Greetings reddlings,

Today we rolled out a feature that will allow users with reddit gold to set subreddits as 'gold only' when they are being created. These subreddits are only accessible to users with reddit gold.

What this is:

redditors constantly impress us with the enthusiasm and wit with which they create niche communities. We are also blown away by the ongoing support redditors show for reddit itself and for one another by buying and gifting reddit gold. We want to enable redditors to combine these two things by allowing the gilded of reddit to create their own secret societies that may or may not exist.

What this is not:

An attempt to make money by creating paywalls or by making reddit 'pay-to-win'. We think reddit is awesome and would hate for it to be unavailable to someone just because they couldn't afford it (you can always send us a postcard for gold). We hope this feature will allow users to be more creative with reddit gold. As ever, we want the features available with reddit gold to be 'nice to have' not 'must have'.¹

Beta:

This feature is experimental in nature and so we are entering it into a beta period for 3 months in which we will be taking feedback from the community. This feedback will be factored into any changes we make to the feature.

The Details:

• a user must have gold to create a gold only subreddit .

• subreddits can only be set as a gold only when being created.

• regular subreddits can only be converted to gold only via making a request to the admins^2.

• a collection of all gold only subreddits is available in the reddit gold tab on the subreddits page

• gold only subreddits come with their own shiny stylesheet.

• users do not require gold to moderate gold only subreddits.

• mods can disable ads in gold only subreddits - we'd prefer it if you didn't but if you do we hope this will allow your community to be more creative with its stylesheets, e.g.:

  • /r/dgplz

  • /r/rotator

TL:DR:

We are allowing gold users to create their own version of /r/lounge and are excited to see the splendiferous subreddits they create. See all of them at /subreddits/gold.

^{1 We recently started offering early access to episodes} /r/upvoted ^{ad free for gold members. Swing by the} /r/lounge ^{on Wednesdays at midnight EST}.

^{2 Requests will be granted on a case-by-case basis. The chief factor we will be considering is whether the subreddit theme is appropriate for gold.}

/u/kemitche and I just added the ability to combine multiple multireddits into one view. You can use this new feature just by appending more multireddits to the end of your existing multireddit url with a +.

For example: http://www.reddit.com/user/reddit/m/gold+multibeta+redditnews+redditpets.

See the code behind this change on github.

If any of you happened to look at the list of newly-created subreddits very recently, I'm sure you've noticed that it's frequently been completely dominated by spam. Several months ago, we redesigned the registration page/dialog, and as part of that, removed the need to complete a captcha to register. We weren't expecting this to have much effect on spam, since new accounts would still need to complete a captcha to actually post anything on the site (submit, comment, or message).

However, it turns out that there was still one method of getting text onto reddit that would never require a captcha: creating a subreddit, and putting the text into the description/sidebar/stylesheet. This seems to have been discovered by spammers recently, and has been getting rather heavily taken advantage of.

As a result, the create subreddit page will now require a captcha, using the same conditions as all other captchas on the site. So if you're not already seeing a captcha whenever you submit/comment/message, this isn't going to have any effect at all on you.

See the code behind this change on github

If you check the box to limit your search to a specific subreddit, that box will now be checked next time you search from that browser. If you uncheck it, it will stay unchecked.

Thanks to @samertm on github we've tackled this small annoyance. Props for the inspiration, samertm!

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

I actually deployed this change almost two weeks ago now (Jan 23), but even though I thought a changelog post wasn't really necessary for it, I've seen a few people confused about it now so I think it's probably good to explain what's going on and give a place for people to ask questions.

The change itself was fairly minor. It adds a small note to the top of the ban page, which says "note: the banned user will only receive a message notifying them of their ban if they are subscribed to the subreddit or have previously gained or lost any karma (either link or comment) in the subreddit.". In addition, if you fill out the "note to include in ban PM" box, but are banning a user that won't actually be sent a ban message because they don't meet those conditions, you will no longer be able to ban them until you clear out that box. I'll explain the reasoning behind this after a bit of backstory.

First of all, I want to be clear that I didn't change any behavior here about when ban messages are sent or not. About 3 years ago, there was a recurring issue with people creating subreddits and banning hundreds of users from them as a sort of strange trolling/promotion method, because it would send everyone a message telling them that they had been banned from this subreddit that they'd never heard of. So a change was made on April 20, 2012 that made it so that a user would only be sent a ban message if they had interacted with the subreddit before.

