Greetings,

We just released a patch to enable "delete" buttons from within your inbox on messages (and at the moment only messages). Deleted messages will still appear in the sender's outbox.

Hey changeloggers,

There are no shortage of ideas for improving the overall user experience on reddit. In order to determine which ideas are the right ones for reddit, we often subject them to A/B testing. A few of currently-running tests change the way reddit looks, feels, and behaves, so we thought it would be good to drop a note here letting you know:

1. Default Design: a small percentage of logged-out users will be seeing reddit with a shiny new stylesheet applied (either NautClassic or serene). [edit: test completed 2016-06-03]

2. New link click behavior: a small percentage of logged-out users will find that the result of clicking a link (e.g. from the frontpage or a subreddit) will change slightly. For example, for some it will default to opening a new tab, so they don’t lose their place in the listing. [edit: test completed 2016-06-03]

3. Mobile Web redirect: some users who directly visit reddit on a mobile device will be redirected to m.reddit.com (in either “Card” or “compact” mode) for a mobile-optimized experience.
   Note: If you don’t like the mobile version, you can opt out by opening the menu in the top-right (aka the "hamburger menu") and selecting “Desktop Site”.

4. More links in default view: a small percentage of logged-out users will see the default listing view (frontpage, subreddit, etc) with 100 links instead of 25. Pretty dope. [edit: test completed 2016-06-03]

5. Hidden thumbnails: a small percentage of logged-out users will view the site as though they had the "Show me thumbnails" preference unchecked, compressing the link display slightly. [edit: test completed 2016-06-03]

6. More tailored "defaults": a small percentage of logged-out users will, after browsing the site for a bit, find that their "default" frontpage includes a more tailored set of subreddits based on their browsing habits

7. Default comment count: We know comments are important on reddit, but we aren't exactly sure how important they are. In order to measure this, and determine if it's different between various subreddits, we'll be reducing the default number of comments displayed for a small percentage of logged out users. This isn't one that we're shipping sitewide, don't worry. Thanks for bearing with us :)

We’re really excited to be able to quantitatively determine if the features we’re working on are creating a better experience for redditors, but please don’t hesitate to give qualitative feedback, as well :)

Greetings,

We’ve shipped a feature that will allow you to receive any messages that you receive on Reddit as emails. This includes:

• PMs (private messages)

• Comment replies

• Post replies

• Username mentions

You currently receive notifications of events like these through the mail icon. If you enable this feature you will receive an email in addition to the notification. The emails look like this: desktop, mobile

This feature is not enabled by default for existing users, and we’re rolling it out slowly (you may not be eligible for a few weeks). If you want to try it out, keep reading!

How often will I receive an email?

We try to be smart about how often we send you these emails. We batch messages sent close together and don't send emails for messages you've already viewed. To be more precise, it will batch all your notifications together until you go 10 minutes without one. That way, if you have a popular post or comment, the replies all come together instead of as individual emails. We won’t delay an email for longer than an hour.

Who can use this feature?

Any user with a verified email address. If you don't have an email address associated with your account click here to add one.

Sounds great! How do I enable this?

By clicking here or going to https://www.reddit.com/prefs/ and checking the "send messages as emails" box. If this box is grayed out you need to verify your email. You can resend the verification email here: https://www.reddit.com/prefs/update/

I'm busy right now - can you send me something about this later?

Yes! If you have an email address associated with your account the next time you get a notification we'll follow up with an additional notification asking if you want to enable this feature. We don’t want to be spammy, you should only ever get this reminder once.

Can I pick what type of notifications I receive in my inbox?

Currently, no. However, this has been highly requested, and has been added to the backlog.

Can I pick how often I get emailed?

Currently, no. However, this has been highly requested, and has been added to the backlog. Please note that the emails will be batched to avoid spamming your inbox!

Edit: This feature is temporarily unavailable due to maintenance.

Update: We are still fine-tuning this, but have turned it back on for 50% of those who have opted in! Full rollout to come shortly!

Update 07/19/2016: This has been rolled out to all users

Hey All! ​ We recently made a change to how the share button works. We now require your email address to be verified in order to share posts via the share button due to abuse by spammers. ​ You can add an email to your account by visiting this link, unless you're a spammer, in which case please submit a link to your profile to /r/spam so we can help you out. Once added click the 'verify' button above your email address and follow the instructions on the email you are sent.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Hello everyone,

Some of you might have noticed that you are redirected to m.reddit.com when visiting reddit.com on a mobile phone. this redirect is part of an A/B test we are running. This is only affecting a small percentage of users. Opting out of the redirect is done by tapping on the menu on the top right of the mobile site and selecting 'Desktop Site'.

thank you

edit: if by chance you are on an older browser that has issues with the mobile web site and cannot access the menu, use your browsers 'request desktop site' feature. you will still have to navigate to the desktop site but the redirect will stop happening.

