New Design

The pearl of this release is the new design. A beautiful, convenient, modern design drawn by Andrey Kolykhalov — huge thanks to him for that! There’s no point in describing in detail how every page has changed. I’ll focus only on functionality that’s less noticeable to the naked eye, as well as on major internal rewrites.

Along with the new client design, the landing page on moera.org has also been redesigned.

Reactions. The reaction settings dialog has become simpler. By default, all reactions are accepted except those that the post author explicitly disabled. When you want to leave a reaction, you can choose any of the available ones — there’s no longer a need to explicitly enable them in Settings. First, a shortened list of the most popular reactions is shown, and the full list can be expanded by pressing a button (you can enable always showing the full list in Settings).

The reaction “Horror” has been added to the list of positive reactions. The “Hmm” reaction is now shown as a pensive face rather than a light bulb.

Negative reactions are ordered by popularity. The reactions “Cool down”, “Incorrect”, “Naive”, “Fake”, and “Go away” have been added.

Explore. An “Explore” page has been added, showing posts from across the entire network recommended by the search engine. On the same page there is a list of the most active blogs, the most popular posts, and the most active discussions. In the desktop version, they are shown to the right of the news feed. The information is taken directly from the search engine and is updated every 6 hours (not once a day as before). Moera Activity Blog has become history.

A new user, immediately after registration, will also see the list of the most active blogs and will be able to subscribe to them right away.

Your news feed is no longer shown to other users. It is quite individual (if not to say “intimate” 😉) and previously it was public only to help find new connections. Now there is a search engine and recommendations for that.

Editor

• You can still choose an avatar in the editor by clicking it. But the button in the corner of the avatar is no longer shown.
• 8) is no longer interpreted as an emoticon and won’t turn into 😊 — too many false positives. Use 8-).
• Keyboard shortcuts have been added for entering long dashes and nice quotes:
  • Ctrl-1 or Ctrl-- — short dash (–)
  • Ctrl-2 or Ctrl-Shift-- — long dash (—)
  • Ctrl-< and Ctrl-> — guillemets (« »)
  • Ctrl-Shift-< and Ctrl-Shift-> — curly quotes (“ ”)
    (there are two variants for dashes because different browsers have different free key combinations)
• Inserting an empty line in the visual editor is now considered the start of a new paragraph (previously these were different things, even though they looked almost the same). This does not apply to lists and code blocks.
• When inserting links, the editor now automatically removes parameters added by Facebook, Google, and others for ad campaign tracking. Only a clean link remains. (May be disabled in Settings.)
• Collapsible blocks (“Fold”) have been improved. You can now set the style of the block title: normal, bold, and headings of different levels. The large heading font is shown only when the block is expanded. (Thanks to @PinchasPolonsky for the idea.) Freezes when creating collapsible blocks have been fixed.
• Resolved an issue with highlighting links when they are pasted with some types of keyboards on Android.
• Fixed a bug that caused the post editor to get blocked if loading the draft list failed.
• Fixed a bug causing image upload progress in comments not being shown.

Other Changes

• The profile editor is now located in Settings.
• Fixed a bug where the “Back to top” button in the feed didn’t always work.
• The hamburger menu in the mobile version can now be opened and closed with a gesture.
• In the mobile version, you can now switch between multiple accounts, like on desktop.
• On login, logout, and user switching, the content is now fully reloaded.
• The bottom menu has a compact mode, which can be useful if your phone has a very small screen. Enabled in Settings.
• All password input fields now have a button to show the contents.
• Secret words at registration can now be printed immediately.
• If you invoke search from someone else’s blog page (in the mobile version — via the menu in the upper right corner), it immediately opens search within that blog. You can switch later if needed.
• You can now copy a link to a post/comment or share it directly from search results.
• When you tap a username in a blog header, the link to that blog is copied to the clipboard (mobile version only).
• It is now mandatory to confirm ownership of an e-mail address (enter the code that was sent) before any mail will be sent to it.
• E-mail confirmation and password recovery codes have been made more human-friendly.
• The number of login and password recovery attempts is limited. If you exceed the maximum number of attempts, you’ll have to wait before trying again.
• E-mails are now sent in the language selected by the user.
• When you open an image for full-screen viewing, you can tap it — and then all surrounding buttons disappear, leaving only the image.
• When you open an image for full-screen viewing, if there is text on the image and it is recognized, you can now copy it by pressing a special button.
• When copying the text of a post or comment to the clipboard via the “Copy text” menu item, it is copied in two variants: as plain text and as HTML with all formatting.
• The notifications list can now be opened in a new tab.
• Comment notifications are now shown above notifications about mentions in other people’s posts or comments.
• Fixed display issues on Safari on iOS when the client would suddenly stop fitting on the screen.
• Limited the number of recommendations added to the feed for those who rarely visit.

Technical

• Expanded the list of recognized search engines for statistics counting.
• Links in other people’s comments are now published with rel="nofollow" to combat spam.
• When creating link previews, relative image links are handled correctly (even though it’s not standard).
• The webmaster name and e-mail belong to the server as a whole, so they have been removed from Settings and moved to the server configuration file.
• The node now sends notifications about all public posts and comments via the IndexNow protocol to force indexing by search engines like Bing.
• Font Awesome icons have been replaced with Material. Only a few icons remain that didn’t have a good replacement. Icons are now inserted directly from SVG files without a special library. The same was done for the logo.
• The internal structure of the complex and confusing navigation system in the client has been completely redesigned. Now everything is much simpler and more reliable.
• Fixed a memory leak in web workers.
• Added the ability for developers to run the client on a local machine with SSL enabled.
• When the node makes HTTP requests, it now sends User-Agent: Moera node/<version>.
• Removed the registration interface built into the node. If needed, it is recommended to use moera-tools.
• Added the externalSourceUri field for posts, intended to store the address of the source from which the post was taken. It will be useful for scripts that copy posts from other networks, to determine which post in Moera corresponds to which post in the source network.
• Bootstrap is now built from sources during the node build process. A separate mechanism has been added to build the frontend for the Web UI.
• Improved thread distribution among tasks.