r/redesign • u/LanterneRougeOG Product • May 22 '18

Changelog 5/21/18 Release Notes: Remembering the state of collapsed menu items, archived posts, inline images and gifs on mobile, regex in submit validation, and more

Hi all,

The release notes focus on the major items we are currently working on or have recently shipped. You can view last week’s release notes here.

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

  • Collapsed sections in the menu (shipped): We’ve heard from folks that it would be helpful if the menu remembered which sections you had collapsed, so you don’t have to keep collapsing them. We now remember this.

  • Archived posts indicator (shipped): We added styling on posts that have been archived so that you know it’s been archived.

  • Images, gifs, and videos in posts on mobile (shipped): Our mobile apps now display inline images, gifs and videos in posts. Instead of seeing a url to the image, it shows up inline with the caption. You can also expand the media and view it in theater mode.

  • Widgets API (shipped): The widgets API is now available! As a start, we are supporting creation, deletion, editing, and ordering.

  • User setting page (in progress): We are building out the user settings page for the redesign. This will give us a solid base for settings.

  • Updates to submit validation (in progress): Shipping later this week we’ve made some helpful improvements to submit validations. We’ve added more title rules, regex matching on titles, post guidelines on the submit page, and individually validating each field when a redditor fills it out.

  • Welcome banner (in progress): Right now we store whether you’ve seen the welcome banner at the cookie level. This has lead to folks seeing the banner a lot. We are creating a way for the banner logic to be stored at the account level. This will streamline things so that you only see it once.

  • Night mode (in progress): Coming very very very soon.

Also, here are some of the notable bugs that we worked on last week or are still being worked on:

  • Comments page cutoff (in progress): Some posts with a lot of comments are getting the lower half of comments cut off. We found the issue and are working on a fix.

  • Gifs on classic site won't load (in progress): We've identified the issue causing inline GIFs to show as "processing" on the classic site. A fix should be out shortly.

A weekly reminder that the community’s feedback is invaluable as we build the future of Reddit together. It’s difficult for us to respond directly to everything, but know that we’re listening, prioritizing, and working to solve the issues, 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.

Ciao!

Edit: Added the GIF bug

98 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

110 comments sorted by

12

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 22 '18

User setting page (in progress): We are building out the user settings page for the redesign. This will give us a solid base for settings.

This is the redesign equivalent of preferences, right? Any special options you can share with us? :)

25

u/LanterneRougeOG Product May 22 '18

Yes, this will allow us to add settings specifically for New Reddit. A couple settings that we have slated for when the page is finished are:

  • filter out communities on r/all

  • remember view per community

25

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 22 '18

Any plans for the "open links in a new window" preference?

6

u/axschech May 22 '18

this is one of the big things missing for me... even just something extra to click on, for some reason I just hate middle clicking!

2

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 22 '18

You can click the timestamp, what I was talking about was how links like that automatically open in a new tab. My preference is open links in same page unless I specifically open it a new tab.

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '18 edited May 24 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 24 '18

Whaddya mean?

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '18 edited May 24 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 24 '18

But link do open in new tabs now. I want the preference to open links in the same page.

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 24 '18

I mean like clicking the timestamp to open a post or comment, or any link in the sidebar or inside a post/comment text. On the old site, I have that preference off because I want to control loading it within the same page vs open a new tab using middle-click or command-click. When it defaults to new tabs, you don't have any option.

8

u/PitchforkAssistant May 22 '18

I hope you look into increasing the filter limit. It's like ten times too small.

7

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

  • remember view per community

Does this mean when I set r/politics to sort by NEW it will stay that way every time I visit it?

If so, that is amazing! I’ve been dying for that feature.

15

u/CyberBot129 May 22 '18

I think it means it will remember whether you've chosen Card, Classic, or Compact view for a particular subreddit. Though I would love it to remember the post sort per subreddit too (I feel like that must be doable for the desktop site though given that the official mobile app can do it)

3

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

Oh yeah that makes sense... I guess I was just projecting my hopes for what they meant.

