Today's Updates - October 11th

Hey folks,

Below are release notes for the upcoming October 11 release, including a bevy of changes made in the October 3rd release which we hadn't previously mentioned. Tomorrow will be our last regularly scheduled release for the month. Skipping release is going to allow for a double-length cycle of QA work on the next release, which includes a mountain of backend changes required to get the mobile version of the platform up and running. A summary of improvements and fixes from this release is below:

Features and Improvements

Thread Image Viewer

Also known as "thread galleries", this new feature will be gradually turned on for folks in the hours following the release rollout tomorrow. If you've ever looked at a thread with lots of images, and said "boy, I wish I could view just the images, but still be able to reply when I want to", you'll like this! Clicking an image in a thread will open an overlay and show the full size image as it always has, however, you'll now see some additional options in the overlay for navigating all of the other images in that particular thread. You can cycle through images in the order they were posted, restrict your viewing to only images from a particular user, view all images from the thread in a gallery, etc - we expect this will be a very popular feature for worklogs of various types. Take a look!




Advanced Search in Threads

When you're viewing a thread, the "search this thread" control will now expose more options:

1. keyword search, of course, but also
2. username of the user posting
3. date range of posts
4. sort by: recency/relevancy

This brings search within threads to parity with our site's advanced search feature. You can of course use all of the criteria together, searching for posts containing keyword "Sony" by user "Chipp" posted "Yesterday."


(yes, there are social sharing buttons in this image - no, we do not and will not be using them - the screenshot is from a QA build of the platform)

Email Opt-In Now Visible to Users
Occasionally, we'd find that users would accidentally opt themselves out of email communications from us and wonder why they'd stopped receiving mail. The email opt-in controls are now exposed to users on your profile settings page, allowing you to see and control exactly what you've opted in to receive and opted out of, able to be changed at any time.

Popular Albums Widget Update
We've updated the Popular Albums widget (displayed on the galleries portal page) to now sort by recent traffic, rather than all-time views. This will allow albums to "trend" to the top, and thus reflect a more dynamic list of what's popular in the galleries.

Re-Embed Recent Images

Many people have asked for the ability to embed images from their albums into the forums. This is the first iteration of such a feature. We've added a section to the image embed dialog that allows you to re-embed a recently uploaded image. Basically, if you recently:

• Uploaded an image to an album
• Uploaded an image to be embedded
• Embedded an image by URL

Those images will be shown in the dialog for you to re-embed. Clicking the More... button will display a dialog where you can browse a larger selection of your recently added photos. Of course, using the dialog, you can select multiple images to be re-embedded.




Bugs and Fixes

• 8682 - Expired infractions will now show up as expired when viewing a user's admin information.
• 10244 - Moving a PM into the same folder twice will no longer cause the message to utterly disappear.
• 10471 - Removing the height attribute from an embedded image should no longer cause it to disappear (previously, this had been setting the height to 0, which cannot be detected by the human eye, eve on a Retina Macbook Pro).
• 10488 - Sponsor pages now perform better. A fix was made to their activity stream.
• 10530 - Some count inconsistencies with Own/Want/Had lists have been ironed out.
• 7151 - You might notice that a number of galleries URLs are now shorter and cleaner. We've done a pass of URL optimization for SEO. This should be invisible, and all historically published URLs should redirect.
• 10432 - In a few cases we were still exposing photosets that had been deleted. When clicked, these resulted in an error. This has been resolved.
• 10456 - All Albums are now required to have a name
• 10488 - Improved performance of activity stream on brand pages
• 10339 - Fixed spurious reviews and articles showing up on sponsor page activity feeds
• 10408 - Fixed embedding images in PMs when PMing a user from their profile page/postbit
• 10449 - Can add borders to images in articles without affecting the display of the image