refreshing continuously
- also fixed a bug that would alert you of Ghost Posts
added a setting to hide the number of unread notifications in the sidebar
- you’ll just get a blank egg! further freedom from the tyranny of Numbers
- also: this is jess’s first change to the site! wow!
changed the order of our <head> tags to hopefully prevent the Flash of Unstyled Content common referred to as “purple cohost”

#cohost corner

cohost dot org @staff8/10/2022, 9:47 PM

cohost patch notes vol. 26: TAke a look, y’all

Greetings from the posting factory! Unfortunately, jae’s general Fatigue and Brain Fog continues unabated so we remain at a lower capacity than normal. That said, we’re just hit the “on” switch on a feature we’ve been excited about: link previews!

On any post, adding a link on its own line will add a preview! This can be a player for youtube, soundcloud, etc, or just a summary card for other sites! The post preview shows how it’ll look so try it out there!

This only applies to bare URLs! Making a markdown link [like this](https://cohost.org) or including the URL in other text won’t embed it! You can also disable embedding by wrapping it in angle brackets like this: <https://cohost.org>

If you don’t ever want to see embeds, you can fully disable them in the user settings.

That’s the big one this week, but we’ve got other changes too! And we’ve got some example uses of embeds after the read more!

deleted comments are no longer included in the displayed comment count
deleted comments that no one has replied to are no longer displayed
- finally, the “[deleted]” of shame is gone… but only if you’re fast
fixed a bug where we were showing the pause button on normal jpegs and such
added a horizontal separator before footnote definitions

that’s all for this week! keep reading for some Things We Think Are Cool :host-joy:

#cohost corner

cohost dot org @staff8/3/2022, 9:13 PM

cohost patch notes vol. 25: 6 months anniversary edition

it has, somehow, been just about 6 months since we launched in the friends and family beta! :host-joy: that rules!

jae’s mostly back now but somehow managed to get sick again (which they are very mad about) so is back to somewhat limited availability unfortunately.

also, in case you missed it, we were featured in The Verge today! thanks @alexis for reaching out to talk to us, we love that people are still excited about what’s going on here.

here’s what’s new this week:

you can now pause gifs in posts!
you can also disable animated gifs in avatars and headers!
- this one’s new as of like five minutes ago!!!
fixed a bug where “read more” would be positioned incorrectly for posts with images
issued a temporary workaround to the “bee movie bug”
fixed an issue where unfollowing someone wouldn’t actually remove stuff they'd already posted from your feed
- would you guess that this was a loop iteration bug? because it was
added a temporary workaround for the ongoing issue where javascript can fail to load
- we’re still figuring out the exact cause but now, in most cases, we’ll try again instead of just failing immediately
made some internal changes to the post creation and update APIs to fix a bug that allowed for Invalid Posts. read more here!

that’s all for this week! no firm plans for what’s coming up next week because we all finished our current work at about the same time and are still figuring that out, but we’re thinking about various things to work on around content filtering and building self-service tools to handle frequent support requests.

thanks for using cohost! :eggbug: :host-love:

#cohost corner

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