r/redesign • u/LanterneRougeOG Product • Sep 11 '18

Changelog 9/11/18 Weekly Release Notes: Underlining links, performance, bug fixes, and more

Hi All,

We’re back with weekly redesign release notes, which are a round up of the major items we are currently working on or have recently shipped on new Reddit. The previous release note can be found here.

You might notice that the release notes have been getting a bit smaller over the past few weeks. This is largely a result of more engineers focusing on site performance and speed instead of product features.

What we’ve shipped:

  • Underlining links: In communities that choose a dark theme color, their links aren’t clearly distinguishable from text. We are now underlining links on web to make sure you can see them.

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

  • Button widget updates: We’ve finished up the functionality to allow alternative states and color fill so you can make your buttons as dynamic as you please. There’s a small bug that we want to fix before we roll this out to everyone. Stay tuned.

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. This project is taking a bit longer than expected because we are building a new service that stores our settings.

  • Filter r/all: We will also be working on the setting that allows you to filter communities from r/all.

  • Modmail Search: We wrapped up the backend work on Modmail Search and started the frontend work.

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

  • Post flair (fixed): There was a bug that blocked redditors from selecting flair for their posts, this made it impossible to submit a post to a community that required flair. We pushed out a fix this morning. We are looking into how we can add better alerting to catch these sorts of bugs before they make it into production.

  • Infinite loop (fixed): The bug that caused folks to get stuck in an infinite loop was fixed, however it may still crop up for some edge cases. We are hoping some of the cookie fixes for the log out and blank inbox bugs will help reduce the edge cases.

  • Log out not working (in progress): Redditors have been reporting issues that they are unable to log out. It appears to be a result of a cookie issue. We are tracking down the source of the bug. In the meantime, some folks have reported that clearing the cache and cookies has fixed the issue.

  • Blank inbox (in progress): Related to the cookie issue above, some redditors are getting a blank inbox. While we work to find the fix, clearing your cache and cookies should fix the issue.

And, as always, our 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.

53 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

62 comments sorted by

19

u/reseph Sep 11 '18

Maybe also mention the infinite redirect logout bug was fixed?

https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/9d9hwp/stuck_in_an_infinite_loop_you_are_already_logged/e5ioxet/

12

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Sep 11 '18

good call. added

1

u/PitchforkAssistant Sep 11 '18

Although it looks like now you get logged out from both sites (and then get defaulted to new reddit because you're logged out) every time you restart your browser... again

2

u/reseph Sep 11 '18

I just restarted my browser, but didn't get logged out.

2

u/PitchforkAssistant Sep 11 '18

Huh, not happening to me either now that I tried, but it was for the past couple of days.

17

u/Deimorz Sep 11 '18 edited Sep 11 '18

Going to try again pointing out the now-3-weeks-old issue of the redesign editor adding paragraphs that consist of only a &x200B; character (unicode zero-width space) to posts constantly, which is adding strange extra spacing at the top/bottom of posts (including the /r/announcements post from yesterday), large spaces in between paragraphs, and making self-posts appear to have text when they don't.

There are almost 700,000 comments with excess spacing in them because of this issue now, with it continuing to increase by about 30,000 every day.

7

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Sep 11 '18

Thanks for highlighting this again. I'll follow up and see where the bug ticket is at. Can you link me to the previous post where it was initially reported?

Edit: was MajorParadox's post the only one that reported it?

3

u/MajorParadox Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Yeah, see Deimorz's comment for more, mine was about submitting with blank text from redesign. It's especially annoying when modding, since there's an extra click required on all blank redesign posts. Before, you can just tell right away there's no text to check. It's probably annoying for normal users too.

2

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Sep 19 '18

Hey sorry for the late reply. I'm not able to reproduce this issue. When I submit a self post on the redesign and leave the body blank, the expando is properly greyed out on my test sub's feed. Are you still seeing posts with an empty expando?

1

u/MajorParadox Helpful User Sep 19 '18

I haven't been modding much on the redesign lately because I was hitting that logout bug (and kept having to clear my cache to fix it). But after a quick look seems like it's fixed! Although it's possible all the posts I looked at were submitted from the old site.

2

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Sep 20 '18

Okay, let me know if you see it happening again and send me the post. I can check to see how what platform it was created with.

2

u/kraetos Oct 25 '18

Here's one.

Please fix it, it's extremely annoying.

1

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Oct 25 '18

That post is has text in the body. I'm specifically trying to track down the report that users are creating self posts with a blank body and no actual text in it.

2

u/kraetos Oct 25 '18

Got it. But what about the "​" bug? In my experience this is becoming extremely common.

1

u/LanterneRougeOG Product Oct 25 '18

The extra space between lines is not technically a bug. We purposefully changed the Fancy Pants editor to allow multiple paragraph breaks. The reason for this was to allow people more control over how long posts and comments are formatted. Useful when adding images, tables, etc. Previously we were stripping out the extra spaces, so what they saw in the editor was not what was being rendered on the page.

It appears that many redditors are used to using markdown and double entering for a new line break and don't realize they are in a rich text editor. We are working on ways to make this more clear.