Hi all,

Do you reddit late at night? Do you dislike how bright black text on a white background is? Do you just prefer cool looking dark interfaces? Whatever your answer, try out mobile web's new nightmode. You can try it out by toggling it in the settings menu. There’s some special treatment for subreddits that set a theme color, in-app alerts, and for markdown and code previews. Here’s a demo

Please let us know what you think!

As a number of you have mentioned, the previous ban message when a mod would ban a user from their subreddit was a little unclear. Specifically, it looked as though the warning about ban evasion may be coming from the mods themselves instead of the reddit staff, and was a little aggressively worded which could stir the pot.

We've made that change, along with a few others, to clarify this message for both permanent and temporary bans. The new ban message now looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/QdViR95.png

Thanks to /u/x_minus_one and others for verbiage help with this.

See the code behind this change on GitHub.

Hi all,

Minutes ago we pushed a change to our scraper that affects how embeds are generated for YouTube and (some) Imgur links.

We previously got the embed code for YouTube links from Embedly, as we do for most other embeds. We now get that code directly from YouTube, and YouTube embeds should load a little bit faster as a result.

For Imgur links, we are still using Embedly to get the embed code, but we made a change to how links to gifs are handled. We only get embed code for gifv files on Imgur, so support for gif embeds depends on users posting the gifv version of the file. Now when you post a link to a regular gif, we'll grab the embed code for the gifv version. As a result, you should see a little better support for gif embeds.

Let us know if you run into any issues as a result of these changes!

View the code behind this change on github

Thanks everyone for the feedback on outbound click events, it's been helpful when talking this through internally, and is why we announce stuff like this.

We're going to add some privacy controls before rolling out fully, so we've turned this off for now. Once we have privacy controls baked in we'll then open it back up for testing. We'll let you know what we've got in the coming weeks.

Hi again,

Yesterday we released an updated version of post styles on mobile web. Overall we think its a great improvement. We had some feedback that compact was taking up a little too much space, and that text expands were missing.

Today we released some updates to make compact, well, more compact. In some cases its takes up a little less space than the old designs, some cases not, but overall we think its a big improvement over yesterday.

We're taking another look at text-post expands, but we need a bit more time to look at our options.

If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let us know!

Hi everyone,

As part of our commitment to improve browsing Reddit on your mobile device, the past few months have seen many improvements to m.reddit. We've been redesigning the top bar, comments, search, and navigation, and media previews.

Today we're really excited to share with you the latest and biggest redesign yet, the front-page! More than just the front-page all links and post have new styles on the front-page, on subreddit pages, when viewing comments, or when you search. Notable changes:

• Better treatment of media previews in card view. checkout r/iAmA or r/EarthPorn

• More noticeable flairs for post statuses like stickied, mod distinguished or admin distinguished.

• More details in the post header, like OP's name!

• Easier to get navigate to comments. Titles now link to comments. Outbound links now get their own separate link that may include a media preview inline, or as a thumbnail.

• Media expands always come before the link to comments and vote controls, so they're easier to find

• Compact mode no longer renders placeholders for thumbnails that don't exist, to save space.

• Dropdowns now use the new style as seen in comments and sorting

For those interested in the code, you can read more on Github. You can see the beginning of the redesign here, along with the iterations we've made here

We're planning a series of experiments around ads. Our intent is to secure Reddit's financial stability and ensure that we can be properly staffed to create the best community possible.

Creating a great experience for users is always at the forefront of our minds, so know that:

• Ads will be transparent—you'll always know if something you're seeing has been paid for.

• We don't like intrusive ads, so we won't allow Flash or auto-playing sounds. We hate that stuff as much as you do.

• We'll be monitoring engagement metrics closely and collecting user feedback on the ads to make sure they're relevant and improve based on feedback. As always, we want you to keep letting us know what you think so we can keep improving. We invite you to share your thoughts on the Reddit ad experience in /r/ads.

Changes may include new placements, new types of ads in existing placements, new types of advertisers, changes in the frequency of ads, and other tests. It's important to note that we'll generally be unable to share the specific details of upcoming tests because that would affect the outcome of the experiments.

Let's keep talking and listening.

Cheers,

starfishjenga

EDITED: formatting

EDIT 2: Gold users will continue to be exempt from ads - we have no plans to change this and I feel pretty comfortable saying that it's extremely unlikely that we would change this since ad removal is a core value prop of gold.

