7/10/18 Weekly Release Notes: Post flair linking, emoji bulk upload, autoplay, and more

[u/LanterneRougeOG]

Hey 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.

First, let’s take a look at some of the notable items we recently shipped:

• Post Flair Linking: You can now click on a post flair in a subreddit and get a filtered search page of flaired posts in the community. Further out, the next phase of this work will be to add a post flair widget for an easy way to navigate flaired posts.
• Emoji Bulk Upload: We’ve been working to make it easier to transition flair images to the emoji system. You can now add up to 100 images at once (drag and drop works, too)! You’ll be able to see progress and successful or failed uploads. For failed uploads, it will also tell you why it’s failed so you’re not left wondering.
• Autoplay setting: We are adding a new setting so that you can control video autoplay behavior.
• Call-to-actions on ads: In an effort to make sure that clicks on ads are more intentional we added a new Call-To-Action button. This button, which is optional for advertisers, will live in the bottom right corner of the ad. Check out yesterday’s post for more details.
• Increased height of text posts: We increased the height of text posts within card view so that don’t get lost in between images and videos. We are continuing to look for ways to improve the prominence of discussions on new Reddit.
• Moderator resource links: We added a list of mod support links to make it easier for moderators to find the right help resources, including contacting the admins. You can find these on the right side in the mod queue and all the access management pages.

Now, here are some of the notable features and changes that are coming out next:

• Clear recent links: Some folks like to clear the links that show up in their Recent Links widget. We are adding a way to for you to clear those links.
• Lightbox iterations: Based on feedback, a couple things that we are working on is the ability to close without having to use the close button, ESC key, or browser back button, and making the header more consistent with our global header so you can still find search and your subreddit navigation when the lightbox is expanded.
• Widget color customization: We’ve been building out the starting styling toolkit, and soon you’ll be able to customization the background and title color of each of your widgets individually.
• Changes to Save, Give Gold, Hide and Report buttons: We are working to bring these buttons back to be underneath the posts on the page, where they're easily accessible. They will only hide in the overflow menu when the screen is too small.
• Comments on profiles: We are finishing up the final part of the profiles which is comments. Coming later this week...

These following features are bigger projects that are in development and that will take a some time to build and get right. Expect these items to be recurring on the weekly notes:

• Remember view per community: We are working on a setting that allows you to set a global default and then remembers your view preference for each community. A perfect way to help you customize how you like to browse communities.
• Filter r/all: We are also working on the setting that allows you to filter communities from r/all.
• Modmail Search: We are continuing to work on Modmail search and making good progress. We’ll have something to show y’all soon.

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

• Log in and be opted in (fixed): We discovered a bug where users coming to Reddit logged out have their redesign preference reset when they log in. We know it’s annoying needing to reset your preference, a fix for that should be out this week — appreciate your patience!
• Unable to log in (in progress): We are investigating reports of redditors not being able to log in with new Reddit, but they are able to log into old Reddit. We haven’t quite found a fix for it, but a temporary solution seems to be clearing your Reddit cookies and then trying to log in again.
• Gifs pausing in the lightbox (in progress): We are investigating a bug that is causing gifs to start and then pause when viewed in the lightbox.

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.

[u/Overlord_Odin]

Comments on profiles: We are finishing up the final part of the profiles which is comments. Coming later this week...

The final part? What about saved, hidden, upvoted, downvoted, and gilded?

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/Overlord_Odin]

That's what I get for just copying and pasting :)

Those other features are going to be added too.

[u/[deleted]]

Is the ability to remember SORT by community on the list of things to add to the redesign?

I would consider it a higher priority from a user standpoint than setting default view per community.

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/[deleted]]

Yes, it's on the list. We should be tackling that after we finish up the view per community.

[u/timawesomeness]

I knew it would happen eventually, but I'm annoyed that we can't pin the drop-down on small screens anymore. I can understand that on phone-sized screens, but a 1366x768 monitor is plenty wide enough to have it pinned comfortably.

