going to be using this thread here to talk about changes to the site. eventually, i plan on completely open sourcing the front-end, so that the changelog will be visible, but in the meantime i'll just post here blog-style

so right now the front-end of the forums are on version 0.3.0 and some of the changes from the latest releases include

• increased token expiration time to one week. this means that you will remain stayed logged in for one week, and the site will try to issue you a new token if you visit the site in a specific window before the 7 days are up

• converted initial page load requests from happening one-by-one to being batched. what this means is an increase in page load speed, especially pages that rely on a few different data sources

• added a "copy link to post" button in the post action menu

• updated how inline <code /> tags appear in posts (hint: that is how they look now, with a border and background color)

• fixed issue with no errors being presented if an expected issue occurred with a client-side request

v0.3.1

• made it so tokens will refresh if you come back to the site within 24 hours to 7 days. after 7 days of no visit to the site, your token will be expired and you will be logged out

v0.4.0

• updates styles on colors and typography

• new logo! thanks https://phylodox.com!

• updates meta description for direct links to posts

• adds automatic hyperlinking for posted URLs

v0.5.0

• removed list of mods from homepage on mobile breakpoints

• added list of mods to forum landing pages

• added support for automatic hyperlinking in quotes (they already existed in the post themselves, but not if you were quoting someone).

v0.6.0 and v0.7.0

we released both versions at the same time due to some bugs with 0.6.0, but here's the batch of updates

• renamed "account" tab in user profile to "settings"

• added a bunch more account settings: bionic reading, toggling posting hints, and reanchor page. read more about account settings here

• added breadcrumb back to the homepage on forum landing pages

• added user tracking with clicky. attempting to pick a company more ethical than google

feel free to update your account settings and try them out!

https://basementcommunity.com/profile?tab=settings

v0.7.2

• fixed an issue where returning to threads would drop you off at the last post you already read. now, it will correctly return to you to the next unread post in the thread.

You might have noticed that with this update, all your read counts for threads are gone. This an intentional purge of data to fix this bug properly and will not happen ever again

v0.8.0

a bunch of stuff happened since the last release. we've been launching some patch versions of things over the past few weeks - nothing crazy to report on, but we're going to batch a bunch of updates here in this post

• fixed an issue where including numbers in your new post while quoting someone was causing issues with the hyperlink that went to the quoted post

• updated some styles and copy (including the primary purple color you see in mentions, sticky-ed threads, etc).

• fixed an issue where not typing line-breaks after quoting someone would cause your new text to be stripped from the post

• added functionality to create post forms (such as create/edit posts, create threads, create PMs, etc.) so that the cursor will automatically be focused on the first text field, for faster post creation!! make some posts quick!!!

that's all for now! the next minor update will hopefully contain some juicier updates around getting more visibility into new threads and posts from the homepage, which should encourage more posting

v0.9.1

more substantial updates this time! in an attempt to make the site easier to find new threads and posts, we've added some convenience features

• added "latest posts" to homepage for each forum, which will link you off to the latest post in each forum

• added new account setting! "auto-bookmark thread" will bookmark a thread any time you create one or post in one. it's on by default, but feel free to turn it off in your account settings

• fixed issue where saving new account settings required a full page refresh before they took effect. this is not necessary anymore

v0.10.0 - v0.14.2

wow a lot of updates have been released over the past couple weeks that i haven't wrote about and a lot has happened in that time. we got a new surge of users which was quite the wake-up call that i need to be more diligent about site performance enhancements and making sure the site is as fast as it can be. without further ado, here are the highlights from the last few releases

1. a "back to top" button now exists in the bottom right corner of the screen which will jump you back to the top of the page

2. using relative links in posts will now route you with the native client-side routing. links such as this one to the homepage

3. added more moderation tools that are hidden from most users, but will be able to help us more quickly get rid of bad posters

4. added announcements! which will appear at the top of the screen when one is active

   • sorry that they're not dismissible yet. that's coming soon!

