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Release 74 - Notification filters, user rename, shout/PM controls, prefetch, PNG icons & more!

Seeing your response to Inktober and registering our 300,000th member has filled us with determination! This is the biggest release since our launch, bringing several long-requested features, and a host of lesser tweaks and upgrades designed to improve your experience. Without further ado…

Release 74 preview [Page 1] by Inkbunny
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Release 74 preview [Page 2] by Inkbunny
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Release 74 preview [Page 3] by Inkbunny
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Release 74 preview [Page 4] by Inkbunny
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Notification Filters

We've added per-watch and account-wide notification filters. Don't care about someone's streams? Like their art, hate their journals - or vice versa? Click "Watching" by their name and select appropriate options. If you really don't want to know, filter them site-wide, just like watches, comments or +favs.

Do you provide updates and offers through journals? Don't panic! Fans who're most receptive to such messages are least likely to disable them; and they'll still be on your user page. As for commissioners, they appreciate a personal touch – if you have something to tell them, a PM or email is best.

As for everyone else: before you enable site-wide filters, consider per-user filtering instead. You may find the ability to be selective rekindles your love of streams and journals!

Account Renaming

You can now change your own username. BBCode/@ mentions will be automatically adjusted, and access to your old profile will be redirected; if another member requests your old name, we'll consider it, but only after a reasonable time. You'll show up under member search for your old names, and they'll be displayed on your user page for a configurable time. You can also choose to notify your watchers.

Staff renames are included, though we haven't notified your watchers. Were you missed? Let us know.

Shout and PM Receipt

You can now disable receipt of shouts and private messages. It's your page: you have the power!

You can still send PMs with receipt disabled; a banner will prompt you to re-enable them if you want to get a reply. We plan to add the ability to restrict PMs to friends in a future release.

Performance and Infrastructure

This release focused on front-end performance: eliminating round-trips and useless fluff, while ensuring that what you do need reaches you as fast as possible… or before you ask for it! We also upgraded key content servers on the U.S. East Coast to reduce I/O load and latency, and cache more files.

* Added: We now prefetch screen files for multi-page/pooled submissions, and prerender the next page of paged lists/galleries and multi-page/pooled submissions (Chrome/Opera/IE11/Edge). 'Latest' is prerendered from the front page and notices. "Predict network actions"/"page prediction"/"prefetch" must be on, and it works best with pooled submissions (another reason to use "bulk-assign to pools").

* Reduced: ~15-20% less HTML served per page and ~5% saved by re-compressing site images. We eliminated unused script blocks, numerous comments, and unnecessary metadata and style tags. Common style/script files were merged and minified to speed delivery, especially outside Europe.

* Fixed: Browser caching of main-server content, including scripts/styles/images and private/hidden files/thumbnails. This speeds repeated access to such content, and decreases our main-server load… not that it was excessive, thanks to our cache network.

* Upgrade: Our Virginia cache now runs on SSD, reducing latency by ~80%. At peak this server handles over 100 requests a second – resulting in over 300 IOPS – and transfers over 100GB/day; not bad for 10¢/day! (We have a three-year contract, so we got the upgrade for free.)

* Upgrade: Our Quebec cache now has 1TB of disk space, up from 250GB; enough to cache every public file and thumbnail on Inkbunny. This virtually eliminates the 90ms hop across the Atlantic for other caches in the Americas. We filled up 50GB of that in just a week. Thanks again to Blu Paw Radio!

* Added: A Singapore cache to provide faster service to South East Asia. We'll deploy a VPS to serve originals to East Asia and Oceania in coming months. (We've also tested an ARM-based VPS.)

* Changed: Our caches now support HTTP/2 (plus its predecessor, SPDY), forward secrecy for Android 2.3+, and custom 2048-bit DHE parameters (test it). Means nothing to you? Don't worry. That's our job!

* Changed: Inkbunny's wiki has moved to our secondary server. It's faster and saves our donors ~$70/year, but for technical reasons, if you do not not have an IPv6 connection and you're using older browsers and platforms, you'll see a certificate warning. Modern browsers should work fine.