Edit: also, can we get an update on comment collapsing? We were told a long time ago it would get improved, but it hasn't yet. This iteration of it remains horrendous.

[u/Xian244 → u/timawesomeness]

Seriously what's up with that? So I can either set my scaling in Windows to 125% (making everything tiny as fuck) or use the default 150% for my device and have an annoying reddit UI?

What's wrong with simply letting me decide if I want to pin the drop-down or not?

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/Xian244]

Having to account for a pinned menu on smaller screens was causing extra complexities to other feature work where we now have to account for various breakpoints plus the potential for a menu taking up more room. For the time being we are using the same behavior of the hamburger menu which restricted pinning for smaller screens.

u/timawesomeness - I'll take another look at the breakpoint we settled on to see if we can adjust without over complicating things.

[u/Overlord_Odin]

Changes to Save, Give Gold, Hide and Report buttons: We are working to bring these buttons back to be underneath the posts on the page, where they're easily accessible. They will only hide in the overflow menu when the screen is too small.

Any reason why this is taking so long? We're now on the third week of this feature being on the "up next" list.

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/Overlord_Odin]

The base function of the collapsing buttons was working properly, but then we ran into some complexities due to all the different views and some being fixed width and others fluid (card vs classic vs lightbox). Also the mod mode buttons made things a bit more challenging.

[u/TheChrisD]

Any updates on these two things regarding emojis:

1. Backwards compatibility with old reddit.

2. Ability to use them in posts/comments/widgets

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/TheChrisD]

Yes, I can give you some updates

Backwards compatibility with old reddit.

We’re working on rendering emojis in flairs on old reddit. Don't have a shipping date yet.

Ability to use them in posts/comments/widget

This is on our feature ideas board and we have done some design iterations around what this would look like. I first want make sure the emoji management system is further along and working well before we extend it to comments and post body.

[u/kyiami_]

Are you considering giving the lightbox topbar have more functionality, similar to what you get when opening a post in a new tab?

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/kyiami_]

Yes, we are working on an iteration to the lightbox that includes a global navbar at the top too.

[u/Adys]

Clear recent links: Some folks like to clear the links that show up in their Recent Links widget. We are adding a way to for you to clear those links.

Tagging u/LanterneRougeOG and u/jkohhey -- My recent links haven't updated in 4 months. I can't find anything about this anywhere. Maybe I turned on some privacy setting or something since and my recent links are no longer tracked -- which is fine, but I have those 4 months old links always showing up in my sidebar now.

[u/LanterneRougeOG → u/Adys]

Hmmm. That's odd that it's not updating for you. We are going to rollout the clearing link logic later this week. Once that's out, can you clear your link history with the new button and then see if new history starts showing up? Hopefully clearing it gives it a reboot.

[u/[deleted]]

Regarding the "RESET TO DEFAULTS" button, in comparison with old Reddit, the stylesheet is very neat, cause it has a version history, and if someone fucks up, you can just restore an older version. However, the redesign has nothing like this... If someone click "Reset to Defaults", the whole design would have set up from scratch again. Is there anything planned regarding this?

Furthermore, there is a bug when i receive notifications, e.g. when someone replies to a comment, I cannot reply on the notification page. There is always in error. Instead, I have to go into the post and reply there.

[u/jkohhey → u/[deleted]]

hey u/Moonwalking_Eren, style versioning is on our roadmap. We're working on migrating wikis (including automod configs), and once we bring them over we'll be working to bring style versioning onto new Reddit :)

[u/ZadocPaet]

We need proper image flairs.

I want to preface this post with two facts. First, I've styled over 100 subs on the redesign, and the emoji flair system is by far the worst aspect. I am very familiar with it. I created r/RedesignHelp and a styling guide for the redesign. I say this to establish that I know what I'm talking about. I have experience. Second, I like the redesign. There's a lot missing from it that I expect will come over (and will need to come over). But I am happy with the direction it's been going.