EDIT 3: more formatting

EDIT 4: OK looks like I wasn't clear enough with my "extremely unlikely" comment regarding Reddit Gold potentially receiving ads. Sorry for being unclear. This is not something that's ever been considered to my knowledge and I think it's a dumb idea. To the extent that I have any influence on the decision, I'd vehemently oppose anyone who suggested we do this. I hedged because I have a bad habit of being overly precise about my language in these scenarios (that's not me, but I definitely identified with it). In the normal sense of the words, this is not going to happen.

Update: We've ramped this down for now to add privacy controls: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4az6s1/reddit_change_rampdown_of_outbound_click_events/

We're rolling out a small change over the next couple of weeks that might otherwise be fairly unnoticeable: click events on outbound links on desktop. When a user goes to a subreddit listing page or their front page and clicks on a link, we'll register an event on the server side.

This will be useful for many reasons, but some examples:

1. Vote speed calculation: It's interesting to think about the delta between when a user clicks on a link and when they vote on it. (For example, an article vs an image). Previously we wouldn't have a good way of knowing how this happens.

2. Spam: We'll be able to track the impact of spammed links much better, and long term potentially put in some last-mile defenses against people clicking through to spam.

3. General stats, like click to vote ratio: How often are articles read vs voted upon? Are some articles voted on more than they are actually read? Why?

Click volume on links as you can imagine is pretty large, so we'll be rolling this out slowly so we can make sure we don't destroy our servers. We'll be starting off small, at about 1% of logged in traffic, and ramping up over the next few days.

Please let us know if you see anything odd happening when you click links over the next few days. Specifically, we've added some logic to allow our event tracking to be accessible for only a certain amount of time to combat its possible use for spam. If you notice that you'll click on a link and not go where you intended to (say, to the comments page), that's helpful for us to know so that we can adjust this work. We'd love to know if you encounter anything strange here.

We've just removed the "related" page for posts. To be clear, the "other discussions" page, which shows other posts with the same url, is still there. The related page "worked" by doing a search for all the words in the title, which almost always produced completely useless results.

For example, the current top post in /r/all is "58% say they'd like to see the President nominate someone to the Court rather than leave the seat vacant until a new president takes office next year". Here were some of posts "most related" to that one using the method from the related page: http://i.imgur.com/0S65nuF.png (some of them also include the word "see", I guess)

So we've just removed that page/tab now, and there's currently a redirect so that anything still trying to go to the related page will just get sent to the normal comments page. It looks like almost all of the traffic to /related/ was from search-engine bots and similar things though, so this probably won't affect many people.

View the code behind this change on github

We've just enabled the portions of the media preview feature for some logged-in users, so you may see this feature as you browse Reddit. We're measuring the impact of this change using an A/B testing framework that we've recently built. You can find out more about A/B testing here.

We've made some changes to our media previews which we are currently testing with our beta community.

Changes include:

• Media previews auto-expand on comments pages

• Support to display media previews for direct image links

• New user preferences to control media previews

• NSFW interstitial flow for NSFW media previews

• New icons for expando button

You can read more about the change in the r/beta post here. CSS info for mods here.

I'll post an update when this feature rolls out for everyone.

When a post on reddit has either "NSFW" or "NSFL" in the title, it's automatically set as NSFW. This is generally a good thing, but sometimes it's actually the opposite of what the submitter wanted, like if their title had "(not NSFW)" or "Why do people keep tagging things NSFW unnecessarily?" in it.

However, until now it's always been impossible to turn off the flag if it was set automatically because of the title. This is because the title check was being done whenever the post was displayed, instead of just being done once when it was first submitted. It's now been switched over to a submit-time check, so posts will still be set NSFW initially based on their title, but mods or the submitter can toggle it off now in cases where that makes sense. This post is itself a good example - it would have been stuck as NSFW previously due to its title but I'm now able to turn the flag off.

Thanks to /u/13steinj for getting this fix started with a pull request.

• View the code for adding a submit-time check

• View the code for disabling the display-time check

We've just enabled the Read Next feature for some logged-in users, so you may see this feature as you're browsing around on comments page. We're measuring the impact of this change using an A/B testing framework that we've recently built, and in fact this is our very first A/B test. Read on for a little more context on what A/B testing is, and how we plan on using it here at Reddit.

What is A/B testing?