* Increase permitted number of open files on content caches to avoid delays during load.
* Ensure best content server is selected if the user's ideal or preferred option is unavailable.
* Don't serve the +fav/deletion scripts/variables to people who can't +fav or delete submissions/journals.
* Disable queries for defunct sales and basket actions.
* Precache +fav star flashing state.
* Turn watching into an asynchronous action, and set the watch script to load asynchronously.
* Move Piwik protocol-selection to PHP.
* Limit member search to 50,000 results. (Problem? Search for 'ab', 'de'. Coders: use sitemaps.)
* Optimized notification counts in notice emails.
* Improve database logging and speed cleanup of temporary search results.
* Be more selective about the columns returned for certain database queries.
* Drop unused database index on submissions table.
* Update main server kernel and RAID array firmware.
* Improve performance of permissions checks during sites upgrades.

Style and Functionality

* Added: PNG and JPEG usericons, including alpha-blending. Also, resizing for all icon formats has been upgraded with unsharp filters and a linear colourspace, and we avoid JPG icon re-compression if within size limits. Lastly, the maximum icon file size has been raised to 300KB. (Upload now!)

* Changed: Drop-shadows now work via style tags, not background images. These conform to the shape of transparent/translucent images, and significantly improve the size and rendering/scrolling performance of pages with large numbers of thumbnails and user icons, but you need a modern browser (e.g. Chrome 18+, Firefox 35+, Safari 6+, Opera 16+ or Edge) to see them. IE is faster without them.

* Changed: "Members" now shows 250 most-watched members with uploads in the last month (vs. 100 and three months). This helps a wider variety of members who regularly share work on Inkbunny. Use other sites, but wish to reach our members? Try tools such as FA to IB and Art Gallery Manager.

* Removed: Options relating to the sales system, including Collections and the Bookshelf. We loved it, too; but for most it resulted in needless delay. Need to retrieve a prior purchase? File a support ticket.

* Changed: 'Logout' has been moved to the account menu to stop people clicking it by accident, especially on mobile devices. (Yes, we know mobile could be improved elsewhere. :-)

* Changed: Date/time is shown in a 24-hour format with timezone; e.g. "12th January 2015, 4:05pm" is now "12 Jan 2015 16:05 AEST", while recent relative times are like "2 hrs, 16 mins ago", providing such information in a compact, consistent format. (Configure your local timezone.)

* Added: Single-IPv6 support for the IP range feature. This is useful if you use ranges to restrict access, and have a fixed IPv6 address (perhaps via a tunnel broker). Support for IPv6 ranges will be added in a later revision. We encourage you to test your IPv6 connectivity; we're not "going IPv6-only", but your configuration must work "as web sites enable IPv6".

* Added: New site mascots by [name]Deruu[/name] and [name]hybridkid[/name]. Hover over the mascot and click < > to see!

* Updated donation instructions; add Paym, TransferWise.
* Streamline submission process, update bulk upload/file restriction instructions, and link to upload apps.
* Remove alphabetical sort option for member lists; it remains the default when searching.
  Note: This has gone from watcher lists, too. We'll fix that. For now, change 'order=name'. Fixed in R75.
* Increase font size of owner options and submission +fav bar; add staff/donor icons and gallery/PM links.
* Invalid username mentions now just appear as plain text, not in red.
* Added Telegram as a contact type, and updated contact detail and social network icons.
* Removed outdated HTTPS status pictures from the login page and unused SSL description page.
* Extend checkbox clickability to grey area on all-journal/shouts lists.
* Use path-relative links on usernames for background credit in footer.
* Center-align and condense footer text. Remove redundant RTA link.
* Cut text instructing users to click for maximum size, redundant with tooltip.
* Simplify login/create account workflow.
* Standardize use of term "username" in UI.
* Add Drawpile and YouTube Live as stream options.
* Don't show page-count/curl for blocked submission placeholders.
* Don't show your own user donation links to yourself.
* Clear file picker when cancelling replacements on file editor page.
* Increase visibility of upload progress meter.
* Fix title on thumbnails showing updated ribbon and images with a larger version.
* Add sanity checks for image resizing software and rework PNG re-compression process
* Handle accessing the IP log of the guest user.
* Move content delivery servers to Misc section of account settings.
* Abbreviate allowed file types list and improve readability of restrictions.

Miscellaneous

These were mostly security upgrades, or things which didn't work quite right. They're fixed now!

* Fixed: Multiple timezone-related issues, especially switching to/from summer time. This was largely due to a mistake in selecting the data type used to store date/time values. The right time was stored, but the lack of a timezone when converted to a string caused several hard-to-track-down problems during the 'witching hour' - e.g. 'ever-new' streams. Should be better for next year!