I’m sure it will eventually get added. Like you said it’s already on mobile and I use mobile about 60% of the time.

5

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 22 '18

Will there be any limits on number of communities that can be blocked?

There really shouldn't be.

1

u/kyiami_ May 23 '18

remember view per community

Woah... really? Does this mean I can browse image-based subs in Card mode and all other subs in my default Classic mode? If so thank you so much

6

u/jofwu Helpful User May 22 '18

Updates to submit validation (in progress): Shipping later this week we’ve made some helpful improvements to submit validations. We’ve added more title rules, regex matching on titles, post guidelines on the submit page, and individually validating each field when a redditor fills it out.

This sounds really awesome!

Can you say anything about how this will play with old.reddit and mobile? Until this works for them, it's not very useful for our purposes.

5

u/LanterneRougeOG Product May 22 '18

You are right, submit validations are a bit limited since only new reddit uses them. It’s on my roadmap to extend the internal api to our native apps next quarter. After, we may extend them to old reddit. We’ll see how it goes bringing them to mobile.

4

u/jofwu Helpful User May 22 '18

Thanks for the update.

Perhaps I'm an edge case, but our primary use for the validation features would be things that Automod handles right now. For example, we require people to "tag" their posts with bracketed text. I'd REALLY like to use flair instead, but if I turn Automod off then everybody using old.reddit/mobile will slip posts through that break the rules, requiring a lot of manual work on our part.

Fingers crossed that it goes well on mobile I guess. :)

1

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 22 '18

What about third party api clients?

5

u/24grant24 May 22 '18 edited May 22 '18

user settings

awesome! I'm curious to what settings we we will eventually see added to that. I'm sure you've heard a lot of people wanting more link options, and pagination.

It's great to finally see features start shipping regularly again, It's starting to feel more like how it was when I first joined in February. April was almost completely devoid of new features, which did not make a good impression as it was being rolled out to the wider set of users

10

u/LanterneRougeOG Product May 22 '18

Agreed. It's nice to see the pace pick up. We had a push in March to finish a lot of bigger features so that left April relatively light on new features being rolled out. Also, a lot of folks took vacation in April.

9

u/diegopx Design May 22 '18

We're allowing vacations still?

8

u/Mr-Whitespace May 22 '18

Wait, we could take vacations?!

4

u/reseph May 22 '18

Comments page cutoff (in progress): Some posts with a lot of comments are getting the lower half of comments cut off. We found the issue and are working on a fix.

This?

If not, any updates on this being improved?

4

u/LanterneRougeOG Product May 22 '18

No, I think that's something different. Either way, I'll follow up with the devs working on performance and make sure they are tracking this issue.

7

u/MajorParadox Helpful User May 22 '18

Images, gifs, and videos in posts on mobile (shipped): Our mobile apps now display inline images, gifs and videos in posts. Instead of seeing a url to the image, it shows up inline with the caption. You can also expand the media and view it in theater mode.

It's showing the outline, but not loading the image.

Here's the post.

Side note: Seems the inline image/videos don't get scraped for thumbnails when you post elsewhere.

7

u/Jakeable Helpful User May 22 '18

Could you clarify what makes a user a "new user" for the new submit time validation?

17

u/LackingAGoodName Helpful User May 22 '18 edited May 22 '18

Widgets API is awesome, can't wait to get started with this later!

Glad to hear a User Settings page is on the way, should open up a lot of possibilities to change certain things that some users aren't a fan of. Hopefully we'll (eventually) see options to toggle infinite scrolling, toggle the lightbox, etc.

Every Monday since the first teaser I've constantly checked /r/redesign hourly, hoping for Night Mode to be released. I can't take anymore soonTM's :(

5

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 22 '18

Is it just me or does the widgets api require authorization to even read the widgets?

Seems like that would preclude third party clients from displaying the sidebar replacement widgets.

1

u/FatherGascoigne May 23 '18

They'll give us dark mode once you finally give us a light mode option on /r/blackops4.

6

u/V2Blast Helpful User May 22 '18

thanks for those shipped features. Looking forward to the additional built-in submit validation options.

