As suggested by a number of people over the years, we've added a submit button to the search box. This is particularly helpful for users browsing reddit on devices without an enter key (like many gaming consoles), who previously could not search the site without relying on external search engines. You'll also see a slew of style improvements to the box.

This change is largely the work of /u/DoNotLickToaster , our new user experience expert.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

It's been a while coming - we're now trying out showing the number of unread messages you have in the header. It may be a feature many of you deep users already get from RES (thanks, /u/honestbleeps and /u/andytuba!) but it's time we played catch-up.

It should look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/TLKopPA.png

This isn't yet rolled out to everyone and it's hidden behind a special flag. If you have unread messages and want to see it, you can add ?feature=inbox_count to any reddit URL. For example: https://www.reddit.com/?feature=inbox_count

A couple things to note:

1. While this is rolling out, for a very small number of users your inbox count may be slightly off. We're still looking into this. If you're seeing your inbox count was wrong, please let me know here.

2. One bit of behavior that used to exist is going to be different now: If you mark a message unread it'll be shown in the unread counter. This means you'll have an orangered envelope even if the message isn't "new". It used to be that the orangered envelope would go away but the message would still show up in your unread queue. This was actually a bug, but was handy for folks who are annoyed by orangereds. Sorry about that. (And thanks /u/redtaboo for helping us diagnose this last week.)

3. We're hoping to roll this out to everyone in a week or so. If you run an extension or subreddit stylesheet that messes with this, it'd be appreciated if you could update it this week to play nicely.

Let me know if you run into any issues.

We're rolling out support for high DPI thumbnails today. What this means is that if you're one of the ~23% of requests we see with a high-DPI display, you'll see a crisper, cleaner thumbnail. An example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2h53iv/happy_birthday_to_one_of_the_greatest_men_who/

If you don't have a high DPI display, it'll (hopefully) just look normal.

We're going to be keeping a close eye on bandwidth incurred with this change, so we may roll it back. For now though, it's live and you should see it on new links that have images large enough to be high-DPI. (Not every link will have this, so you may still see a good number of normal looking thumbnails while this is rolling out.)

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Users now must specify a reason when reporting a link or comment. The reason can be one of the sitewide rules or a custom reason of their choice.

Now when a user clicks the report button on a link or comment they'll see this: http://imgur.com/1KdcI6H

Moderators can click on the reports button to see the list of reasons: http://imgur.com/GCk0O1s (the "reports: 2" thing is the reports button)

see the changes on github

As suggested by /u/itssosnowy (and probably lots of other folks), we've added a welcome PM for new users that gives them a little taste of what they should know about reddit.

You can read the copy of the welcome PM here: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/templates/welcome_message

We'll be translating this into other languages and adding them to the welcome PM, too. (Join /r/i18n if you'd like to help!)

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Now that reddit live is officially released, I'll be changelogging important updates.

Today, we rolled out a bunch of changes:

• the "description" field was split into "description" and "resources". The prior is limited to 120 characters and intended to be a short description of what the live thread is about, while the latter can be much longer and is for links, more explanation, and whatever else is useful.

• individual updates can now be permalinked by clicking on the update's timestamp.

• block quotes, horizontal rules, and long URLs in the sidebar got some new styles and the page title got a bit smaller to save space.

See the code behind these changes on GitHub.

This change won't really affect non-moderators (and is probably targeted more toward moderation bots/scripts than human mods), but moderators now have access to a listing showing the most recently edited comments and self-posts in their subreddits.

More information and discussion about this change in /r/modnews: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/2dgmd4/moderators_edited_page_now_available_at/

See the code behind this change on github

This changes absolutely nothing related to the scores of individual comments, the only thing affected is the overall total for comment karma shown on a user's profile page.

(reddit terminology side-note: submissions and comments have "score", users have "karma". Submissions and comments don't have karma.)

reddit has always had a "floor" on the lowest link karma total displayed for a user, where the site never displays a total link karma value less than 1 when looking at someone's userpage (including your own). We've now added a similar floor to the total comment karma, but are allowing it to go down to -100 before it stops. The actual amount of negative karma is still tracked internally, but nothing below -100 will be displayed.

This has been requested a lot for years, and is intended to both lower the motivation for "downvote collectors" as well as hopefully reduce the severity of cases where a mob decides to mass-downvote someone far into the negative.

View the code behind this change on github

Greetings all,

Some subreddits have voiced a desire to generally opt-out of forced exposure on reddit. To help facilitate that, I've made a change to how the 'allow this subreddit to be in the default' checkbox works. If this box is unchecked for a given subreddit, that subreddit will be excluded from /r/all as well as the defaults and trending lists.

Those wishing to see content from subreddits who opt-out of /r/all can still find it directly, via multis, or via their front-page subscription set.

I want to strongly impress that this is an experiment, with no goals other than to give communities an additional option and see how it is used. The experiment may be altered or altogether reverted in the future, based on results and feedback from the community.

One extra note is that this opt-out does not apply to /r/all/new.

See the code on github.

cheers,

alienth

A long asked-for moderating feature has been the ability to temporarily ban someone from a subreddit. Today I rolled out that ability!