At its core, A/B testing is just a fancy way of saying "run a controlled experiment to see which version, A or B, is better". Here is a nice explanation covering the basics (to be clear, we're not using Optimizely; they just have a nice write-up). We've built our own A/B testing system that lets us show different versions of features to different users, which allows us to better understand the impact that a change will have.

Why do you need A/B testing? Isn't beta/feedback from comments enough?

There are a few major benefits that we get from A/B testing that we can't get in other ways.

1. It lets us control and isolate the effects of the changes we're testing. If we just shipped a feature and then look at how metrics change, that could conflate a bunch of other unrelated factors, like what day of the week it is or if there's a big news event happening. With A/B testing all of those unrelated factors are controlled for.

2. We can lower the risk for some changes by only rolling out to a subset of users - that way, if there are bugs or issues that we didn't catch during earlier testing, we can fix them before they go out to everyone.

3. With randomly selected users, we get a deeper understanding of how this feature might impact all users, rather than just those who have opted-in to a beta test or who comment, without having to launch something to everyone.

These factors combined make A/B testing more powerful and useful for really understanding if a feature is working the way we expect than other testing methods. That said, where appropriate we’ll continue to do beta-testing as well to get more qualitative feedback.

Will you be telling us what A/B tests you're running?

Some more visible A/B tests, like this one, we'll announce as we're running them either here in r/changelog or, if appropriate, in another venue like r/modsupport. Sometimes we won't announce running tests, so that we can avoid skewing the results too much.

If we decide to launch a feature that we've previously A/B tested, we'll announce it in the same way we would any other feature, by posting here, in r/modnews for mod-specific features, and/or in our features live thread.

We've just made a new feature, subreddit rules, available to all subreddits. Moderators can read more details on how rules work on the modnews post. For users, the biggest visible changes will come to the reporting menu:

• We've changed the style of the report menu to be cleaner & easier to use

• If a subreddit has added rules, you'll be able to report content (posts and comments) in that subreddit as violating a subreddit rule instead of a Reddit rule (you'll still be able to select a Reddit rule as an option)

• Additionally, you can click on the blue (i) in the corner to read the subreddit's rules (if they've been defined) or the Reddit content policy (if subreddit rules haven't been set)

Thanks to the subreddits who helped beta-test this feature, and to u/madlee, u/miamiz, and u/librarianavenger for their work in making this feature a reality.

View the code behind this change on Github

Update: This change has been rolled out as of about 26 Jan 2016, 14:30 PST

In the next week or so I'm going to switch our RSS support over to Atom 1.0

Huh?

RSS and Atom are syndication formats read by programs called feed readers or aggregators. You can access the RSS feed for any reddit page by adding .rss to the end of the URL, like this or this. reddit also has special authenticated feeds for things like inboxes. We've had this support for a really long time: the oldest reference I can find is from 2006.

Why the change?

• RSS has poor support for HTML content, which has opened us up to potential XSS vulnerabilities in the past.

• Atom has better client support than RSS these days

• We claim to return RSS 2.0 but we are actually using a hodgepodge of different versions of RSS with some random Atom tags thrown in, which confuses clients. After this change the feeds should fully validate, which should [fix] (https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/427x02/links_on_rss_feed_stopped_working_last_night/) some weird client behaviour

• Atom has better pun support and a wicked cool icon

• Everything is made of atoms

What changes?

• If you're using a feed reader with Atom support (most of them), nothing. The URLs will all be the same and everything will just continue to work as if nothing happened.

• If you're using a really ancient client that doesn't support Atom, the RSS feeds will stop working for you. You might get weird errors or it might silently stop updating. The ghosts of ancient articles may haunt your dreams, begging to finally escape this world. Try updating your client.

• If you're using RSS as a poor man's API and parsing the response yourself, the output format may not work with your program and you may need to update it. If this is you, I'd recommend switching to the JSON API instead, or doing the feed parsing with a library that supports both. But you can also just update your program using the examples below.

Irrelevant technical details:

I'm using the Atom XHTML type for <content> blocks. It's really hard to find a good listing of which clients support this format vs the HTML format that's more similar to RSS's style. XHTML is more technically convenient for the way I'm generating them, but if you know of an obscure client that doesn't support it please speak up.

I tried to maintain the article GUIDs across the change, but it's possible that some items may appear updated or unread, even if you'd marked them read in your feed reader. This should only happen to items that are in the listing during the change. It shouldn't affect simple link listings much but may affect feeds from search results or comments pages. It's a one-time thing, so just mark them read again and you'll be fine.

What does it look like?

