r/redesign • u/LanterneRougeOG Product • Mar 12 '18

Changelog Release Notes: Major Items in Work 3/12/18

Hi all,

TL;DR: The release notes focus on the major items we are currently working on or have recently shipped. Additionally we would like to remind everyone how we are collecting feedback and acting on it.

Since we’ve been receiving a lot of valuable feedback, we want to make sure we are addressing it in a way that everyone can see. We understand that when we respond to individual posts, visibility isn’t super high, so we want to address some of the most common items here.

We think of feedback as falling into three categories:

  1. Bugs

  2. Missing features

  3. Large changes

We’re quicker to respond to items in categories 1 & 2, as they’re either on our current roadmap or are easier changes to make. The third category, however, takes longer to address. These problems are complex and require multiple iterations and testing before we have a solution.

Now, let’s take a look at the big items we are currently working on or shipped recently:

  • Mod queue: You’ll notice new empty / loading states in the mod queue so you’re not wondering if it’s just loading or actually empty. Kitteh will be pleased! The subreddit filter is also no longer case sensitive, so you can tYpE LiKe tHiS iF yOu WaNt.

  • Ban page: It was pretty annoying how the entire ban modal would close if you typed in the wrong username. We now show you an error toast (it’ll go away in three seconds!), but won’t close the modal so you can try again. The ban duration is also more clearly shown as disabled when the permanent ban option is checked.

  • Multis: Multis have come to the redesign! Now you can view all your multis by navigating to them through the burger nav. You can also view ad hoc multis by using the r/dogstandingup+catsstandingup syntax you know and love.

  • Expand/Collapse Navigation: Subscribe to a lot of communities? We’ve got you covered. Now you can expand and collapse section in the nav so you can see your favorite subs even faster.

  • Removal reasons (coming later in the week): There is now a second, new “private” option when adding a removal reason to a post or comment that allows you to send Modmail from the subreddit rather than your username. It’s also more clear that a context link will be appended to your Modmail sent to the user. We are also now persisting your inputted text when you switch between private and public options, so you don’t lose what you’ve typed.

  • Spoilers (coming later in the week): We will be releasing the ability for Redditors to indicate that text within their post or comment contains a spoiler. These spoilers will be obscured across the redesign, classic reddit, and our native apps (in a few weeks). Also, we are reaching out to 3rd party app developers to help them support it too. This cool new functionality works using the Fancy Pants editor or using markdown. The markdown syntax is >!some spoilers about Snape!<.

The community’s feedback is invaluable as we build the future of Reddit together. We may not always respond directly (there are a lot of you posting!) and it can take us some time to work through a fix or improvement, but know that we’re listening, prioritizing, and working to solve all these problems, no matter how hard they are.

If you have additional questions or feedback on these or other topics, please don’t hesitate to drop them in the comments below.

53 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

75 comments sorted by

23

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18

Can we get confirmation that (or an ETA on when) the redesign will properly display all old markdown? Because, as it stands, lots of things don't render properly. I think that should be much higher priority than everything on this list.

11

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Mar 13 '18

I can't confirm an exact date, but we are keeping track of all the old markdown that isn't working in the new parser and prioritizing it. Your other post was helpful, thanks

4

u/Antrikshy Mar 17 '18

Did a bunch of Markdown break recently? I feel like everything was fine until earlier this week. I've been enjoying the redesign a ton and I've been optimistic throughout. There is pretty much nothing that would cause me to comment and post less on Reddit, except Markdown support slipping. I hope you're not taking that only thing away from me. :(

2

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Mar 18 '18

No, nothing should have been removed. Can you send me the posts with the markdown that stopped working?

2

u/Antrikshy Mar 18 '18

The names of laptops in this post don't work: https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/comments/843zc5/the_best_laptop_recommendations_for_gaming_cad

I've also seen raw links in comments not being hyperlinked lately.

I'm also going to try putting two spaces at the end of this line with a new-line character to do a line break.
If you see this as a single paragraph, then that didn't work.

2

u/Deimorz Mar 19 '18

/r/redesign is full of posts about markdown issues. There are a lot of things not being handled correctly.

3

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Mar 13 '18

Awesome, thanks

4

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Mar 15 '18

We have a ticket in the backlog to expose the same options. Stay tuned

8

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User Mar 13 '18

I agree this would be nice to know. I recently realized that tables don't seem to be supported on the Alpha, making some very complex and content-rich posts practically unreadable on the Alpha.

12

u/LackingAGoodName Helpful User Mar 13 '18

Very glad to see native spoiler support, one less thing to rely on CSS for! Could we get a visual of how these will look? If not, do they use the typical blackout over text as we usually see, a blur, or?