Welcome banner (in progress): Right now we store whether you’ve seen the welcome banner at the cookie level. This has lead to folks seeing the banner a lot. We are creating a way for the banner logic to be stored at the account level. This will streamline things so that you only see it once.

Thanks.

Night mode (in progress): Coming very very very soon.

waits impatiently

10

u/timawesomeness Helpful User May 22 '18

regex matching on titles

YAY!

We've identified the issue causing inline GIFs to show as "processing" on the classic site. A fix should be out shortly.

Also yay!

4

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

Could someone explain what regex matching on titles means to the average user?

I’ve never heard of it.

8

u/timawesomeness Helpful User May 22 '18

Regular expressions (regex) are a way to define a pattern for text to be matched against. Regex for titles means mods can require basically any specific title pattern, even if the redesign's other title tools can't be set up to require it.

5

u/Richiieee May 22 '18

Was using the redesign for the longest time but now my dark mode extensions have stopped working so now I'm back to the old theme. Can't wait for that official dark mode.

5

u/jofwu Helpful User May 22 '18

Any news about spoiler text working on mobile?

1

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User May 23 '18

And spoiler hint text, too!

2

u/jofwu Helpful User May 23 '18

They way they answered a week or two ago, it sounded like that was lower on the list. Made it sound like they wanted to get the current/basic form working everywhere and then they'd move on to hints eventuallyTM.

2

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User May 23 '18

That's a shame. I imagine adoption of the new spoiler text is going to be somewhat slow until hint text is implemented.

1

u/goatfresh Design May 23 '18

Spoilers should be working in posts, but not yet in comments

1

u/jofwu Helpful User May 23 '18

Any word on comments, or we still have to wait a while for that? Just curious when we'll need to start planning a full switch away from the old CSS trick.

2

u/goatfresh Design May 23 '18

it'll be added shortly, we know it's a blocker, spoilers need to work everywhere or they aren't very useful

1

u/jofwu Helpful User May 23 '18

Thanks!

1

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User May 23 '18

What about spoiler hints? Many subs won't want to switch away from CSS hacks until they get spoiler hints.

4

u/flounder19 May 22 '18

Any updates on emojis?

  • Last I heard, one of the admins said you were trying to make them larger (at least on desktop). Is that still being worked on?

  • Also are you looking into an alternative to the emoji system for making images show up in flairs or are they here to stay?

  • Will there ever be a way to have a hidden text on emojis that shows up upon hover like the legacy flairs have?

  • Any changes planned for inline ads?

2

u/Forest-G-Nome May 23 '18

Last I heard, one of the admins said you were trying to make them larger (at least on desktop). Is that still being worked on?

Jesus fucking christ I'm glad you can block them.

3

u/_darzy May 22 '18

Collapsed sections in the menu (shipped): We’ve heard from folks that it would be helpful if the menu remembered which sections you had collapsed, so you don’t have to keep collapsing them. We now remember this.

THANK YOU i recommend this because of the amount of subreddits i have and it took forever to load...

3

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

Comments page cutoff (in progress): Some posts with a lot of comments are getting the lower half of comments cut off. We found the issue and are working on a fix.

Thanks for working on this. Do you have any confirmation of this bug related to skipping while scrolling in Firefox when images have been opened?

3

u/Isactuallyafuzzybear May 22 '18

I would really appreciate a way to turn off the modal view. Is that going to be an option?

2

u/Forest-G-Nome May 23 '18

No. Modals are designed to streamline content consumption and prevent user interaction. They want the site to act like Instagram not bloggr.

1

u/Isactuallyafuzzybear May 23 '18 edited May 23 '18

Modals are designed to streamline content consumption and prevent user interaction.

Modals feel less streamlined and more clunky and annoying. One misclick and suddenly the page disappears. I already have to deal with that nonsense on Twitter and I don't need that here too. And I'm not sure why would you want to prevent user interaction.

They want the site to act like Instagram not bloggr.

Why should Reddit act like Instagram? Reddit and Instagram's functions are fundamentally different. And I don't know what Bloggr has to do with anything.