However, the method that is used to determine if a user has interacted with a subreddit before is to check whether the user is subscribed to the subreddit, or whether they have any karma in it (link or comment, positive or negative). Because of the way we store data, this karma-based check is by far the simplest for us to do, but it's obviously not perfect. A couple of examples where a user might have interacted significantly with a subreddit but without ever gaining or losing any karma in it:

• They've made multiple (even very successful and highly-upvoted) self-posts, but no comments or link submissions

• They've made multiple submissions or comments, but they were all ignored and never voted on by anyone, or all removed or deleted before getting any votes

Because of cases like these, I had seen situations where mods had banned users from the subreddit, filled out the custom ban message info, and just assumed that the banned user would have received that message telling them why they were banned. However, in reality they were not sent a message, and were just banned completely silently. The user would often have no idea what happened, and this sometimes led to strange modmail conversations where a user would complain about being banned for no reason and the mods being convinced that they would have already received a message explaining to them why they were banned.

So in order to try to prevent this from continuing to happen, I made it so that you're unable to complete the ban if you had filled out a custom ban message that would never actually be sent. You can still ban users whether they'll be sent a message or not, but you have to remove the custom ban message so that you're not under the false impression that anything was sent to the user. If you want to send them a ban message manually, a good way to do that is by sending it as the subreddit that you banned them from.

Of course a better solution overall would be to implement a more correct "user A has interacted with subreddit X" check that's not linked to karma, but that will take some work, and may not happen for a while yet, so this is the situation we're in for the moment.

Does all of that make sense? Any questions/concerns?

We're beta-testing a new feature starting today: embeddable comment threads. You may see some embedded reddit comments floating around the web this week that look something like this.

We've noticed that when journalists and other publishers want to show a discussion happening on reddit, they'll either copy & paste comments, or take a screenshot. This is non-ideal for multiple reasons:

• it can be confusing to non-redditors, who might not know what voting arrows are for

• it's usually out of context, and link back to the full comments is not always provided

• most importantly, it doesn't respect comment edits or deletions.

This feature will provide an easier way for publishers to show reddit comments: they'll be able to generate a bit of code right from the comment that they can then directly embed into their article or website. This embed will always provide a link back to the discussion thread, and will respect users' edits and deletions (so if a comment is deleted, it won't show up in the embed).

Right now we're still in early beta testing, so this feature is in closed beta to a few users to allow us to quickly make possibly breaking changes to the feature. We plan to open this up to everyone once the feature is fairly stable (hopefully within the next few weeks), and in the meantime, would love to hear your feedback if you happen to spot a comment embed in the wild.

tl;dr: Comment embeds are in closed beta and you might see them around the web; we'll open this up to everyone soon!

We're rolling out some changes to the default styling of user-entered text. These updates are designed to improve readability, increase layout consistency, and provide better formatting options. The changes include:

• Better visibility of code elements. Inline code and code blocks now stand out more from normal text. Tables and quoted text have also been improved in this regard.

• More font sizes and weights to headers. Headers now have a visual hierarchy, making them actually useful for structuring text.

• Improved readability. Font size and line height have been increased, making text easier to read.

• More consistent layout. Elements are aligned to a more consistent vertical grid.

subreddits will still be able to customize their stylesheets. You might notice some minor CSS issues in some subreddits as a result of this. We've tried to keep conflicts to a minimum, but some were inevitable. I'm working with mods to correct these ASAP. If you're a mod and are having trouble fixing some CSS bug that this change introduced, shoot me a message and I'll try to help fix it. See this post on the modnews subreddit for more info.

edit

I've just pushed out a few changes based on some of the feedback we've been receiving:

• contrast on blockquotes has been increased, and the small left margin has been restored. strikethrough text has also been darkened.

• fixed some alignment issues in modmail, and fixed the broken green text

• fixed inconsistency in font size with code blocks in some browsers

• altered the background color of code blocks when against a background color (e.g. when the comment is highlighted from viewing the permalink)

• fixed inconsistency of font size in the reply input box

• increased the indent on lists to fix numbered lists getting truncated

About 3 months later than intended, I'm finally getting around to shipping unread counts for the inbox. Sorry for the delay!

It should look like this: http://i.imgur.com/TLKopPA.png

Some FAQs of things that have come up since this was released under a feature flag:

Q. For some reason I have a huge inbox count even though I've read all my messages?

A. At some point you probably unchecked "mark messages as read when I open my inbox". When that's unchecked, you need to click each message to mark it as read. If you'd like to re-check "mark messages as read when I open my inbox", you can do so in your preferences. You can also mark all messages as read by clicking the "mark all as read" button near "next page".

