New features

Link previews. When you insert a link into the text of a post or comment, a special panel appears below it: an image, a title, and a brief description of what the link leads to. In Moera, a post/comment can have several links with previews. A post/comment can have both attached images and link previews at the same time. You can choose which links to show previews for (using the "Links" button under the editor), delete previews (click the cross in the upper right corner) and edit the preview text (click the pencil there).

Access permissions. Access permissions support has been added everywhere possible. The full extent of possibilities can only be seen through the API, because a UI with all of these features would look like a cockpit. Now it is possible to limit access to almost everything, including individual reactions. Upper-level users (admins, post authors, and comment authors) can override access permissions defined by subordinates and limit their ability to limit possibilities 😉

Access categories: everybody, registered users only, subscriptions only, friends (see below), a particular group of friends, only me.

What can be tuned:

• Visibility of a post.
• Visibility of comments, including hiding them completely.
• Limiting the circle of people who can add comments, up to disabling comments.
• Hiding/unhiding comments one-by-one - can be made by both comment's author and post's author.
• It is possible for post's author to hide all comments automatically and reveal them later one-by-one or all at once.
• Switch all reactions on/off, or only negative ones.
• Visibility of the e-mail address in the profile.
• Hiding/showing the lists of subscribers, subscriptions, friends, banned users etc. completely or one-by-one - can be made by both blog's owner and the subscriber.

Friends. Made possible to add other users to friends and to create groups of friends. It means you are able to write "friends only" posts or you can enable commenting to friends or to a group of friends only etc. Friends and groups of friends may be visible to you, to the members of the group or to everybody else. Also it is now possible to write posts "only for those who I'm subscribed to" and to assign other permissions to them.

Subscription button now allows not only to subscribe, but also to add to friends and to choose groups of friends. And a separate menu item was added there: ask a user to subscribe to you or to add you to his/her friends. It is possible to attach a short message to the request. Notifications have been also upgraded: now there are buttons in notifications about you have been subscribed to, added to friends or asked about something. These buttons allow to subscribe back or add to friends immediately.

People page has been rewritten. It now contains lists of friends, groups of friends and those who added you to friends. Icons next to the name show that the friendship is mutual or that the subscriber is your friend etc. Advanced management tools are shown to those who have more than 12 subscriptions or friends. They allow to find a person by name, select several persons and perform an operation on them: subscribe/unsubscribe, friend/unfriend, change their groups of friends. People are now arranged in the list in the order of closeness to you - those you interact with more often are displayed first. But there is a button to order them alphabetically.

Ban. Now it is possible to prohibit a particular user from adding comments to your posts, to prohibit from adding reactions to your posts, to hide comments by this user in all discussions (including discussions in blogs of others) or all of this together. The ban may be limited to a particular period of time or be permanent. The ban may be related to a particular post (i.e. it is possible to remove a user from one specific discussion) or to all of your posts. To kick a user from a specific discussion, open the menu of some of his comments. To ban a user globally, press the friend/subscribe button. The banned user will be notified about this.

The list of banned and those who banned you is shown on the People page. This list is public by default, but you can hide it. You can add a message to the ban, to explain the reason of the ban. This message will be sent to the banned and will be shown on the People page.

"Show hidden buttons" button allows to reveal the comments of the users hidden by you at any moment.

Sheriffs is a voluntary moderation mechanism in the decentralized network. If you allow the sheriff to moderate your blog, he will be able to see all your posts (except the ones visible to you only) and mark the posts or comments that, as he thinks, violate the rules. For now, there is only one sheriff in the Moera network - the one enforcing the rules of Google Play. This is required by Google as a condition to allow the Moera application to Google Play application store. The blogs not allowing sheriff to moderate them will not be shown in the Moera application installed from Google Play. Posts and comments marked by the sheriff will also be hidden. But outside the application - when accessing Moera through a browser or any other application - all these blogs, posts and comments will be accessible.

Any user of the application may complain to the sheriff about violation of the rules by any post or comment. All complaints are public by default. The user may ask not to show his complaint to others, in this case the complaint will be hidden till the sheriff's decision. All further hiding of the complaint is at the discretion of the sheriff, but, in most of the cases, the sheriff will leave the complaint public.

Rearranged Settings. Settings arranged into groups, laid out in convenient order etc. For numeric settings, the allowed range is shown. Added caching of settings on the client and binding some settings to a particular device or device type (desktop/mobile).

Translation to other languages. Added UI localization mechanism and added translations to Russian, Ukrainian and Polish (partially, thanks Tigra). If you wish to take part in other translations or to make corrections, you are welcome at: https://app.tolgee.io/projects/1120 User's gender (if defined) is now taken into account when formatting messages. The default language is figured out automatically from browser settings and may be changed on Settings page or when signing up.

Internal mechanism of subscriptions is rewritten. Two concepts are now separate: "user's subscriptions" - those the user asked for and controls directly, and "machine's subscriptions" - those are part of interactions between nodes and not visible to the user. This separation allows to extend user's abilities: for example, to subscribe to updates of a post - the user will receive notifications when the post was edited. But this feature was not added to the UI yet.

Now you can also unfollow comments to your own post.

Lists of users. Any node may keep lists of users, and all other nodes can read these lists, search in them and subscribe to them to receive notifications about changes. The lists may be used, for example, to fight spam or to create decentralized communities. The sheriff uses such a list to inform all nodes that some specific user violates the rules too often, and because of that all his comments should be marked by the sheriff's mark automatically.

Plugins (add-ons). Plugin is a web application that connects to a Moera server (at server level or at particular node level). It differs from a script in that, in addition to performing regular operations, it can receive notifications from the server about various events (comment added, post updated etc.), can extend server API and have settings.

Server-level plugins require the root secret for authentication, so only server owner may run them. Node-level plugins may be added by any user on their node - they need to generate an authentication token and pass it to the plugin or to the script. There is now an UI on the Settings page for this.

Smaller changes

• Allowed to embed <iframe> from codepen.io.
• Allowed to embed images from gifer.com and giphy.com.
• Long titles of posts are truncated when displayed in the feed.
• Titles in Hebrew/Arabic are now right-aligned.
• Special icons have been added when a post or comment is briefly mentioned in notifications: "chain" - link, "scroll" - quote, "picture" - image, "camera" - video.
• Improved automatic detection of image formats and rotation - fixed nasty bugs at image loading and when an avatar is cut (thanks to Oleksandr Pushkar and @edjekora).
• Possibility to hide posts from viewing without a client, possibility to deny indexing of posts by search engines (thanks to @zera for the idea).
• Pasting images from the clipboard (thanks to Eliyahu Duvidzon for the implementation).
• When returning from a post to the feed, a small part of the feed is now shown above the post (thanks to Дракониха for the proposal).
• When viewing a gallery, a message is now shown when moving from the last image in the gallery back to the first one (thanks to Дракониха for the proposal).
• Added REST API documentation in OpenAPI format. It is located at /moera/api-docs. At /moera/api-ui.html you can see it in a more user-friendly form.
• Provider can now receive mails about registration of new users.
• Provider can now subscribe all new users to some blog.
• Click on Moera logo in the top-left corner now opens your Newsfeed (thanks Orbb_1974 for the proposal).
• Added new "Tired" reaction.
• Context menu of a post is now located at the bottom of the post also.