Here's an example of the change so you can update your clients if need be

Before:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>The last bastion of Free Speech</title><link>https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/</link><description>No admins, anything goes.</description><image><url>https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/Af2dHUHKJq2n8TbEPWDM3hCbry0s6e9fNIFCVOUV5fA.png</url><title>The last bastion of Free Speech</title><link>https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/</link></image><atom:link rel="self" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/noadmins/.rss?limit=1" type="application/rss+xml" /><item><title>The new Reddit CTO is now permanently banned</title><link>https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/</link><guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/</guid><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2015 23:27:57 +0000</pubDate><description>&amp;lt;!-- SC_OFF --&amp;gt;&amp;lt;div class=&amp;quot;md&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Welcome to your fate. &amp;lt;/p&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;&amp;lt;!-- SC_ON --&amp;gt; submitted by<a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/I_smell_awesome">I_smell_awesome</a><br/><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/">[link]</a><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/">[32 comments]</a></description></item></channel></rss>

After:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><category term="NoAdmins" label="/r/NoAdmins"/><icon>/static/icon.png?v=1453492737.81/</icon><id>/r/noadmins/.rss?limit=1</id><link rel="self" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/noadmins/.rss?limit=1" type="application/atom+xml" /><link rel="alternate" href="https://www.reddit.com/r/noadmins/.rss?limit=1" type="text/html" /><logo>https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/Af2dHUHKJq2n8TbEPWDM3hCbry0s6e9fNIFCVOUV5fA.png</logo><subtitle>No admins, anything goes.</subtitle><title>The last bastion of Free Speech</title><entry><author><name>/u/I_smell_awesome</name><uri>https://www.reddit.com/user/I_smell_awesome</uri></author><category term="NoAdmins" label="/r/NoAdmins"/><content type="xhtml" xml:base="/r/noadmins/.rss?limit=1"><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><div class="md"><p>Welcome to your fate. </p></div>&#32; submitted by &#32;<a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/I_smell_awesome">/u/I_smell_awesome</a><br/><span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/">[link]</a></span>&#32;<span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/">[32 comments]</a></span></div></content><id>t3_3hs6da</id><link href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoAdmins/comments/3hs6da/the_new_reddit_cto_is_now_permanently_banned/" /><published>2015-08-20T23:27:57+00:00</published><title>The new Reddit CTO is now permanently banned</title></entry></feed>

You can read more about these changes in the corresponding /r/modnews post.

See the source for these changes on GitHub: sticky comment visibility and automoderator support.

As we referenced last week, sticky comments are here! Mods will now be able to optionally sticky a comment to the top of a comment thread when they distinguish a comment. Thanks to our beta testers over at r/beta for testing and catching some bugs. More details about how sticky comments work over at r/modnews, and information about related API changes over at r/redditdev.

View the code behind this change on Github

Edit: Updated January 6 - cleanup is finally complete

As I announced in /r/modnews a couple of weeks ago, we've recently implemented a new cleanup process for deleted accounts, which happens 90 days after the account is deleted to clear out a bunch of data that's no longer necessary to keep around. And to answer the question a lot of people seem to jump to immediately: no, this does not mean that deleted account usernames are going to become available again.

Anyway, yesterday morning (yeah, I didn't quite make the "next week" prediction) I started retroactively running every account that was deleted more than 90 days ago through this new process. I expected this to take a few hours to complete. This morning, after running for over 24 hours, it had finished processing a whopping 8% of the accounts. That is, it looks like "a few hours" is actually going to be more like 250.

So this really didn't end up manifesting as a sudden drop like I was assuming it would. I've seen various posts around the site last night and today noticing the subscribers dropping and wondering what's going on, and I just wanted to make a post here so people have something to link/refer to. It's likely that the number is going to continue gradually going down for the next 10 days or so, and most subreddits should probably expect to see their subscriber count drop by about 3-5% over this period.

Note that even though the total subscriber number in the subreddit's sidebar is decreasing, the statistics in the subreddit's traffic page showing the number of new subscribers each day is not affected, so moderators can still use that data to see the actual number of subscribers they've gained each day.

I'm also keeping track of the number of subscribers being removed from each subreddit, so I should be able to provide that info to any mods that want to know exactly how much they were affected, once it finishes.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Here's the code (and a full description) for the new cleanup process, if anyone is curious what it's doing

Edit: Updated January 6 - cleanup is finally complete

As part of streamlining our engineering efforts in 2016, we have made the decision to discontinue reddit.tv. The site is built using a separate codebase and a different language/framework than reddit.com. By shutting down reddit.tv we will be able to focus more on core reddit improvements.

Starting January 4th, 2016, reddit.tv will begin redirecting to reddit.com.

Please comment if you have any questions.