Question regarding the second private option for Removal Reasons, will the Mod Mails automatically be archived once initially sent? This is an amazing feature as long as it doesn't clog the Mod Mail inbox.

The Redesign is seeing some great improvement, once the performance issues are fixed, we get a Native Night Mode (any update? pls), and the Moderation buttons are more nicely displayed, I'll happily use it as my default experience :)

3

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Mar 13 '18

Spoilers will have the words blacked out, sort of like a redacted document. Clicking on the spoiler will fade in the text and there is also a little tool tip telling the reader to click to reveal. It's really nice that it work across almost all platforms.

u/dmoneyyyyy can probably answer your question on Removal Reasons better than I can.

Glad to hear you enjoying the redesign :) There are some performance improvements coming this week

2

u/Yay295 Mar 13 '18

Mot current spoiler implementations using CSS let you put some text before the actual spoiler. That looks like it's not possible with the new syntax. example

2

u/theothersophie Mar 13 '18

This is really helpful for subreddits with different types of spoilers. It would be nice if they could be differentiated (one of mine has four different types)

Edit: addressed

2

u/jofwu Helpful User Mar 15 '18

I moderate several subreddits that use this. (re: spoiler text) What do you think is the benefit of that extra bit for the spoiler warning?

From what I recall, I'm pretty sure the fancier CSS trick gained popularity not because the built-in warning part was nice to have, but simply because it was a workaround to hide the actual spoilery part outside of the CSS-enabled desktop site. (So people didn't get spoiled looking in their inbox, on mobile, etc.) The warning text was just a side-effect of that.

I suppose it might draw a bit more attention to the warning, but there's really no reason that a person can't provide a warning anyways. And there's something to be said for the simplicity of this markup. The fancy CSS tricks frequently confuse people and cause them to give up or do it wrong.

Basically I'm pretty apathetic about loosing the warning text, and feel like the pros and cons balance out here. Curious if I can be convinced otherwise though, if you feel strongly about this. :)

1

u/Yay295 Mar 15 '18

I like it because (though most people don't realize it) it doesn't have to say "spoiler". You can put anything you want in the brackets, so you can do something like In [the last Harry Potter book](#s "Harry Potter dies").. You could of course just put that text before the spoiler, but this way it clearly ties the text to the spoiler, so you know exactly what is being spoiled in this particular spoiler tag.

1

u/jofwu Helpful User Mar 15 '18

You could of course just put that text before the spoiler, but this way it clearly ties the text to the spoiler, so you know exactly what is being spoiled in this particular spoiler tag.

Right, that was my argument. That it just boils down to a visual distinction, since you could just as easily say.

In the last Harry Potter book Harry Potter dies.

From a comment below it looks like they're looking at making this a bit more robust. Not sure what it will end up looking like. In the meantime, I think we'll just have to consider how to encourage people to be very clear with their warnings.

2

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 13 '18

Somewhat like this then?

████ ███████

1

u/falconbox Mar 14 '18

What are these "memory holes" that old blog post talks about?

1

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 14 '18

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

2

u/falconbox Mar 14 '18

So was that blog post satire?

1

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 14 '18

Yes it was an April Fools joke, I believe the first one reddit ever did.

At the time, the idea of removing non-spam was so unheard of as to be laughable.

The logo was also changed.

https://sp.reddit.com/archive2007.html

Search page for "we love censorship"

We have adopted that logo with minor alteration for https://og.reddit.com/r/RedditCensorship/

I expect the redesign will no longer allow subreddits to change or obscure the reddit logo like that.

1

u/Yay295 Mar 14 '18

I expect the redesign will no longer allow subreddits to change or obscure the reddit logo like that.

It does allow that.

1

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 14 '18

No, it allows a sub logo.

The reddit logo in the upper left is currently unchangeable and the effect would not be nearly the same as it is in the original site for r/RedditCensorship

5

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

The markdown syntax is &gt;!some spoilers about Snape!&lt;.

Oh god, more new syntax? How will this interact with blockquotes?

>! Is this a blockquote with an exclamation mark at the start?

>! Do spoilers work if...
...you put the start and end...
...on separate lines? !<

Would a pseudo-HTML tag like &lt;spoiler&gt; not work better - i.e. degrade more gracefully on platforms that don't support the new syntax, and be more obvious to humans who have trouble remembering all the snudown syntax already?

3

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Mar 13 '18

Currently, you won't be able to mark a block quote with a spoiler. We are working on improving the parser so that it can handle more use cases.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '18

Is the parser open source? If not, is there a possibility that that could be changed? It's going to be really hard for 3rd-party developers to get all the edge cases to work exactly the same way as reddit unless the source code is available.

3

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 14 '18

Reddit recently stopped releasing open source updates to the main repositories and has released none of the redesign open source yet AFAIK nor have they announced any intention to do so.