* Fixed: Bulk-setting journals friends-only no longer results in 'ghost' journal notifications. Notification counts have been recalculated.

* Changed: Views are now incremented on view, rather than on load, using the Page Visbility API. This prevents our preloader and search bots from increasing the view count, among other issues.

* Disallow a potential route of session fixation by using PHP "strict mode".
* Improve sanitization of blocked keywords and artists.
* Fix display of pools page in 'wide' mode when there is no content in the pool.
* Rationalize use of date and multi-byte-safe functions.
* Return to the original page after deleting a shout.
* Update submission/journal changelogs to include friends-only/guest-block/comment-lock status.
* Force logout for staff with a blank or universal IP range.
* Automatically reassign tickets assigned to staff accounts upon demotion.
* Prohibit scheduled removal of guest and superuser accounts.
* Removed super-secret invisible shout box on shouts list.
* Fix journal/shout list footer if you just have one page.
* Avoid selecting journals and shouts for deletion if they have already been deleted.
* Improve IPv6 and GeoIP support for developers testing locally.
* Enforce well-formed IPv4 addresses in IP ranges.
* Make allowed ratings icon go to the right place if clicked.
* Adjust initial type of keyword ID in keywords table.
* Internally document opcache use and improve warning if APC is not correctly configured.
* Fixed Javascript error due to disabled sales feature.
* Fix deprecated new-by-reference in string parsing.
* Fix broken notification counters on IE8
* Miscellaneous spelling and grammar tweaks.

Whew! As always, if you notice anything amiss, please file a support ticket.

Fundraising

This will we brief, we promise…

* Added: No ads, intermissions, or sponsored surveys.

Thanks to our benefactors – including cache sponsors Bad Dragon and Blu Paw Radio – we won't have a donation drive this year. Why? You paid already. Have you seen our donor list? (We love you guys.)

There are plenty of members who deserve your money this holiday season. Go commission them!

Salmy
[icon]starling[/icon]
GreenReaper
Viewed: 2,975 times
Added: 8 years, 4 months ago
Site News Item: yes
Commenting Locked
 