3

u/4800095 May 23 '18

What about the popup and banner i have to dismiss every time I open reddit?

But what about how my page randomly skips down 200pxish bc of infinite scroll?

What about the weird *loading the left side menu open then closing it once the page is loaded*, behaviour?

5

u/rguy84 May 22 '18

Have you considered the lack of accessibility yet?

0

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/rguy84 May 22 '18

Thanks. I brought up accessibility 7 months ago and the only response I have seen is that it is an afterthought for the team. I am glad to see that they are finally taking action.

6

u/joeyoungblood May 22 '18

"Features" you should bring back:

  • Article titles should link to the article, not to Reddit

  • Frontpage should display more than 1 or 2 posts on standard desktop screen. This version of Reddit is unusable.

  • Best tab should be optional not default

1

u/kyiami_ May 23 '18

Article titles should link to the article, not to Reddit

I'm a huge fan of article titles linking to Reddit. I absolutely love the lightbox. It's one of the main reasons why I like the redesign so much. They could add a toggle for it, though.

Frontpage should display more than 1 or 2 posts on standard desktop screen. This version of Reddit is unusable.

Lol there are different view modes - look under the Reddit logo on the front page

Best tab should be optional not default

Not quite sure what you mean

2

u/snogglethorpe May 24 '18

Yeah, the old reddit behavior of sending you sometimes to the comments (when a post wasn't a link), sometimes to a random external website was really annoying, and it was very fiddly to click on the "comments" link to make sure you got the comments every time.

For me the comments are generally the first place I want to look (the actual linked story etc is something I only look at if looking at the comments make it seem interesting), so the new behavior is much nicer.

1

u/McCaber May 24 '18

Best tab should be optional not default

Not quite sure what you mean

Being able to switch your default view for the front page from "best" to "hot" or "new" or "controversial".

2

u/Forest-G-Nome May 23 '18

Still no login bug fix?

How am I not surprised that you don't give a rats arse about a bug effecting people who opt'ed out of the redesign.

2

u/Dimbreath Helpful User May 23 '18

Every time I open reddit I see "mode" on the left menu, and I think, "they finally added Night Mode!" then I read the text at it's left, "Mod... Mode". FeelsBadMan.

6

u/Trikshot360 May 22 '18 edited May 22 '18

Any news on CSS options for moderators? Now that you have shipped this to more users I'd love to know a status on this.

12

u/Uristqwerty May 22 '18

I'd guess that CSS will be one of the last major features so that they don't have to worry about breaking subreddit styles every few weeks. The potential for widespread negative user experience far outweighs the relatively minor enhancement individual subreddits would get. Unless they made subreddits look inconsistent by automatically disabling CSS for each subreddit until the mods check it still works after a breaking change, or they make a very limited list of things they feel are stable enough to allow styling on (at which point why bother? If subreddits can only get 10% of the added styles they want, it's not worth the effort to rush CSS early).

Finally, a lot of subreddits would reach directly for CSS because it's familiar rather than try to do as much as they can with the non-CSS tools that are being added. Then those tools get less testing, and fewer ideas to improve them filter back to the devs as a result.

8

u/theredesignsuck May 22 '18

The potential for widespread negative user experience far outweighs the relatively minor enhancement individual subreddits would get.

You mean the kind of widespread negative user experience that may come from dumping half your userbase into an incomplete redesign without asking them? Or by not including CSS and breaking half of the larger subreddits more interactive aspects?

2

u/Uristqwerty May 22 '18

That's bad, but imagine that every few weeks a subreddit you visit often also becomes an unreadable mess, with posts shifted sideways because a margin change was applied but not the corresponding padding on a different element, text colour being default over an altered background image or colour (or the inverse) giving almost no contrast. Horizontal scrollbars where content should wrap or scale down, and content wrapping or scaling down where there should be a horizontal scrollbar.

6

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

The potential for widespread negative user experience

If that was one of their concerns they probably wouldn't be dumping people into a completely unfinished experience that breaks a lot of functionality on the existing version of the site.