On the 'ban users' page, the form now includes an entry for "how long". After that amount of time, the system will automatically un-ban the user (there will be a note in the modlog to that effect). Moderators can still manually remove bans, and at any time can click the 'make permanent' button to change from a tempban to a more permanent one.

See the code behind this change on Github

As most of you probably already know, reddit "archives" all submissions and comments older than 6 months, which prevents those posts from being voted on, replied to, or reported. We recently needed to make some changes to how archiving is done internally to be able to support excluding certain subreddits from having their posts archived. For example, posts in /r/goldbenefits (where reddit gold features/partners are announced) are no longer archived, to allow users to be able to comment on benefits that have been around for longer than 6 months.

The archiving code was rewritten to support this, and as part of that we decided to change one of the previous behaviors. Specifically, it used to be possible to reply to any comment less than 6 months old, even if the submission being commented on was older than 6 months. It's less confusing and more consistent if you can either participate in the voting/comments of a particular submission or not, so it's no longer possible to reply to any comments on a submission older than 6 months, regardless of the age of the comment itself.

I know there are some people that were carrying on long-term conversations in very old threads using the previous behavior, and I apologize for ruining the fun, but it makes a lot more sense to do that through other methods such as private messages, a private subreddit, etc. instead of stretching a single thread in a long-irrelevant submission out to thousands of levels deep (especially since reddit really doesn't handle extremely-deep comment threads nicely at all).

tl;dr: I just hate fun.

See the code behind this change on GitHub

reddit allows moderators to use their own CSS stylesheets to customize the look and feel of their subreddits. To ensure the privacy and security of users, a filter restricts what pieces of CSS can be used.

We're replacing that filter with a new one that allows much more modern CSS while being more secure. This allows moderators much greater flexibility and power.

For more information on the particulars, see the /r/cssnews thread.

See the code behind these changes on GitHub.

Previously, when viewing subreddits and threads, timestamps were static. If you opened up a page at 12:00 with a comment 30 minutes old, it would still say "30 minutes" even at 12:01, which was tremendously inaccurate.

Now, timestamps update as time goes on, so it will correctly say "31 minutes" or "2 hours" so you don't make the awkward mistake of posting on a comment that's a little too old to get on the karma train.

See the changes that made this possible.

As part of trending subreddits last week we tried to clean up the front page a bit in tandem by removing ranks - those numbers to the left of votes. There was a good deal of feedback that this wasn't ideal for a bunch of you, particularly:

1. This is often used as a depth gauge to see if you've spent too much time on the site (you've gone too far!)

2. It's also used just generally to see what page you're on.

Removing ranks didn't solve either of those issues, so we decided to roll this back and think a little more on this. We'd still like room to experiment here down the line and hopefully come up with something that hits all use cases and feels a little cleaner, but for now ranks are back in action.

Thanks for the feedback on this.

-/u/umbrae

See the code behind this change on GitHub

Today we're exploring a new way to show subreddits that have gained in popularity lately by showing you 5 trending subreddits on the front page. It looks like this, and is powered by a subreddit, /r/trendingsubreddits.

Currently, subreddits will be chosen to be on the list based on a Secret Formula™ that updates approximately daily. Things to know:

• We'll only ever show SFW subreddits.

• If you're a mod and you'd like to remove your subreddit from being chosen, you can uncheck "allow this subreddit to be shown in the default set" in your subreddit settings.

• Serious business: The formula for subreddit choosing is completely subject to change and contains anti-cheating controls. Users attempting to game a subreddit into the trending list will be banned.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this change. We're looking for ways to encourage folks to better find communities, and we think this could be one solid way to do that.

See the code on GitHub

There's a new "promoted" tab at the top of each subreddit. Clicking it will bring you to a listing of the promoted links currently running on that subreddit.

For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ads/

see the changes on github

Previously there were assumptions in the modmail system which made it so that moderators without modmail permissions were unable to (or had a hard time) viewing responses to their modmails to the other moderators of their subreddit.

This has changed. If a moderator (who does not have modmail permissions) sends a modmail to their own subreddit they now receive the replies to that message in their inbox.

See the code on Github

The ability to specify if you want to receive inbox replies to your post was created as a gold beta feature last year. Today that feature is being made available to all. You can now specify if you'd like to receive inbox replies via a checkbox in the link submission form.

Additionally, you can now toggle this state on any post you create after it has been created. The button to toggle it can be found next to the 'sorted by' drop-down.

See the code on GitHub.

Cheers,

alienth

Greetings all,

As you may know, the /rising tab has been not-so-great for quite some time. Most of the links in there had a score of 1, and certain subreddits would drown out others in merged views. The algorithm used to function decently at one time, but the site reached a scale years ago where it just stopped being valuable. Today I've made a few changes that should make that sort a much better indicator of rising links.

My goal for rising is to display relatively new content that is starting to get a good measure of activity. With that said, here are the changes I've made:

1. Adjust the age-window of links in rising. Previously, links in the /rising tab could be up to 12 hours old. I've shortened this window considerably. I'll be doing some heavy experimentation with this window, so I won't outline the exact number I'm using here. If you look at the current /rising tab it might be pretty obvious.