Flygon
8 years, 4 months ago
This explains why the uploader unexplained changed as I was uploading the submission I'm about to submit! xP
PantyRanger
8 years, 4 months ago
bro bro bro bro. changing names? This is my fave site to post on art now.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Glad to hear it! Your icon got a free upgrade, too. :-)
PantyRanger
8 years, 4 months ago
OH SNAP! TRANSPARENCY!
I was a bit confused about it at first.
GondolianCorgi
8 years, 4 months ago
yay, now everyone is going to disable my journals because everyone else they watched annoys them with spam so now they will throw me in randomly with that bunch and discontinue the journals. which would have no point of continue to watch me but you know how others are
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
They could… or they could just disable journals for those who annoy them. It's their choice!
GondolianCorgi
8 years, 4 months ago
but the thing is they watch people alot, if it was just me they watched then it would be understandable. but since they watch alot of people they cannot remember me. so they just say eh and remove journals and submissions but still watch me, which leaves no point of continuing to watch after that. it happened to me on DA alot when people would reply to my pics but not my journals
chacumera
8 years, 4 months ago
Did you get the artist donation tabs working?  Or the digital store?  Or are those next?
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
We may offer additional donation options in the future. With respect to sales, for now we're most likely to go down the route of promoting "offers" rather than handling transactions. I can't give you a timescale for that, as it's a big feature which we've only sketched out, but it's definitely on our roadmap.
JeffyCottonbun
8 years, 4 months ago
You guys are amazing, as always~ <3
Harzy
8 years, 4 months ago
I feel like the mascot selection system could be improved a tad. We have quite a few at this point, and swapping through them all individually to find something new or an old favorite could be time consuming. Maybe a new page showing a full selection could be something you'd be interested in implementing? It's not needed, but it'd be a nifty quality of life upgrade.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Yep! That's a wishlist item for us, too - it just didn't have a high enough priority to get into this release.
Harzy
8 years, 4 months ago
Ah, alrighty! It's good to know that it's something that might eventually happen. Thanks! ^^
Zeikcied
8 years, 4 months ago
Oh, while we're talking about an easier way to choose a mascot, how about some sort of option to select specific mascot pics we like, and shuffle through only those?  I'd use the Randomize feature, as there are several I like, but there are also several I don't, and it would be nice to only see the ones I like. :)
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
We have this as part of the feature definition! It's had a long history in our issue database. :-D
Zeikcied
8 years, 4 months ago
So, I can create a list of my favorite mascots, and it will shuffle through them and only them?  I can't wait to have that implemented. ^_^
Hornybunny
8 years, 4 months ago
Pulls the pink bunny through the screen and hugs him. "I'll love him and hug him and call him George."
HydroFTT
8 years, 4 months ago
Fantastic additions, I particularly like being able to choose what notifications I receive from people I watch. As to anyone against being able to block journals, just think of it this way: is it better for people to be able to only see submissions or be un-watched completely? I've had to stop watching people (mostly on other sites) because of annoying journal spam. Plus I think most artists are already aware that a lot of people ignore journals anyway, but now that we can pick and choose maybe people will actually pay MORE attention to important journals. I'll just continue to advertise commissions via images either way though, haha.
Immelmann
8 years, 4 months ago
Being able to disable watch/fav notifications is pretty nifty.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Yeah, we know a few of our more-popular members tend to get bombarded with these. >_>
Nice to know people think well of your work, though!
kst3xh
8 years, 4 months ago
...did you guys just make an undertale reference? 0_o;
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Considering almost half of the Inktober submissions were Undertale references…
kst3xh
8 years, 4 months ago
frikkin A x3
Waccoon
8 years, 4 months ago
Fantastic work, guys!  While the tech bits will go over most peoples' heads, it's really cool to see that you release this information for anyone interested.  The notification filters are especially welcome.
Jessika
8 years, 4 months ago
really cool I love this site anyway you guys are awesome.♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
TanukiArts
8 years, 4 months ago
I love these updates.
Zahrah
8 years, 4 months ago
Looks good to me. I saw when the logout button disappeared. xD
Ya0iQueen
8 years, 4 months ago
Can't wait to change my name <3
TastesLikeGreen
8 years, 4 months ago
I can see why. :B
Salmy
8 years, 4 months ago
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Actually, that is their new name…
Salmy
8 years, 4 months ago
Damn xD
Blutcher
8 years, 4 months ago
Congrats on your 300,00th member :)
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Roll on 1,000,000 submissions! Not long now…
Floofy
8 years, 4 months ago
Well here's a (hopefully) future link to it :P
dmfalk
8 years, 4 months ago
" * Changed: Drop-shadows now work via style tags, not background images. These conform to the shape of transparent/translucent images, and significantly improve the size and rendering/scrolling performance of pages with large numbers of thumbnails and user icons, but you need a modern browser (e.g. Chrome 18+, Firefox 35+, Safari 6+, Opera 16+ or Edge) to see them. IE is faster without them.

This currently affects avatars and submissions, although submission thumbnail rendering (for those submissions or their thumbnails with transparencies) needs to be fixed eventually to reflect transparency. Otherwise, no more grey backgrounds on submissions with transparencies! Yes! ;) (ie:
[Request] Amy, Musical Mousie (by LittleMissFortunes) by dmfalk
)

d.m.f.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
We noticed a small number of PNG submissions have odd thumbnails or full versions late in the release process. This may be because a background colour was not set (we may use black if so), or because it's stripped (ImageMagick has a habit of not following our explicit instructions not to do that). I'll pass this on to the rest of the dev team! You could also try explicitly setting a background colour, or adding an opaque background layer.

Thumbnails are currently JPG, which don't support transparency. This may change in the future.
dmfalk
8 years, 4 months ago
I even tried resubmitting the source PNG as a replacement thumbnail, to see if it would be rerendered, to no avail. Once this issue with PNG transparencies in thumbnails is fixed, IB will go from a 12 to 15 out of 10 in my book, since it's the one thing I can think of that would improve the look and experience of gallery browsing, and truly tidy up quite a few submissions (GIF transparencies, too).