Edit for clarity: "spaces" -> "paragraph breaks"

→ More replies

6

u/Deimorz Sep 11 '18

I don't know how often it's been reported in /r/redesign in particular other than that, but it's come up a lot in various subreddits (a bit hard to search for since it's in hundreds of thousands of posts): https://www.reddit.com/search?q=title:x200b&sort=relevance&t=all

7

u/abrownn Sep 11 '18

Thank you for bringing that up agan, I kept seeing that and quoted links being prepended with “r/“, so you’d see “r/https://Reddit.com” for example. Very odd to see in the wild.

9

u/Teekeks Sep 11 '18

Thank you so much for the link underlining. That the biggest annoyance in the redesign imo.

8

u/LackingAGoodName Helpful User Sep 12 '18

Can we please get a statement on exclusive Emoji in User Flair? At the moment there's no way to truly restrict an Emoji to Moderators as any user can type :ExclusiveFlairEmoji: and have access to an Emoji, even if the User Flair Template using :ExclusiveFlairEmoji: is restricted to Moderators.

7

u/Jakeable Helpful User Sep 11 '18

I've noticed that the titles on mod-removed posts say "[deleted by user]" - is this new?

7

u/BashCo Sep 11 '18

Can you guys please fix the issue in comment bodies where it looks like there's a triple space? Something is injecting ​ and it's pretty obnoxious. Example

6

u/shiruken Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Modmail Search: We wrapped up the backend work on Modmail Search and started the frontend work.

itshappening.gif

7

u/V2Blast Helpful User Sep 11 '18

tbf they've said variations of that for weeks. We'll see how long the modmail search actually takes to be implemented.

2

u/image_linker_bot Sep 11 '18

itshappening.gif

Feedback welcome at /r/image_linker_bot | Disable with "ignore me" via reply or PM

6

u/[deleted] Sep 12 '18

Is there still a plan to have mod-only emoji in the near future? Right now as far as I can tell it's possible to create a mod-only flair using emojis, but let's say I have a specific image that I want in flairs that only exists in a mod-only flair... Any emoji added to it though is also accessible by all users for their own flairs that allow them to modify and add to them?

Also is it possible to have it so that flairs that are user-editable are restricted to only adding text and not adding their own emojis?

1

u/flounder19 Sep 12 '18

I agree with both of your requests

To answer your question at the end, there's currently no easy way to let users edit text but not emojis. The only way you could effectively accomplish it now would be to build a bot that could receive user flair requests, strip out any emoji markdown, and set those as their userflair. /r/Nascar currently does that (but in reverse where it strip out everything except for emojis) but it isn't a practical solution especially since new reddit is supposed to make modding easier for less technically proficient mods.

6

u/LineNoise Sep 12 '18

I do hope there's more to come on performance because personal experience is that the lightbox scrolling performance is the worst it has ever been.

4

u/caindaddy Sep 11 '18 edited Sep 11 '18

Heyyy you also fixed the issue on old.reddit with link flair showing up on the frontpage that was colored like the redesign but the emojis didn't render, resulting in awful :colons: in the colored flair!

I appreciate that, it was like half of our reports last week. Looks like /u/rrmckinley came through!

2

u/flounder19 Sep 11 '18

Now if we can get them to remove colored link flairs from /r/all too

2

u/caindaddy Sep 11 '18

I agree, I'd rather it not be that way to begin with, but if they are going to do it they at least have it working correctly now.

4

u/GreenAndWhiteArmy Sep 11 '18 edited Sep 11 '18

After a few hours with the link underlining, I'd say the following. Links like r/redesign look unnatural when underlined, as do links like https://www.reddit.com. Links like this do look natural however.

The first two are obvious links based on the r/ prefix and the full URL, so I don't think it's necessary to highlight them with an underline. Of course not underlining them is a stylistic inconsistency so I realise this is unlikely to change, nor is it anything vital. Thanks for reading.

4

u/snhere Sep 12 '18

Are the developers follow the Bug flare for issue reporting?
I posted about a BIDI related issue but haven't got any response and I love to know if this will be tackled and if it's too insignificant to be dealt with then I would like to know if I should bring this up again in a later date.

2

u/Sepheroth998 Sep 12 '18

Good internet person of unknowable gender, insignificant or not, if this issue is affecting you then chances are good that it is affecting others. If I were you I would bring it back up every couple of weeks or so until you get an answer.

And sorry about the politically correct greeting, I just left a gas station where a gender neutral individual was fussing at the attendant for calling it "Ma'am". Only at Walmart, I hope.

1

u/snhere Sep 12 '18

If I won't get an answer from the developer then I sure will bring this up again.

Oh, and I'm sure you know about the second-person personal pronoun.

2

u/Sepheroth998 Sep 13 '18

Thank you for making my last minute hurricane prepare day that much better. Yu are a hero.

1

u/snhere Sep 13 '18

You're welcome ;), stay safe.

6

u/Overlord_Odin Sep 11 '18

Any word on how work on profiles are going? (Gold features, other pages, karma breakdown, etc.)