5. added the ability to put the site into "manual activation mode" which will allow me to manually approve new user accounts, which should help mitigate some bad posters coming back to re-register over and over again

6. adds setting to turn off avatars. check it out in your account settings

7. stopped reanchoring threads with JavaScript if you've manually scrolled the page already. sorry if that was annoying. it will now only re-anchor if all images have loaded and you haven't yet scrolled the page yourself

8. you can now click on checkbox helper text to toggle the checkbox on and off, like the ones in account settings

9. fix issue where "favorite thread" button was visible to logged-out users

10. fix issue where putting URLs in quotes was parsing them as markdown URLs

11. fix issue where returning to thread with unread posts would drop you at your last read post. now, it will drop you at your first unread post

here are the points that have to do with site performance:

1. some authentication-required requests were being made even if you were logged out. this doesn't happen anymore which should get us a few MS of load time back

2. added sentry.io logging to better monitor site performance

3. (most) links on the site will pre-fetch assets. this means that when you hover on a link, the site will request the stuff it needs ahead of time before you click it so the page navigation should be faster.

4. added rate limiting to all API endpoints. this should help mitigate DDOS attacks

5. added number of workers for the API server

6. cleaned up a bunch of SQL queries to be more performant, which should make the main document download faster when visiting a page

7. again, we added a "turn off avatars" setting. go ahead and turn that off if you don't want to load all those images with each page load

v0.15.0 - v0.17.0

okay it's been a while since one of these. i'm still working on the site, but finding a lot less time to do it, so releases have been a little infrequent, but i'm excited to talk about some of the stuff we released over the past month

first things first, let's get some bugs out of the way

• fixed weird issue with posting lists where sometimes the * or number would appear above your bullet point

• fixed issue where pagination controls weren't being rendered on the server which caused them to pop in after page load

• fixed issue in quoting posts where adding more brackets to your post would mess with where the quote text was cut off

• fixed issue where page re-anchoring wasn't functioning for logged-out users

• fixed issue where sometimes when you go from one thread to another via clicking a notification, the posts in the new thread would appear

• fixed issue where every single mention said it was by me (😥)

• fixed issue where posts that were punished would not list that if the punishment was expired

---

As for the new stuff.....

• we now are storing your avatar's height and width at the time you upload an avatar, so we don't have to parse it when read. this ultimately should speed up load times for posts

• added a lot more administration tools! this is mostly only relevant to me, but it will mean we can get rid of shitty people faster!

• added commas to thread view and reply counts

• updates helper text when registering an account to describe the password requirements more clearly

• changes threshold for threads to appear in trending to be threads 2 weeks old max

• adds a blocklist for usernames

• adds better error messages for registering an account

---

and the big one which is:

we added redis to the API! this means that hopefully we'll see a collective increase in page load speeds as there will be less of a load on the database. this one i'm still experimenting with, so don't be alarmed if you update your profile and you're not seeing changes in posts right away. that's most likely means the list of posts was cached and should be visible within the next 30 minutes!

v0.18.3 - v0.19.2

welcome back to another round of updates! this one is pretty meaty, as it contains some UI updates i've been dying to make for a while now. there are some pieces of UI that i'm not 100% satisfied with, so more updates will definitely be coming in the future, but for now i think we've definitely improved some elements

let's begin

• fix issue where new users weren't allowed to view their own private messages (ouch that was a bad one)

• allows creating posts from the post preview view

• fix issue with current page button not being disabled on the mentions landing page

• stops highlighting quotes for logged-out users

• stops pre-fetching pages while hovering over notification links

• adds custom logos (feel free to submit one)!

• allows announcements to be dismissed

• allows posting hints to be dismissed permanently (go to your settings) to turn it back on

• overhauls homepage and threads landing page

• moves some post actions out of the pop-out menu and inline with the post

• adds a new privacy and FAQ page

• fix issue where private message threads last updated time wasn't being updated with each new post

• saves drafts of posts if you refresh or navigate away from the page. drafts are on a per-thread basis and will clear out after you either make the post or 2 hours have passed.

v0.20.0 - v0.28.0

another long overdue changelog. sorry about that folks, but we had quite a few changes since the last round of updates and i'm excited to finally announce a bunch of stuff we've deployed over the last couple months:

• DARK MODE - it took some iterating on, but we've finally got a dark mode for the site. One that I really believe in because I wanted to take the time to make it as accessible as possible and get it right. Please let me know any feedback you have in this thread

• Adds toggle for dark/light mode in the footer for logged out users. For registered users, this toggle lives in the account settings

• Also updates color palette for light mode

• Changes functionality to how mentions are marked read. Previously, they would be marked as read when opening up the mentions drawer. Now, they are marked read after being navigated to the thread where you were mentioned, so that you intentionally have to click into a mention to get rid of the icon.

