litphoria

A lot of work has gone into the site since September. Here’s a list of the major changes.

A smarter notification system that won’t bug you or miss things

The old notification system faced two big problems: under just the right conditions you wouldn’t be emailed, and notifications were excessive at other times. We’ve re-tuned notifications to be pretty close to “just right”.

Notifications from the same source will now batch together. If you get 20 posts to one of your RPs, you’ll get one update in your inbox for the first message, and extra messages will start adding a (2), (3), and so on to it until you just have 1 notification telling you there’s 20 messages. Batched notifications only send one email, so you won’t get email spam for each and every post to a roleplay you’re in. Email alerts have become more accurate. You will always receive an email for any roleplay post or PM notification after a 15 minute window, if you haven’t already cleared the notification by then. You can now turn off all site email notifications through account settings.

New moderation features for better channel and private message management

The lack of moderation tools was a serious issue and the first steps towards better moderation are now here.

• Blacklists: The owner of a chat or roleplay can now blacklist users, which prevents that person from sending messages to the channel. (It won’t block them from viewing the channel.) The blacklist is accessed from the channel’s edit page.
• Ignores: You can now ignore other profiles. Your ignore list can be edited from your account settings page. If you have a profile ignored, you won’t see their messages in any chat or roleplay (after you refresh). Moreover, the entire account won’t be able to send you PMs, friend requests, or channel invitations from any character of theirs. You’ll still see their other profiles in chat (we won’t indicate who those are).

We plan to improve these features and add more. A system for flagging posts or profiles is planned.

Roleplays have had a total redesign

Roleplays are the core of the site, and in the past few months, they have received some significant upgrades.

Thanks to rebuilding the code for the chat from scratch, messages are sent and received much, much faster than before, and we’ve wound up with a very different chat & roleplay client to what we had. Rebuilding the chat lays the foundation for a lot of cool features to come.

• New in-channel character switcher. Changing your character is now intuitive, fast, and easy. You can change profiles on the fly within a chat or roleplay, without affecting your active characters elsewhere. Your selection is remembered per channel on your device.
• New safeguards against losing posts. In particular, you can no longer connect to a roleplay as a character who can’t post there. If you’re attempting to do so, the character switcher will automatically open to let you pick a profile with permission to post in it, and won’t let you proceed until you pick one. (This means the switcher will usually open when you enter a whitelisted roleplay or a PM, unless you’ve already made a choice in the past which it will remember.)
• Block/inline layout. You can choose whether to display any roleplay with an inline (chat) layout, or a block (forum) layout. Chats use inline layout by default, roleplays use block layout. Your choice is remembered per channel on your device.
• Reading mode. You can now view all the posts of a roleplay in Reading Mode, which is optimized for...well, reading. Note: At this time, only IC (In Character) posts will show up in Reading Mode.
• Unlimited edits & live edit/deletion updates. Messages in chats and roleplays can now be edited or deleted, and these changes will be shown to users without needing to refresh the page. Edits are unlimited in quantity.
• User list updates. User List now shows the number of Active and Idle users. Active users have their name and avatar icon shown in a list. Idle users are listed in the count, but profile name and icons are not shown.
• Backlog scrolling and page scrolling modes. You can now choose if a roleplay/chat displays within a scrollable area or if the whole page stretches as new posts are made.
• Message spacing and font size. You can now choose your preferred level of the space between messages and the font size.
• New notification settings. Notification settings--sounds, toasts, whether the window title shows “New post!”, and whether or not they are triggered when the tab is focused--are now customizable for each individual roleplay and chat.
• Guests can see live updates. People who are not signed into the site can now view a roleplay and watch for updates to it.
• Named dice rolls (and other upgrades). Dice rolls can now be “named” through using quotation marks: 1d10 “attacks the evil goblin” will now behave like an emote, only with an embedded dice roll. Dice rolling also now works a little differently. More details will be added to the Help section soon. Leaving a roleplay no longer deletes all your posts from it. Roleplay and chat are now much faster.

The Front Page and Inbox have a new look

The front page has been updated so that the “more” links are brought into the header itself. That is, to view all feedback, you just click the larger “feedback” link, instead of the smaller, easier-to-miss “more” link underneath all of the recent items (which is now gone).

• Small inbox redesign. Your PMs and roleplays are side-by-side on desktop, and the display of both has been improved (next bullet points).
• Private messages in the inbox now indicate who posted last (you or them)
• List of roleplays now shows who posted last and when, number of people in the backlog, and total number of posts.
• Like the front page, the headings for the three Inbox sections (four if you count notifications) are now links to the rest of that information.

New Staff!

We have two new staff members - Grizzly Bear and Lich. These two people are helping me go through feedback and really get a sense of what things we need to work on – and just to keep tabs on the community itself.

I can’t, quite frankly, do it all on my own. I still have a strong interest in keeping a light staff, but I’m not the only one motivated to see this site be the best it can be, and part of that desire means accepting it’s probably not in the site’s best interest for me to even try to do it all.

Importantly, these two can also help to balance my sometimes strong opinions and ensure we really are what’s doing best for the site. All feedback is now accepted/rejected based on a unanimous vote, after as much discussion as necessary.

There will be a newspost to come that describes the responsibilities of these new staff members in greater detail.

Miscellaneous Updates

In addition to all the above improvements, there have been some other more subtle updates

• Paginated Search Results. You can now browse page after page of search results, rather than being limited to just the first 25.
• Updated the description of several traits and interests to be more intuitive.
• Removed and consolidated some too niche or confusing interests and traits.
• The community added a lot of new interests, canons, and some categories that were missing from traits.
• Lots and lots and lots of bug fixes.

The community managers will be listening out in the feedback section for further potential improvements to the descriptions (or names) of existing traits, interests, and canons.

That's all for now!

~WA

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