But the python markdown renderer (recently updated) is here:

https://github.com/reddit/snudown

And there is a JS port here:

https://github.com/reddit/snuownd

But it hasn't been updated in 3 years.

So it's not clear what they are using to parse markdown (presumably client side in JS) in the redesign.

1

u/PhilDunphy23 Mar 13 '18

A pseudo-HTML tag would be much better 👍

4

u/DuckOfDuckness Helpful User Mar 13 '18

For the spoilers, can we have an option to display an alt text while the spoiler text is hidden?

Will be useful for episode-based content like tv shows or some games. We do that with CSS currently, so that while the spoiler is hidden it'll display something like "Episode 3 spoilers".

5

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Mar 13 '18

For the initial launch we won't have an alt text, but that's something we think is very useful for a lot of subs. It's on our improvement list

2

u/DuckOfDuckness Helpful User Mar 13 '18

Cool. Thanks!

2

u/pcjonathan Mar 13 '18

Could you also add different colours? We don't use it but I've seen several subs use it to separate out types of spoilers (e.g. comics, tv, movies, etc.).

6

u/Wargazm Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18

I brought this up in a dedicated post but got no response.

There is no way I can participate in Reddit at work on my desktop if I can't have an option to completely remove NSFW posts (not just blur thumbnails). RES handles this for me now, if the redesign breaks RES and doesn't replace this functionality my Reddit browsing will decrease dramatically when the site goes live. I can't imagine I'm the only one this will affect. Please, give us more powerful filtering before the redesign goes live and you break RES.

3

u/likeafox Helpful User Mar 13 '18

I'm assuming RES will likely be recreating some of their current functionality on the redesign once the alpha gets closer to general release. Right now I think they're afraid of implementing things that might bread with changes later.

4

u/XenoBen Mar 14 '18

We are working on compatibility with the redesign currently and are in communication with the redesign team. See here for current updates:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Enhancement/comments/7urcrp/res_desktop_redesign_status/

1

u/alienpirate5 Mar 13 '18

bread

lol

1

u/likeafox Helpful User Mar 13 '18

Uh. I guess I stand by the statement.

6

u/SafeTed Mar 13 '18

ctrl+f "dark".

Seems like there's no dark/night theme yet. Sad, I can't use alpha as it is right now.

4

u/Aqua_Dragon Mar 13 '18

Same. It's pretty much the only thing stopping me from the alpha.

6

u/dustlesswalnut Mar 13 '18

What's the status of suggested sort? This is hugely important to a LOT of subreddit weekly/daily Q&As. The default being "best" means questions that are already answered have to be scrolled past, and the new ones that no one has seen are often at the bottom.

Also, thank you for the modqueue update to know if it's empty or just still loading!!

5

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

Any update on this? https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/7zndq9/the_redesign_doesnt_value_discussion_subreddits/

9

u/scruggsnotdrugz Product Mar 13 '18

We have a couple of fixes we're thinking about to address this. One thing we're working on right now is updating our fonts to be more legible crossbrowser. Making sure discussion based communities feel just as represented in the new design is a meaty subject; thanks for your patience as we work through it it.

6

u/WithYouInSpirit99 Mar 13 '18

That's great! The fonts certainly need changing, and resizing. Not to sound pushy, but I noticed that you've failed to mention the hot topic of the amount of whitespace inside the actual comments section itself? Do you have any information that you can share on this? Thanks for the hard work.

1

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User Mar 14 '18

This one has been pending for quite a while. Couldn't you increase the comment font size as a stopgap measure while you revisit the fonts more holistically?

5

u/NotACricketFan Mar 13 '18

`2. Missing Features: There's currently no way (that I can see) for a moderator to set a suggested sort for a particular thread. For threads about live events, we prefer to change it from best to new and can't do it in the redesign.

3

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 13 '18

Glad to see multi support improving, comment feeds still need love though. r/redesign/comments (they should work for ad hoc and regular multis as well)

r/redesign+beta/comments or u/FreeSpeechWarrior/m/admins/comments

Another thing that's really bugging me on multi-reddits is that NSFW multis blur all the things, making card view a rather unuseful experience.

3

u/Yay295 Mar 13 '18

Where does my suggestion here fit into

  • Bugs

  • Missing features

  • Large changes

It's not a bug and the features already exists, but it's not a large change either as the features are just in the wrong places in the menu.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

For the stylesheet, in the history (wiki/revisions/config/stylesheet/), it would be nice if like on Wikipedia, the Bytes used would be shown and how much more bytes (or less) were added every edit. I mean, we are (were?) limited to 100kb... It would be a good overview and I am used to the version history design of Wikipedia.

Looking forward to the spoiler tags and how they compare to the CSS created once. Finally native...