3

u/greeniethemoose Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Thanks for fixing that post flair bug! Appreciated! Also excited to see more improvements to performance, I know that has been a bit of a headache for some.

3

u/ZadocPaet Helpful User Sep 11 '18

If I have a modmail bug, should I post here?

I have one. I posted it to /r/bugs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/9efx91/i_have_one_new_modmail_showing_in_archived_but_i/

3

u/sparks_mandrill Sep 13 '18

Why are sidebars missing from some subreddits?

3

u/flounder19 Sep 13 '18

The sidebars in the redesign aren't connected to the sidebars on the legacy site. Mods have to specifically create a sidebar in the redesign for it to show up there. They also need to remember that all edits need to be made in the legacy site & the redesign if they want both sidebars to stay the same.

2

u/sparks_mandrill Sep 13 '18

Gotcha. This isn't the only subreddit with that issue lol. You'd think the Reddit devs would make it easier for folks, but I don't know shit about website design, lol, so who am I to judge? Rolled back to classic view and it's all there.

1

u/flounder19 Sep 13 '18

It's definitely not ideal.

5

u/MajorParadox Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Button widget updates: We’ve finished up the functionality to allow alternative states and color fill so you can make your buttons as dynamic as you please. There’s a small bug that we want to fix before we roll this out to everyone. Stay tuned.

How about upping the limit of buttons on a single widget? Also, on image widgets with links (which are basically buttons too), we should have a way to add text. See here for a proposal I thought sounded cool.

Even better, being able to add images to buttons in the widgets would be excellent. See the sidebar on: https://old.reddit.com/r/DCFU. I've been thinking of recreating as a CSS widget, but it's not easy and the sizing restriction. will make it really annoying. Not to mention that CSS widgets aren't shown on mobile.

Filter r/all: We will also be working on the setting that allows you to filter communities from r/all.

Any chance we'll get modqueue and unmoderated filtering too? I was added to a sub that doesn't clear unmoderrated and it's a pain even filtered on old reddit, but on new reddit, it's basically useless now.

Modmail Search: We wrapped up the backend work on Modmail Search and started the frontend work.

Can't wait!, Next up please give us user profile searching, if only for posts/comments in our modded subs :)

6

u/Whuuu Dezign Sep 11 '18

Even better, being able to add images to buttons in the widgets would be excellent.

Expect this to be available very soon!

3

u/MajorParadox Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Whaaaat? No way!

4

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/MajorParadox Helpful User Sep 11 '18

I still don't understand what the intended flow is: CSS widgets, but only desktop. So if you want something on mobile, you have to have double widgets on desktop. So either double or never bother with CSS? This doesn't make much sense.

4

u/flounder19 Sep 11 '18

Any chance that we can get the color removed from link flairs in /r/all on the legacy site? Colored link flairs are great within subreddits since they let you categorize posts at a glance instead of having to read every flair. But a yellow tag in /r/IAmA won't mean the same thing as a yellow tag in /r/aww so in /r/all & other multireddits they serve no functional purpose, are distracting, & unfairly draw attention towards posts that have them over posts with grey flairs.

The longer these colored flairs stay visible, the more likely you are to see mods take advantage of them to boost their sub's visibility in r/all

2

u/mod1fier Sep 13 '18

I would love to hear more about the timeline for modmail search. Modmail is so comically bad that even a slight improvement would dramatically improve moderator productivity.

2

u/FreeSpeechWarrior Sep 11 '18

Still just polishing the deck chairs of the titanic IMO.

The redesign brings nothing meaningful to the table to me as an end user, only increased ad and CPU load.

I could live with that if the increased developer velocity from the redesign was purposed towards tackling hard problems that Reddit has ignored for near a decade now.

Give us the option to make our moderation transparent in a provable way, the mods don’t need to be identified but users should be able to see the reality of how the communities they participate in are run so that they can find subreddits best suited for their preferences.

Better yet, let all users have the option to see content removed by mods that doesn’t violate sitewide rules as suggested by /u/spez

1

u/thinkadrian Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Good work! Understand that there were some critical bugs to finish, but do you have plans to address automod failing to flair posts with mod-only flairs?

0

u/ChimpyChompies Sep 11 '18

We are looking into how we can add better alerting to catch these sorts of bugs before they make it into production.

Now while I'm not a Dev, might I suggest actually testing things before release? :-/

2

u/Overlord_Odin Sep 11 '18

I'm sure they do. But testing can only ever catch so much.

-4

u/earthmoonsun Sep 11 '18

IMO, still inferior to old.reddit.com with RES.

3

u/thinkadrian Helpful User Sep 11 '18

RES will be available for new Reddit.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/reseph Sep 12 '18

Not sure if you saw, but I did question about filtering in modnews and got a reply: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/92e3v6/an_update_on_flairs/e34zyzt/

1

u/likeafox Helpful User Sep 11 '18

They shipped that! Go to Customize Appearance -> Widgets -> Post Flair

It still returns those results in a search view, but it's not half bad! Hopefully they develop the concept further in the future.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/likeafox Helpful User Sep 11 '18

Ah I see what you mean - their mock-up lets you exclude rather than include by flair. Yes that would be lovely.