So far, IB keeps running circles around others... ;)

d.m.f.
QueenKami
8 years, 4 months ago
I like a lot of this stuff, especially now that my icon has no background. :D

Though I won't lie...I liked having the grey background on transparent images. With the white background and shadows it makes them look really blurry around the edges. I dunno I guess it's something could grow to like but at this point I don't think it looks very good on most things. (Like things with white. White becomes a grey color. Not like you could see it when you downloaded but at least with grey you can see it. xD )
But that's my only gripe and I know this is literally just now a thing and I might also be the only one who feels like it doesn't look too good. I do love the other changes to the site, you don't know how happy I was when I saw my icon looking like it does. :D
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
We're open to the possibility of removing the drop-shadow on images which we detect as having a transparent background, or all images. It's actually something we debated internally, but we wanted to push it out and see what people thought first. No sense in making a feature that nobody wants. :-)
dmfalk
8 years, 4 months ago
Suggestion: have it as a user option, for those who don't like the drop shadows.

d.m.f.
QueenKami
8 years, 4 months ago
"Suggestion: have it as a user option, for those who don't like the drop shadows." As dmfalk said that could be good.

But I totally get it, too. It doesn't look bad on some things, it looks cool. Other things, like some of the sketches I looked at, looked..odd. xD

In any case keep up the good work. ;)
dmfalk
8 years, 4 months ago
It, at least, is an improvement, and gets rid of those damn crosshairs in the shadow! :)

d.m.f.
Bitcoon
8 years, 4 months ago
I've been curious for a while, I use this extension on Chrome called Imagus, which lets me full-view an image by mousing over the link (basically it seems to pre-load the page and grab the image), but while it works on most sites including Deviantart and FA, it doesn't work here. (or Weasyl for that matter) I wouldn't expect the devs here to know how Imagus works (since they didn't develop it and all) but I'd like to ask on the off chance you know why it doesn't function properly here.

I'm not sure how popular image preview extensions are on art sites, but I personally find it speeds up browsing immensely. It's the only thing that makes FA's tiny thumbnails palatable. If you guys got it working on here without impacting performance, I'd love you for it~

Anyway, loving the update, keep it up~
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Can't say exactly what the problem is without knowing how Imagus works, but we do use hotlink protection to prevent bandwidth leeching. If, for example, it works by opening up an page on their website which embeds the full image, it won't work.

Of course, it could be something completely different, such as mis-detecting the image in question!
Bitcoon
8 years, 4 months ago
I'm guessing that's what causes it. FA doesn't have hotlink protection in my experience and DA is probably big enough that it's not really a concern. I'm not sure what flags an image for the extension to grab, but it also picks up whole albums if it's a link to multiple images on Imgur for example. Never seen it grab a wrong image, either.

I don't have much experience in web development so it's all wild guesses for me. I just often find thumbnails to be too small.
sansschema
8 years, 4 months ago
Hey there! You're not the first person I've encountered that has had this problem, so I threw together this journal entry that explains how to make Imagus function properly on FA, Inkbunny, Weasyl and SoFurry. I contacted the dev of Imagus a few months ago about this very topic and these are the instructions they gave me. Since then, Imagus has worked like a dream; I browse all these sites regularly with no problems.

Hope this helps!
Bitcoon
8 years, 4 months ago
Oh sweet, I didn't think this was possible! You just made this site a lot better for me~

And Weasyl, too. Their thumbnails are a good size but it's nice to be able to full-preview quickly because they still don't have a solution to people deciding to zoom their thumbnails way in.
Sn0wBunny
7 years, 10 months ago
Thanks~ This page isn't indexed very well though, took a bit to find this resolution.

Oh shoulda clicked first and saw it was deleted. :/
sansschema
7 years, 6 months ago
Gahhh, I'm really sorry about that! I totally forgot about linking that journal here when I nuked my account awhile back. I updated the instructions and posted them here on Pastebin if you're still interested.
Sn0wBunny
7 years ago
Super late reply but this is awesome and ty so much. Works wonderfully! <3
sansschema
7 years ago
Aw, no problemo. Oh! And I just added an entry with an updated rule for FA to reflect FA's most recent site-wide update. Just a heads up. :)
Sn0wBunny
6 years, 6 months ago
I hate to ask but Pastebin has now deleted this and I can't get Inkbunny to work with Imagus anymore... It took me /ages/ to relocate this comment chaing too.

So uhh... One more time, care to share those steps again? I'm going to archive it somewhere. >//<
Meiji
8 years, 4 months ago
Wow, in terms of community-based sites this is definitely one of the most receptive I've ever seen to the userbase. Even the little things like moving the logout button for mobile users are nice :P

Keep up the good work <3
Deruu
8 years, 4 months ago
Yay!! thanks a lot for the hard work~
Kristal
8 years, 4 months ago
Woah awesome! Keep up the good work!
Gennie
8 years, 4 months ago
Remember when FA tried to announce like a "filter annoying shit journals" option
Now Inkbunny did it before them, and made it so not only can you filter all annoying journals, you can also select specific artists to filter journals from.