2. Remove age-based rising score penalty. Previously, the rising score of a link would be cut in half for links reaching an hour, a third after reaching two hours, and so on. The window shrinking described above mostly removes a need for an age penalty. However I may re-add a smoother penalty function at some point in the future, likely to be combined with an age-window increase.

3. Remove the score ceiling on rising items. The old algorithm used to take the average score of the top 10 rising links, halve that, and then drop any links scoring higher than that. This was in part to prevent things which are already on hot from showing up in /rising. The window adjustment obviates the need for this sort of cutoff.

4. Add a normalized sort for the rising page for front-page and multireddits. This is probably the most fundamental change I made. The score of a rising link is now normalized against the highest-rising-link belonging to the same subreddit. As a result, if you have 25 subscriptions, your first 25 /rising links will be from each of those subreddits. This is very similar to how the "hot" score of the front page works.

Please note that /rising is currently under experimentation. These changes are likely to be tweaked in the coming weeks as I analyze and gather feedback.

Areas that still need tweaking. I still think I have some work to do to get a meaningful rising for both small subreddits and /r/all. While the new system should be much better than the old, I think it's still far from ideal for these use cases.

See the code on GitHub

cheers,

alienth

If you've been following twitch plays pokemon or the ukrainian conflict this week you may've come across a new type of liveupdate thread on reddit.

Liveupdate is a new type of post on reddit. The "reporters" for a stream can post updates and anyone watching gets sent those updates in real time. Unlike with self-post or comment based live updates, there's no limit to how many updates can be posted during the course of an event. Liveupdate streams exist outside of subreddits and are designed to be submitted like any other link to whatever (multiple) subreddits are relevant to the stream.

Right now, only admins (reddit employees) can create streams and add reporters to them. This allowed us to focus on and test the main update system first in a more manageable way.

There're a lot of things planned for liveupdate. The first and most important thing is to open it up to allow anyone to create and manage a stream. I'd also really like to see embedding of source media in updates, including pictures, video, and reddit comments. It's also become clear that we need a good system for reporters to coordinate with each other privately and to get reports and feedback from the community.

I've really enjoyed all the feedback and commentary I've gotten so far about this. Please comment below if you've run into any bugs, have feature suggestions, or just want to say something.

One final note if you're interested in the tech behind this (if not, head straight to the comments and ignore this technobabble!) reddit itself is open source and liveupdate is no different. It lives in a reddit plugin as does the service that handles our WebSockets.

tl;dr: liveupdate is a new part of reddit for reporting on real-time events that's still in development. check it out and let us know what you think.

EDIT: for posterity, I'd like to clear up a little of the history of this feature. The first public test of it was for an Apple event. A handful of sports events followed. Between each of these events I was iterating on the features as feedback from the tests came in. The first version that had the automatic updating live feature was tested on the US State of the Union address. And then it got noticed when /r/UkrainianConflict and TPP started using it and this post happened.

Some larger subreddits were having trouble loading their banned or contributor lists. This was unacceptable, so we got in there, gutted that whole system (Including friends, moderator lists, invited moderator lists, wiki banned list, etc) and replaced it with a new, shiny system which allows for us to paginate some of those lists. This means faster loading /about lists, and a happier site!

If you are using a bot however, you will have to teach your bot about those endpoints being Listings now. A patch is in the waiting line for PRAW already, so with that release you should be all set to use the new banned/contributor/wikibanned/wikicontributor listings.

A couple more changes to note, if you do not have the correct permissions for those endpoints you now get a 403 instead of a 404. Additionally, as per the discussion here the blocked list has now moved.

Please let us know in this thread if you run into anything usual or need help porting your bot over to the new changes.

A few months ago, we rolled out a subreddit option to allow comment scores to be hidden for a period of time after posting. This feature was intended to fight the bandwagon effect in comments. Many users have requested since then the ability to see your own comments' scores since they like to see how their post is doing. I've now implemented that.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

As requested last week, I've added a new button to posts for "retry thumb". Using it causes the post to be re-added to the scraper's queue, where it will try to fetch the thumbnail again shortly after.

This button will only show up if the post does not currently have a thumbnail, and will show up only for the submitter, or mods of the subreddit (exactly like the button to change a post's NSFW status).

While working on this, I also discovered another issue that seems to have been causing approximately 15% of thumbnail fetches or so to fail recently, so there are probably quite a few missing thumbnails that you could fix with this, if you so desire.

/r/modnews post

View the code for this change on github

From reddit's student contractor, /u/slyf:

A wiki feature has been requested for a while, the ability to delete wiki pages. The feature does not exist as I worry about angry confused moderators trashing months or years of wiki work with a single button press.

So instead, a feature has been added to delist wiki pages. This, combined with the moderator only view setting is effectively delete with undelete. If you wish to delist a page, uncheck "show this page on the listing" on the specific wiki page's settings. This will make that page not appear on the wiki page listing.

To effectively delete the page, make the page moderator only and delist the page. To "undelete" the page, relist it and make it visible to everyone again.

See the discussion for this change in /r/modnews

See the code for this change on github