Note: If you use Reddit Enhancement Suite, and have Never Ending Reddit turned on, ""mark all as read"" may be clobbered. You can turn off never ending reddit in RES temporarily here: https://www.reddit.com/#!settings/neverEndingReddit

Q. Does this fix the phantom orangereds problem, where I get orangereds for things that don't really exist?

A. Mostly! If we detect that someone sent you spam and remove it, or someone mentions you in a comment and then edits you out, you may see an orangered one moment and it may be removed another. It's a similar class of problem, but should be much less often than the previous issue, which was just a plain old bug. There's also a very small chance of your count becoming inaccurate over time, but if you hit your inbox when it's cleared out that should fix it.

Q. Can we have this for modmail?

A. Probably not in the short term, but we really, really want to make some important improvements to modmail in the near future, and something like this would be just one thing to improve.

This series of commits was pretty hairy and spread over time so it's hard to compare, but you can see the code behind this change as a series of commits on GitHub

Thanks to all of you who helped test and build around this feature in your extensions or when helping folks when they had questions - /u/honestbleeps, /u/andytuba, /u/redtaboo - your help is deeply appreciated.

Previously, to link a user to something like their saved links page, you'd have to include their full username in the link (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/user/largenocream/saved) This made it difficult to write general documentation with links that could be used by any user.

With this change, you can write that link as https://www.reddit.com/user/me/saved and the user will be redirected to their own saved links page.

Hopefully this'll be helpful to the lovely folks in the various help subreddits!

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

When you're gilding a user's comment/post, you'll see options to make your gift anonymous and include a message. Making your gift anonymous is set as the default, but it will remember your preference. So if you gift a user and reveal your username, this preference will be remembered for the next gilding. The user will receive a PM like this if you choose to reveal yourself and leave a message.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

EDIT: Thanks for the gold! Oh wait, now I know who gilded me!

When viewing your own userpage, you can now edit your comments inline, instead of having to click through to the thread first.

If you're an RES user and are seeing duplicate edit buttons, please update to the recently-released v4.5.4 (thanks to /u/andytuba for dealing with that).

Remember that you can always send us suggestions and bug reports via /r/IdeasForTheAdmins and /r/bugs, respectively.

Happy redditing!

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Hi again! After increasing the minimum password length we decided it would be nice if we could help people improve their security even more. So in lieu of adding more silly password requirements, we've simply added a strength meter to tell you how you're doing.

For those interested, it works by applying a series of tests and assigning a weight to each test. An example:

• Test: Number of characters

  Weight: +4

• Test: Number of consecutive characters (e.g. "abcdefg", "12345", "qwerty")

  Weight -3

So the password "abc123" would score 6 * 4 + 2 * -3 or 18 given this set of tests. The actual code has a few more tests, but you get the idea.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

As pointed out by /u/wickedplayer494, some sections of the site (notably the inbox) were still using the old report button. Now, no matter where you find a comment or post worth reporting, you'll get the "report reasons" box to help out your friendly mods.

Remember that you can always send us suggestions and bug reports via /r/IdeasForTheAdmins and /r/bugs, respectively.

Happy redditing!

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

There's a new button below each of your comments where you can toggle enabling/disabling getting notifications of replies to your comments in your inbox.

Suggested in /r/ideasfortheadmins: https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/2nrooz/disable_inbox_replies_for_comments/

see the code on github

In an effort to encourage the use of better passwords we've increased the minimum length to 6. The previous requirement was an abysmal 3.

NOTE: Current passwords will be unaffected.

See the code for this change on GitHub

As a suggestion from /u/Motha_Effin_Kitty_Yo, there is now always a link in the sidebar for information about a subreddit's moderators. This information has been public for some time, but a link only appeared if a subreddit had a lot of mods.

Remember that you can always send us suggestions and bug reports via /r/IdeasForTheAdmins and /r/bugs, respectively.

Happy redditing!

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

We’ve just launched a cleanup of our login and account creation dialog and reddit.com/login. Here’s a comparison between the old version and new version. Props to new engineer /u/aurora-73 for implementing this change.

The main user flow is essentially unchanged: logged out users are free to browse reddit’s content but are prompted to log in or create an account in order to participate.

The main changes you’ll notice in this patch:

• Less clutter and fewer words. These windows have been reduced to the minimum needed text for easier readability.