Yet people don't like this site because of cub artwork :P Their loss really.
Kieba
8 years, 4 months ago
Yay, my mascot made it in!
Rainydays
8 years, 4 months ago
Kudos for providing these changes - I don't want to be the guy who leaves yet another "This site is better than ___" comment, but in the year I've been here Inkbunny has provided every feature I want on other sites. XD And more is still being added! Bravo.
dmfalk
8 years, 4 months ago
It doesn't stop! IT DOESN'T STOP!!! AAAAAAAaaaaaaH!!! :O

d.m.f.
(Yep, best keeps getting better- I ain't complainin'! ;) )
MorhlisDizzi
8 years, 4 months ago
You guys are the best ^^
FlopsPixel
8 years, 4 months ago
this update fills me with determination
Lando
8 years, 4 months ago
I refuse dropshadow!
JinxMcKenzie
8 years, 4 months ago
This will we brief
Norithics
8 years, 4 months ago
Very nice indeed!
KNIFE
8 years, 4 months ago
This site just keeps rocking harder and harder! :D
Thanks guys..you really ARE the best! :D
Gatoh
8 years, 4 months ago
FINALLY

THANKS SO MUCH IT GOT REALLT CONVENIENT N EFFICIENT
ZoePapillon
8 years, 4 months ago
this update = best update
Ketsa
8 years, 4 months ago
But it'd still be useful for me to do a winter gaming marathon donation drive, right? :3
Meowz
8 years, 4 months ago
Oh god thank you *so* much! Some people I watch spam journals several times a day (every day) like it's facebook or something, and while I think "more power to them", I can not finally have some lil' bit of power there, too! :D This will only affect *very* few people who I never talked much to, to begin with. But these few make up for 90% of the journals every day.
Malachyte
8 years, 4 months ago
Once again, this reminds me why IB is my favourite furry site.
R0zz
8 years, 4 months ago
Wow, that's awesome! What a huge list of changes!
KitSoone
8 years, 4 months ago
Yay, I can finally upload the animated GIF avatar I've spent four years trying to compress to acceptable size! XD

You lot never fail to impress me with your updates and dedication to the site. Cheers to you! Viva la Bunny! =D
TayFerret
8 years, 4 months ago
And to think that some people still use FurAffinity!
Roketsune
8 years, 4 months ago
Seems the quality of the staff and site continue to be unrivaled.
Xial
8 years, 4 months ago
If I could, I would ♥ this changelog.

Not only is it full of information, it's readable and understandable information.

Finally being able to upload an avatar that is not then force-changed to GIF is one big thing I like.
More granularity on various features (no shouts!) is beautiful, too.

Maybe in a future update, ePub downloads for stories would be hot, too. It's the only thing I can think of right now that I would like that Inkbunny lacks.
KaloTheSkunk
8 years, 4 months ago
Nice update. Thank you! <3
DeactivatedCharcoal
8 years, 4 months ago
DA got nothin´you you guys!
Shokuji
8 years, 4 months ago
" has filled us with determination
Nice Undertale reference. :p

" You can now change your own username. BBCode/@ mentions will be automatically adjusted
That will be nice, hopefully it won't be abused. Is there a limit to the number of times your user name can be changed within a certain time period?

" We plan to add the ability to restrict PMs to friends in a future release.
This will be useful. =)

" Our Virginia cache now runs on SSD, reducing latency by ~80%.
I'm glad IB is staying ahead of the curve.

" Added: PNG and JPEG usericons, including alpha-blending... the maximum icon file size has been raised to 300KB.
Brace yourselves for lots more animated icons. X3

" Changed: Drop-shadows now work via style tags, not background images.
Kudos on this, especially in combination with the previous addition.

" Changed: "Members" now shows 250 most-watched members with uploads in the last month (vs. 100 and three months).
It did seem like the same people were on that list most of the time. Thanks for making adjustments so more people are included.

" Added Telegram as a contact type
It's the best! =3

" Add sanity checks for image resizing software
Sanity checks? o.o;

Lots of updates, thanks for all the effort.