• Requests fresh list of PMs when navigating to PM threads, so that the notification badge updates more quickly.

• Updates CSS around the site to support legacy browsers that don't support CSS variables.

• Joined a bunch more webrings on the webrings page

• Stops sorting bookmarked threads by sticky status. Now they are just sorted by last post datetime.

• Adds better error messaging for logged-out users attempting to view a route that requires log in.

• Adds new MSPaint logo (Thanks to user @Headwig)

• Adds forum stats to homepage

• Adds meta title and meta description to the rest of the routes that didn't have one

• Increases number of featured threads on the homepage

• Adds new UI for deleted users. Posts are blanked and username reads as "deleted_user"

• Adds ability to view posts by user (example link)

  • see either in the header action menu or in a user's public profile page:
    
    
    

• Adds ability to view posts in thread by user (example link)

  • view by clicking on user's username on a post and clicking "thread posts"
    

  • you can also navigate directly back to the post when viewing in filter mode:
    

v0.28.1 - v0.32.1

youtube embeds, binch. we got em (but feel free to turn them off in your account settings)

long time, no update! glad to see some of you are still sticking around here for some reason and making posts. it is much appreciated, so that's why i wanted to spend this past couple weeks cooking up some new features to say THANK YOU! I know lately it seems like some weeks are slower than others on this site, and that's okay. we're gonna keep trucking along and continue with the goal of trying to build a high-quality platform for people to hang out and discuss their favorite things.

at some point in the future, i might make a bigger post about my community-building goals and what steps i've been taking to get in some more users and what i plan to do, but for now let's get into the update:

• adds COOL mode theme - check out your account settings to change the theme

• adds "users online" and "link of the day (LotD) to thread stats

  • do not hold me to updating the link once per day

  • feel free to send submissions for cool links in this thread

• truncates thread author username to the first 13 characters threads landing pages

• moves probation/ban text in a user's post to under their avatar (previously this was right under the "posted at" datetime)

• updates various moderation tools

• fix issue where user posted images didn't have the alt tag they defined

• decreases the padding of announcements (sorry if announcements felt too big and annoying)

• adds a new logo to the rotation (go tell @raptor he's extremely talented)!!!

• fix issue with images parsing function that determines when all images on the page are loaded

• adds "add quote" button in post creation pages. try clicking it to add multiple quotes to your post easily:

• makes your authentication cookie HTTP-only

  • this is not going to affect much to the users, but this adds a huge layer of security for the site and definitely was not an easy task to accomplish. this one required a couple weeks of coding to refactor a lot of the outgoing request code the site uses

• adds better fatal error messaging (the site will now try to tell you that you've lost internet or that we're doing maintenance on the API server when it happens)

• updates the design of the wall of shame page!!!

• adds page headers to the footer on the threads landing page and the posts landing page so that you can navigate back to the previous page from the footer:

• fix issue where some text was unreadable inside quotes

• updates header layout. "bookmarks" now lives inside the main header, while "messages" were moved into the menu

  • also the font size decreased

• adds Youtube embeds

  • again, you can turn them off in your account settings

And that's all folks. hopefully some of these changes will help you to create more and better posts. until next time...

v0.32.2 - v0.33.0

welcome back - this is gonna be a quick round of updates because it involves a bunch of stuff i've been cooking up for a while now but never got around to actually finishing. this one involves just a teeeeeeny bit of new features, but mostly site performance improvements. let's get into it:

• users can now delete their accounts themselves. check out the "close account" tab (but please don't though it's nice to have you here)

  • there's a bit of a caveat with actually closing your account - all your posts and profile information get properly wiped, but users who quoted you have their posts completely unaffected. we'll figure that one out later.

• upgrades the framework the site is built on (Remix) to version 2.0.0. This one is pretty big because it will open us up to a lot of potentially good stuff in the future

• bundles component CSS. all the individual pieces of the site: buttons, links, menus, icons, etc. They all now have their CSS bundled into one file, which is loaded upon first entering the site

  • each actual page's CSS is still loaded when you actually visit the page tho.

• removes all javascript-based styling from the site. This should give us just a slight performance boost, along with ~0.1MB less to download.

• fixed an issue where sometimes on the edit-profile page you could get into a state where the page wouldn't automatically scroll you to the error message on-screen

• updates styling on the mentions pop-out menu

• revamps all tables from the ground up. You might not notice anything has changed, but the underlying code that powers things like the rows of threads, rows of offenses, etc. are running on much better code.