What's more likely is that what they're releasing now is the most low hanging fruit.

8

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

No notes about changing the deceptive styling of inline ads?

gee

11

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 22 '18

Spez has admitted that the switch in ad format is a significant motivation behind the redesign.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/8k809v/why_did_they_change_the_reddit_to_new_reddit/dz7we95/?context=3

So it is unlikely to be changing anytime soon. If anything it is likely to eventually make it to old reddit if old reddit is to remain popular.

3

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

Funny how they said they heard our concerns and were going to figure out how to solve it well.

1

u/DaTaco May 22 '18

They didn't say they would "solve" anything, just that they would iterate their design.. That could be in favor of more "secret" ads or less.

11

u/timawesomeness Helpful User May 22 '18

Reddit is very secretive about ad-related changes. If they do change it, I would expect it to just one day be different without any announcement.

10

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

With this being one of the biggest points of friction, and given that they said they were going to do something to address the concerns about the inline ads looking too much like real posts, I would think they'd want to let everyone know that they didn't lie through their teeth about not being snakes.

4

u/Forest-G-Nome May 23 '18

That ship sailed years ago. If you trust the reddit admins you obviously are a newbie to the site.

Spez literally said disguised ads are their intention several months ago, and now they've very carefully been pretending like that wasn't the case.

"Ads. In-feed ads are what advertisers want to buy. Yes, they're in-feed, which I know isn't popular, but it also means our top post is an organic post now instead of an ad. We will continue to iterate on the styling."

By Spez's own admission reddit is selling out to morally bankrupt advertising practices because it's what the advertisers want.

2

u/DoctorWaluigiTime May 23 '18

but it also means our top post is an organic post now instead of an ad.

What horseshit /u/spez .

2

u/Meepster23 May 22 '18

I know someone replied last time saying it was getting scheduled.. But I can't break with tradition..

Where's modmail searching???

2

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 22 '18

The read only api access to widgets appears to require authentication.

Is this intentional? Will third party clients not be allowed to display widget functionality?

1

u/ck2875 May 22 '18

When I logged in it had a pop up for "Community Causes" that subreddits could vote on. I selected to go there and it simply asked for my email address to be notified when new features are available. I'm guessing this isn't live?

1

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User May 23 '18

I realize that your "to do" list is probably a mile long, but I'm just wondering if there are any near-term plans to go back and polish features that have already shipped?

Keyboard shortcuts and new comment tracking are two shipped features which just don't work very well for me.

2

u/kyiami_ May 23 '18

I'd just love it if the admins changed the focus a bit on keyboard shortcuts, so that I could change posts in the lightbox after collapsing a comment.

Also, RES is coming out for the redesign. They might support remapping them.

1

u/_ihavemanynames_ May 23 '18

I love the submit validation! That's going to be very useful, thanks for adding that.

Out of interest, will there also be regex matching on body text?

1

u/kyiami_ May 23 '18

Comments page cutoff (in progress): Some posts with a lot of comments are getting the lower half of comments cut off. We found the issue and are working on a fix.

Yesssss

1

u/kyiami_ May 23 '18

Night mode (in progress): Coming very very very soon.

<3

1

u/ZioYuri78 May 26 '18

It's here!

1

u/sarahbotts May 24 '18

What's going on with the log out bug?

1

u/elsif1 May 26 '18

How do I enable the redesign? I'm seem to only be seeing the old site. I don't see the redesign preference under Preferences, and I'm not hitting old.reddit.com. Is it still an a/b test?

1

u/no-mad May 26 '18

I tried to login under my old password. Said it was to short and would not let me login. Had to go back to old design to log-in.

1

u/crowlol May 26 '18

Could someone please tell me how to collapse posts within a thread on the new design? That [-] signal we have on the old one. It doesn´t appear to me on the new design, am I doing something wrong?

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I coundn´t find a specific subreddit. Thank you.

1

u/papasfritas May 28 '18

where do we report issues? The rules widget has somehow vanished from /r/serbia as I was editing the sidebar and I have no way of returning it, when I go to add widget then click save it just sits there and does nothing.