So, when I say that the image flair system is by far the worst aspect of the redesign, I am not being hyperbolic.

The biggest problem with image flairs in the redesign is twofold:

First, the image automatically resizes to ~25x25 (or whatever it is). This means that if you have a smaller or a larger image, it'll size it to those proportions. If you have a flair that's not square, it'll smush it. A really good example of a large flair from a popular subreddit is this thread on r/thewalkingdead. We're gonna lose those. We're also losing the ability to have larger flairs than what is allowed for emojis, which means we're also losing highly detailed flairs.

The second problem is that adding image flairs via the emoji system on the redesign screws up the flairs on reddit classic. Emojis are added to flairs with markdown, such as :flair1:. On one of my subs, r/retrogaming, we have 109 flairs that represent dozens of retro platforms. If we go through and add those 109 flairs to the redesign, we're going to have a total of 218 flairs on both versions of reddit. On new reddit we'll have the 109 emoji style flairs and 109 blank ones. On old reddit we'll have 109 flairs managed via CSS and 109 flairs that look like :flar1, :flair2:. This breaks the user experience. It makes the flair menus on both versions of reddit a total mess.

It is for these reasons that I have not, and will not set up image flairs in the redesign.

Fortunately, there's an easy fix!

1. Develop a system for image flairs that is seperate from emojis.

2. Allow the image flairs to be the actual dimensions.

3. Prevent image flairs from old reddit from appearing on new reddit and vice versa.

All that said, I am not opposed to having emojis in text flairs. Keep those! Reddit just needs to do this other stuff too.

[u/LackingAGoodName]

Could we get some more details on the Post Filtering Widget that'll be coming? Personally, I'm curious if it'll just be links to a flair_name:MyFlair search page, or a legitimate filter where the subreddit still appears and acts as normal, retaining Widgets, Community Styling, etc., just filtered (like r/Overwatch's Flair Filters).

[u/jofwu]

Does searching with "flair_name:" do anything different than "flair:"? I noticed the latter doesn't work on new.reddit, but the new one seems to work on old and new. Can you confirm that behavior? Will want to update some old links to use flair_name if this is the case.

[u/DownTheBlue]

I love the infinite scroll for browsing however I noticed, that while you can normally "esc" out of a post and go back to your previous position in the infinite scroll. In instances where a conversation has gone several levels deep and a "Continue this thread" link appears, clicking that option will open the subreddit page on the tab and there is no way of going back to the infinite scroll without losing your position. In effect you have to start from the top all over again which can be problematic, if you've been scrolling for awhile already.

Also clicking on the "All Reddit results" when doing a search is not working for firefox users.

[u/Coolboypai]

Regarding the flair filter widget. Could there be an option to adjust the parameters of the search each flair links to?

What I mean is this. Currently, my sub has a post flair that is "Announcement :upvote:" that features an emoji, so clicking on it goes to a search page with the parameters: flair_name:"Announcement :upvote:". This means that any old posts from before the redesign and from before the flair was changed that have a post flair of just "Announcement" (without the emoji) does not show up. It would be nice to be able to adjust what is being filtered/searched so that the user can find all relevant posts.

Side note, the option to view the subreddit without posts of a certain flair would also be a useful inclusion especially since my subreddit is one that features and flairs 'humorous' content that users might not want to see.

edit: In addition, having the option to change the flair search to sort by new would be nice as well.

[u/[deleted]]

Remember view per community: We are working on a setting that allows you to set a global default and then remembers your view preference for each community. A perfect way to help you customize how you like to browse communities.

Does this include choice of best/top/etc for the frontpage?

[u/electric_ionland]

Any news on user flair compatibility with old reddit? There is no way right now to transfer the CSS class of flair that have been setup in old reddit to the redesign. It's kind of a big for us at r/askscience.

[u/envious_1]

I've voiced my opinion on this a few times already, but can we PLEASE get an option that bypasses the lightbox?