I have small feature request to make naming IB users easier on IB when you don't want their icon breaking up the text. Currently to make this happen you'll have to use the [name]username[/name] method which is cumbersome. Could a shorthand code be added for IB users that's similar to how people can link to FA/SF/DA/W users? Typing Username would be much more streamlined than typing out the bbcode or clicking the username icon.

Thanks!
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Renames can only be done once a month. We'll consider raising this figure if it appears to be abused.

Sanity checks are to ensure that the programs we rely on for certain functions can be accessed. We test these early when in debug mode and fail fast rather than have more confusing failures later on.

It does seem odd for it to be "harder" to link to an IB user on a single line than a user on another site. We could use "@ @ username" [with no spaces] but that would probably cause confusion, since FA chose to do it the other way around. Username would probably make most sense.
Shokuji
8 years, 4 months ago
" Username would probably make most sense.
Sounds good, looking forward to it being implemented. =3
KSimba
8 years, 4 months ago
What a massive update! Others can't compete. thanks!
Tbonedraws
8 years, 4 months ago
Seriously so good! I just love everything about the design of this website, it's so comfortable to use!
AquaVixen
8 years, 4 months ago
I really do sincerely hope that by supporting changing names, you will make it so random people browsing the site will be able to see all previous names a person has used and changed from. Otherwise we're going to have some nasty greifers and aholes doing bad things and then quickly changing names and no one will ever know who did anything.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
A member's page is "their space", and so they are not required to display their old names on it. There is an account setting to let you determine how long your names show up; the default is forever.

However, we automatically redirect to their new user page from links to the old one, display them when searching members for the old name, and update all @-mentions. (Indeed, we don't have a way of not doing that, since mentions are linked to user IDs now.)

Likewise, if someone comments/shouts and changes their name, any existing notifications will show their new name - it is based on the user ID, not the username.
AquaVixen
8 years, 4 months ago
That's at least some relief. I just wish there was some way to like, restrict people to only one account per computer, so people don't go making tons of random accounts and doing different things as different folks, but I think that's outside the scope of this.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
It gets tricky… there are legitimate reasons for multiple accounts to be using the same IP address, or even the same computer. But where there's an indication of abuse (e.g. user ban evasion), we do have the tools to help track such activity down!
CareBear
8 years, 4 months ago
Thank you for adding notification filtering.

I've never had a furry site respond to a feature request, so it's a pleasant surprise.

Edit: I noticed the filtering is just a checkbox for notification type.

That doesn't really fix the problem because now people will simply upload a JPG with the word "streaming" as the entire content and then put a link to the stream in the submission description like they do on that other furry art site.

What we need is the ability to filter submissions with regular expressions.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
" …now people will simply upload a JPG with the word "streaming" as the entire content…
That becomes a moderation issue, which you can talk to us about. (Or block their submissions - which you can do even if you don't watch them - and wait for journals asking why nobody +favs anymore…)

We do permit the upload of streaming artwork, as art. But it must meet the typical requirements, e.g. minimum keywords, ratings, etc. if you notice it being repeatedly uploaded and deleted, that might be a good time to give us a call.

Now, filtering with a regex - or a more user-friendly equivalent - might also be cool! But this issue seems like it calls for directly addressing the root of the problem: misuse of the submission system. Which is often people not knowing any better because other sites don't have stream announcements…
CareBear
8 years, 4 months ago
> this issue seems like it calls for directly addressing the root of the problem: misuse of the submission system.

I'm not sure I concur with that assessment.

I can spend all day firing off support tickets to complain about abuse of the submission system.

Then your support team can spend all day deciding if those users should be punished or not, and administering to that accord.

Or you can give me the tools to handle the problem myself and put the work back into my hands.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Giving you more tools require developing and testing the tools, which takes our time, too. :-)

More importantly, this is an issue which impacts everyone! Including the submitter, because they aren't using the site as effectively as they could. It's not a matter of personal preference, such as artistic taste - hence, it's an appropriate topic for a report.