• prevents clicking the "add quote" button when you're drafting a post and in preview mode, with a little message telling you why it's disabled:

v0.33.1 - v0.34.0

anotha one. gotta few quick updates this time, mostly some quality-of-life features to make it easier to read the forums. let's go:

• adds code snytax highlighting! typically, this is a pretty beefy feature that sometimes requires a lot of extra javascript to be downloaded, so let me explain how it works:

for one, you can format code blocks by wrapping your code on each side with three backticks like so:

/```
/* but pretend there is no forward slash above or below */
var thing = "something";
/```

var thing = "something";

you can also get specific language highlighting by adding the name of your language to the end of the first set of backticks:

/```js
/* but pretend there is no forward slash above or below */
var thing = "something";
/```

var thing = "something";

the way it works is that the site will download the javascript required to highlight that specific language if it's requested on the page. So you will download the PHP highlighting code if someone posted PHP code in the thread. This will alleviate any unnecessary language downloading.

furthermore, all this extra downloading will be requested AFTER the page has fully loaded, so that it doesn't block the speed at which threads load. This will also mean that you might see unhighlighted code for a split second before the code to highlight it runs.

For most pages, you might be looking at downloading an extra ~0.3MB of javascript from my testing, which isn't great, but it's not the end of the world in my opinion. If no code blocks exist on the page, you download nothing extra. The only instance in which it could get beefy is if a lot of different code block languages are posted in a thread page, which probably won't happen very often, if ever. let's move on...

• fixed issue where quote author link would sometimes link you to the wrong post, if the post body also contained a link to a post

• updated the "copy link" button to be inline with posts for logged out users. also changes to a "copied!" text for half a second to give you feedback that it the link was successfully copied to your clipboard

• removes the noreferrer attribute from all outbound links, so that people can see who's coming to their site from basement community now!

• adds RSS feeds! one for the every post on the site, found on the homepage:

• and one for each subforum, which can be found next to the name of the subforum when navigating to it's landing page:

and that's all folks. short and sweet. cya next time 👋

v0.35.0 - v0.37.0

happy holidays and welcome back to the changelog!!!! this release is a big one, with features that i'm both really excited to announce and some that i'm excited to tentatively introduce and maybe take back and remove later. let's get into it:

• updates RSS feed values to add some additional information to each feed item

• adds pagination buttons to each thread on the threads landing page (if they have more than one page)

• adds progress bar to top of the screen if a page is taking more than 750ms to load, so you have a better indication that something is loading

• adds new pixelated site logo from user stonehead. thanks @stonehead!

• fix issue with <meta /> tags on the threads landing page

• updates webrings page to be called the "links" page and include a "sites we like" section to highlight some sites from people on and off the forum.

• updates scrollbar to the browser darkmode scrollbar, for users browsing in either "cool" or "dark" modes

• updates error handling for avatar uploading (hopefully this resolves issues with uploading avatars being confusing for some users)

  • errors with uploading will look like this:

• gives the user profile page a refreshed look and adds mastadon as a new profile option. also adds automatic hyperlinking for things like twitter, mastadon, and personal sites

• removes the requirement and ability to select a thread icon when creating a new thread

• adds a "credits" page to the privacy and FAQ page to properly credit the artists who's assets appear on the site

• adds smileys to posting forms! try them out!!!!

• adds the concept of user "ranks" which will appear both in your profile as a number value and in your posts as a special icon. keep posting to see all the different rank icons. in total there are 11 different ranks/icons to earn

  • this is a feature that is very experimental. we'll see if it sticks around

• updates the back-to-top button to be smaller

• adds support for timecodes in youtube embeds

• updates width of threads and posts tables to be smaller on desktop breakpoints

---

as always, thanks for sticking around the site and creating posts. hopefully we'll continue to grow the community some more and make this one of the best forums on the internet.

v0.38.0

happy new year ya'll!! we're back with a quick round of updates. most of this is maintenance i've been meaning to do for a while, with some small layout changes. please checkout the basement community in 2024 thread for more information about coming updates later in the year and let me know if you have any feedback!

hope everyone is having a great 2024 and thank you again for visiting the site!