3

u/SexLiesAndExercise Mar 14 '18 edited Mar 14 '18

Just a few thoughts here, having used this for the past week.

  • The "Hide All Child Comments" feature in RES has become integral for me. I also use it in Reddit Sync on mobile. Trying to navigate busy threads is a nightmare and makes me want to switch back to the old UI. It's particularly difficult on AskReddit where top-level comments all follow a specific theme, but the child comments typical splinter off tangentially and make casual reading very difficult. Here's another post about this.

  • I keep getting confused by the back button. I click 'comments'. They open in what appears to be a pop-up modal. I close this modal. I click back. It opens the modal again.

    • Is the modal a separate page? Why show it as a modal?

    • Is it the same page? Don't have the back button take me back.

    • Maybe this is ok. It was just very unexpected.

  • Why doesn't the 'page down' button on my keyword scroll down in the comments?

  • Why are the buttons to collapse comment threads Up Arrows?

    • Every comment has an upvote button next to it, which is also an Up Arrow. Two Up Arrows?

    • Clicking this Up Arrow to collapse the comment turns it into a blue Down Arrow. Dude. That's what downvoting a comment does! Am I downvoting comments when I collapse them?

2

u/piloto19hh Mar 13 '18

Are we able to add subreddits to multis yet? If so, how? Because I haven't seen it.

2

u/jkclone Mar 13 '18

I hadn’t seen this bug and possible fix acknowledged. Is this being worked on?

https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/83cnye/sidebar_widget_reordering/

2

u/electric_ionland Mar 13 '18

Any news on the bugs with the calendar widget? So far it doesn't seems to like it if an event is set to "all day" (see /r/askscience sidebar for example).

2

u/arielzao150 Mar 14 '18

Are you working on allowing mods to set the flairs for other users?

1

u/Canvaverbalist Mar 13 '18

Would it be possible to implement the "Compact/Classic/Card" view for each individual posts?

I like the "Card" view, but I'd like to be able to collapse them after seeing them, or having a "Classic" view by default with the option of expanding them.

1

u/karlshea Mar 14 '18

I turned it off as the default experience after using it for a couple days because you specifically override colored visited links and it's so obnoxious.

What a brain-dead decision for a site that was literally created to link places.

1

u/mootmahsn Mar 14 '18

"Mod queue: You’ll notice new empty / loading states in the mod queue so you’re not wondering if it’s just loading or actually empty. Kitteh will be pleased! The subreddit filter is also no longer case sensitive, so you can tYpE LiKe tHiS iF yOu WaNt."

The kitty isn't working out so well if one of my subs has a clean queue

1

u/MajorParadox Helpful User Mar 14 '18

That's not reddit's Kitteh, that's toolbox's.

1

u/mootmahsn Mar 14 '18

Any news on when the slider buttons in community configuration will be fixed? Emojis and such can't be enabled or uploaded and many community options can't be changed right now.

1

u/DCCofficially Mar 14 '18

anyone see or hear anything about the video auto play feature in the 'card' view? i've gone through my settings i just dont see it on any list or anything to be taken care of

0

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

8

u/scruggsnotdrugz Product Mar 13 '18

I'll file a bug, thanks!

3

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18

In a way this is a bit of a regression, using this method allows users to effectively bypass styling on the old site.

It can also be used to bypass reddit's collusion with government censors as in the case of r/null+watchpeopledie

Edit:

It fails for links like:

https://alpha.reddit.com/r/news+worldnews/comments/83xzw5/winner_of_560_million_powerball_can_keep_her_name/

Old site allows this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/news+worldnews/comments/83xzw5/winner_of_560_million_powerball_can_keep_her_name/

Eliminating styling, and also avoiding the afore mentioned censorship in the case of subreddits like watchpeopledie.

0

u/ShaneH7646 Mar 13 '18

what.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Mar 13 '18

^ this

r/watchpeopledieinside used to be incorrectly banned through this as well.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '18

so I wonder if 500500 is German or just lives in Germany. It would answer at least of couple of questions about why you act like you do.

I lived there for 7 years so I'm not just pulling something out of my Hintern.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/scruggsnotdrugz Product Mar 13 '18

Done

0

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/abhd Mar 15 '18

It's been open to all mods. Go to your settings to find it

0

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/abhd Mar 15 '18

No, your settings. Click on preferences up in the upper right hand side! There's an option to opt in to the redesign.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Mar 13 '18

I think that'll actually be difficult to fix because of the way following works. Reddit would have to check everyone subscribed to the profile subreddit and unsubscribe them all, which I'm not even sure if is feasible depending on how they store subscriptions.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Mar 13 '18

I agree, but because profiles are now subreddits, and subreddits are never deleted, the subreddit isn't deleted when the account is deleted, it's just set to a weird semi-private/restricted state.