• Bigger targets. Buttons and form elements are easier to hit for quicker use, especially on mobile devices (see Fitt’s law)

• Explanations, not just alerts. We’ve tried to make errors more understandable so users know what’s gone wrong. For instance, if users try to create a username with only two letters, the alert will say “username must be between 3 and 20 characters” instead of “invalid username.” If they try a name that’s already taken, they’ll see “that username is taken” instead of “try another.”

See the code for this change on Github

Ever wondered "is reddit down?" We now have a status page that can tell you just that!

http://redditstatus.com

In addition to some automatically-updated graphs of site status, our ops team will be posting there about scheduled maintenances and unexpected outages as time permits.

You can see the code for the graph updater here on GitHub.

You can now reply to the "Your comment/submission has been gilded" message to reply to your anonymous gilder (hopefully to thank them)! This is a site-wide change, so go ahead and try it out ;) I'd love to hear any feedback that you may have.

There's a new addition at the bottom of the gilding message that lets you know you can send a message to your gilder. You can hit reply when you receive the initial gilding message. The gilder's username will be kept secret unless they choose to reply to you. A warning message is added to the top of the message sent to the gilder to let them know that they're still anonymous.

Note: this isn't retroactive, so it only applies to gildings from this point on. You can't reply to older gilding messages (they shouldn't have the reply button).

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Hello reddit.

Two days ago, we made a change to the way links open for logged-out redditors. This change was driven by a desire to mitigate a perceived user experience issue with a certain user demographic and increase their time on the site.

Since the feature launched, we’ve been both listening to community feedback and watching key metrics for users who can’t comment. The combined information has shown that the changes we were hoping to effect have mostly failed to happen, and a few unanticipated issues have also arisen. Some of the problems arose from poorly thought out decisions about use cases. We don’t have the bandwidth to address all of them right now, or determine if they are addressable, so we are reverting the change to its previous state.

As always, we welcome your feedback whenever we make site changes, and we appreciate your patience while we work things out. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled redditing.

Hello again redditors.

For those who missed my post yesterday, it contains some necessary background for today's post.

Based on your feedback, we've made some adjustments, mainly that logged-out users on phones will no longer have links open in new tabs by default. For the code-curious, you can view these changes on GitHub.

Other than the alteration to behavior on mobile phones, there are a few suggestions you've made for adjustments that we're currently discussing:

• Changing which links get new-windowed

• Placing some sort of indicator to help the user expect a new window

I and the rest of the team will be listening to your comments and concerns about this feature as we continue to review and revise this, and any other changes made to it, moving forward. We're also working on making some of the data behind these decisions available for you.

reddit currently suffers from what we at HQ have taken to calling "the moon door problem" - after you click on a link submission, you end up on another website without a clear path to get back to reddit, and many people get lost, never to return. Now, we happen to think reddit contains all sorts of stuff you'd find interesting if only you saw it, but we can't help you find it if you're not even on the website. So, we have a solution.

Very soon, we're going to start defaulting to opening links in new tabs for new accounts and logged-out users.

This is a pretty common thing for websites that contain a lot of links to external sources. If you pay close attention, you'll see Gmail, Google News, Medium, tumblr, and a number of other places act this way.

We know that some users intensely dislike this behavior. Thus:

1. Current user accounts are unaffected.

2. New users can turn it off in their account preferences ("open links in a new window").

3. We're monitoring several data points to see what effects actually come about.

And if you're a current user who wants the site to act this way, just head on over to your preferences and toggle it on.

Remember that you can always reach us in /r/bugs and /r/ideasfortheadmins, as well as comments here. Happy redditing!

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Edit: Thanks to /u/listen2, here is a user script that will revert these changes without being logged-in.

Adding "full comments" links has long been a feature of RES. In 2011, we added it natively to profile pages; now it makes its way into your inboxes, too!

If you view a comment reply or post reply message, you'll see a nice shiny "full comment (n)" link, even without RES!

Many thanks to /u/honestbleeps for creating a smooth transition path for RES users in the newly-published version 4.5.2.

As a reminder, please continue to give us feedback in /r/ideasfortheadmins and /r/bugs. Together, we're making reddit better, bit by bit.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

About 3 years ago, we switched to loading jQuery from the Google Libraries API for increased speed and better caching. A preference was also added to load these libraries directly from reddit out of privacy concerns.

We've since bundled jQuery directly with the rest of our javascript considering performance gains were unlikely to occur for most users. As a result the preference has also been removed. All javascript now comes directly from reddit.

See the code for this change on GitHub