• makes all smiley buttons come after the "preview" and "create post" buttons

• updates meta title on /links page

• updates homepage thread cards to read "new" if thread is unread and number of posts unread if you partially read the thread. also changes color of the text

• updates issue with "images loaded" parsing, so now a page will be re-anchored more properly

• adds "last updated by" link to each thread row, which will link to the last post in a thread

• fixes security issue with authentication token being able to be accessed by client-side javascript

• adds height and width properties to avatar on the public profile page, to avoid page jumping after avatar loads in

• updates smiley buttons to insert the smiley shortcut where your cursor currently is on the post creation page, rather than being appended at the end of the text

• updates general styling of the threads landing page

• removes link of the day and users online from the forum stats on the homepage. i didn't find them useful and thought they were just wasted space

• removes user rank icon from each post, but they will still appear on the profile page (sorry about this one - they might come back later, but getting that information on the page required a SQL query that was very slow and was causing massive performance issues).

• removes deleted forums from list of "forums moderating" in user profile page

v0.39.0

two updates in a month. let's get it

• adds a "sort by" dropdown on the threads landing page and the boomarks page, which allows you to sort threads by last post, reply count, and view count

• adds a basic WYSIWYG to the post creation forms. Currently only supports adding links and images, the 2 things that I think most people have trouble with

• fix issue where the "last post by" on threads landing page was not always returning the last post in the thread

• allows markdown in profile bios, so you can add hyperlinks, images, and other flair to your text

v1.0.0

that's right people. we're calling this version 1. as far as I'm concerned, everything on the site today is what I would consider the "base" feature set. we'll obviously continue adding, fixing, and changing shit in the future but the time is now to call this site "finished" (with a big asterisk).

Ironically, even though this is a moumental release, the updates are rather small:

• adds /search page, which allows you to search either by post body or thread title

• adds search bar to each thread page, allowing you to search within the thread

• removes bionic reading mode from the account settings.

  • sorry to anyone who liked this feature, but it was causing some pretty big security issues. If I have some time, I may revisit the feature and try to fix the current problems with it.

• updates the header and footer to contain links to the search page

• fixes issue where going to thread without specifying a page would default to the last page

Now that search is released, I'd love to hear some feedback on it. Please post any and all feedback, whether they be bugs or things you just plain don't like about search in this thread:

https://basementcommunity.com/threads/245

this video doesn't have anything to do with this release, you people should just check out Rosie Tucker b/c their music absolutely slaps

v1.1.0

Here's a quick lil update:

• adds new account setting called "homepage view" that will let you switch between the "classic" forum view you know and love, and a "threads only" view that will display the most recent 5 pages of threads, sorted by their updated_at timestamp

• updates misc. styling. the search landing got some spacing tweaks and the post creation forms got some line-spacing to make creating posts easier to read when you're typing them out

• improves some text for screen-readers around the site

that's it. Be sure to check out the new account setting in your settings page:

gimme dat!

welcome back to the changelog. it's been a few quiet months, mainly because the forum is pretty feature-complete at this point, so new updates are going to be fewer, but this one is still packed with some nice stuff (though not very exciting so don't get your hopes up)

let's get into it:

v1.1.1 - v1.3.0

• updates misc. styling - the height on the post creation from was decreased, some padding and margins were tweaked, and general widths were adjusted so the site looks better on ultra-wide monitors or TVs

• updates the look and feel of the trending and recent threads sections on the homepage

• updates error pages to auto-focus on their h1s when mounted to improve the accessibility of the site

• adds support for strikethrough in posts by using tildes ~strike me through zaddy~

• upgrades some of the dependencies the site relies on for better long-term support

• redirects /webrings to /links because that URL used to be /webrings originally before i changed it

• updates list of fallback fonts if the main one doesn't load

• updates formatting on RSS posts

• updates /links pages with https://forum.marianabay.com

• adds a "delete thread" button to the moderation tools, so I don't have to pull out my laptop to delete a thread

• adds email verification requirement for new users to post

AND that's it. that was a bunch of changes that were deployed over the last few months, some of them I'm sure you've noticed already.

as always, reach out with any questions. happy to discuss existing changes or new ones! hope everyone is enjoying their summer!!!!!

WELCOME BACK! It's been a few months, sorry about the lack of updates. We have a small-but-mighty one today and here it is:

v1.4.0 - v1.5.1

• updates "sites we like" section on the links page

• adds additional moderation tools for quickly disabling sign-ups

• allows markdown in offense reason

• adds 88x31 button

• adds username autocomplete in post creation forms

  • try it out by typing @ then someone's username