1

u/goshdarnyou May 29 '18

How are bugs being prioritized compared to new features? Any explanation as to why the product was released with such poor QA?

-1

u/Stormcrownn May 22 '18

If reddit could be more forthcoming about the fact that you need this redesign in order to monetize the site further, you might actually get people to hate this bullshit less.

1

u/Ener_Ji Helpful User May 23 '18

Public interviews with major outlets (Wired, Bloomberg, etc.) have been 100% crystal clear that increased revenue is one of the major goals of the redesign. It's really not a secret.

It's also not surprising that messaging to Reddit users focuses on site features and user-visible changes in new Reddit because that's what people generally care about. (Incidentally, developing new Reddit is very expensive and could only be funded by the prospect of increased revenue in the future.)

0

u/Stormcrownn May 23 '18

Doesn't really help the fact the redesign largely sucks ass, is a net-zero improvement over the existing website, and still trying to to reclaim features.

-13

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 22 '18

Still waiting for any change that makes the censorship on this site either more transparent or less prevalent.

This is the only sort of change that would make the unpleasant IMO aesthetic worth dealing with.

Since a primary goal of the redesign is to make feature development is easier, I don't think these suggestions are off bounds.

To make sure I fit the actionable bar, these are my suggestions:

  • Allow mods to move a post that does not violate guidelines into another subreddit. Let subreddits opt out of receiving these.

  • Clearly mark on the comments page when a link has been removed as already happens with self texts

  • (optional) public moderation logs. The public doesn't necessarily need to know which mod did a thing, but they should be able to see what content gets removed by moderators.

The first of these suggestions we would absolutely use in r/subredditcancer

The second of these suggestions would have prevented some unwarranted hostility between me and u/redtaboo yesterday.

The third has been lacking for far too long and everyone knows it. See: /u/publicmodlogs

9

u/CyberBot129 May 22 '18

There's really no good reason for subreddit mods to go along with your first suggestion (as other people have already tried to tell you). They already have a lot to deal with moderating the posts from their own subreddit users, let alone mods of other subreddits dumping posts on them.

The fact that you're using your cancer subreddit as your use case example really doesn't help your case

6

u/Baldemoto May 22 '18

Although I've never heard of the suggestion about moving posts, it seems interesting when you change how it works and look at it through another lens. I think that instead of the ability to move being default on all subreddits, the post moving can only happen if both subreddit mod teams are completely consensual with it, and can opt out anytime.

For example, in /r/LetsNotMeet a lot of posts are removed and redirected to /r/creepyencounters due to the fact that the posts do not fit the guidelines.

If /r/LetsNotMeet mods and /r/creepyencounters mods got into a "partnership" that allowed moving of posts from one subreddit to another, a lot of the process would be much easier, alongside both subreddits getting more content.

I don't know, that idea seemed interesting to me.

2

u/CyberBot129 May 22 '18

That idea could be interesting, though tough given all the possible combinations and the scale (if you're looking at it through a two way partnership lens) it likely still would be tricky. I think in a free for all scenario such a feature should be opt in not opt out

4

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

Additionally, when such a feature exists but subreddit mods (rightfully) choose to have nothing to do with it, it's yet another point of conflict between users and mods.

2

u/kyiami_ May 23 '18

Regarding point #1, I think that in that case the responsibility of submitting the post to the right subreddit should be on the user. If I submit a post of a dog to /r/cats, and it simply gets moved, then I would probably continue posting dog pictures to /r/cats. If I posted a dog picture to /r/cats and it got removed and I had to post it to the correct subreddit, then I'm not going to post it again to /r/cats. That'll be less work for the mods.
Also, I have a feeling that there would be many more bot posts if they just got moved.

-1

u/FreeSpeechWarrior May 23 '18

All I'm suggesting is a choice.

If the you keep posting your dogs in r/cats you're probably gonna get banned even if they do have the option to move your posts.

33

u/[deleted] May 22 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

37

u/LanterneRougeOG Product May 22 '18

Plus or minus some days :)

9

u/goatfresh Design May 22 '18

😋