We generally aren't focused on punishment - after all, we're all adults here. You have to be willfully doing something bad to get privileges withdrawn, and we can do granularly (i.e. if someone keeps posting bad submissions after being told not to, we may take their ability to post new ones away until they promise not to do that; but they can still comment, PM, etc.).
Trunchbull
8 years, 4 months ago
Really appreciating what you are doing with the site. a lot of the updates you made are sorely needed on FA, and to see you making them without having to wait a year for them to come, is quite exciting. =)
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Hopefully other furry sites will be encouraged to adopt similar features in the future! In particular, prefetching/prerendering can provide a significant benefit with relatively little cost, as long as you have spare server/bandwidth capacity. (We saw an increase of ~28% as implemented above.)
MaDrow
8 years, 4 months ago
Is there also a way to lookup which old artistname is changed to the current artistname?

Sometimes I find nice art of artists but it would be a pity if they aren't findable because they changed their name.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
You can do a member search, or @-mention them and it'll convert to the new one. Old links work, too.

If you meant "can you go from the new name to the old?", by default, they're on the user profile by the new name, but it's possible for each member to hide them.
MaDrow
8 years, 4 months ago
I see! |=(:3

But doesn't that mean that names couldn't be reused anymore by other members?
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Yes, and that is the current intent - to have it redirect forever. We may, in the future, change "forever" to "a specific period of time". We'll also consider support requests to take over an old name in individual cases, particularly where it is generic.
MaDrow
8 years, 4 months ago
OK |=(:3
ZheymrossBlu
8 years, 4 months ago
Gee, loads of updates! Sounds like awesome guys!

I guess now only need to get responsive for mobiles! :0
wunderhase
8 years, 4 months ago
thank you guys
Torahamukun
8 years, 4 months ago
The best upgrade that could have Inkbunny is to have versions in other languages, not just English.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
It would be nice. But we can't justify it at this point, given how many different languages we'd have to do and the fact that the software is not currently set up to serve anything but English. Sorry about that. You can always ask someone fluent in English to help, though, such as Spanish staffer Salmy!
MiaMon
8 years, 4 months ago
There are several gripes i had that you've just cleared up. Love the new journal filtering, it is so useful.

There's just a couple of things I'd like but these are more of a ridiculous request just on the hope that it might be possible rather than something practical.

If it is possible I'd like some sort of way of choosing to follow user's favorites instead of just their submissions. I know that's a stupid ask as some people favorite a lot and it would fill up quick but maybe just the last 12 like you see on their userpage. I know you can do that individually by looking at the page of each user but having a page showing several users at once like https://inkbunny.net/usersviewall.php does for recent submissions by a user would be nice. Not that I want to see the favorites of every user i watch but there are some users I look at specifically for favorites who never post any art. Even if it was just a two way option like watch for art OR watch for favorites it would be super handy.

The other thing I'd like is being able to filter my https://inkbunny.net/submissionsviewall.php by submission type e.g. picture/picture series/character sheet/audio/text, especially being able to filter out text from images. Some people I followed for their art but they also posted short stories, it may be a personal gripe but I'm dyslexic and so being able to just flick through the text separately and delete and short stories I won't read would be especially useful for me. Also sometimes I like to quickly flip through a bunch of single pics and other times I like to spend my time looking at longer pic series or reading character sheets through. Also filtering by G, M or A would be cool though I'm not sure how useful.

If you can't do it I'm totally fine with that also this site is already better than all my expectations. Keep doing what you do, you're amazing.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
I think you may be able to get some of what you want with creative use of an additional account and the text links at the top of the search page! (Which you possibly missed because they look like text, not links - something to fix for the future.)

In particular, favorites by members you watch already exists - as does suggested submissions, which helpfully excludes submissions you'd see anyway through your own watches. These links are also delivered regularly by email if you have that set up. Limiting it to specific watched people would be a bit trickier; you might do best to set up a separate account and watch just those members in a different browser, then use the above pages.

submissionsviewall.php is used to view all kinds of galleries on the site, but I'm guessing you're thinking of new submission notifications? It shouldn't be impossible to filter this; just a matter of doing it. Might be more useful for those with a large number of unread submissions. With rating filtering I think you could do it temporarily by setting user ratings except for the General rating (it took a while to to convince the development team that it was needed in search, too…).
MiaMon
8 years, 4 months ago
thanks I totally missed those at the top of the search page. That is so useful. I saw quick searches and assumed the rest was the same or some other search filter. D'oh.

Oh and 1 more thing that might be useful. There's a lot of TMI tuesday/ask me, 20 question meme, commission request, stream and shout out journals. If it's possible, would there be some way to separate out the journals in the notices section like by making it an option when making journals so these have their own section. like a filter and checkbox thing. I know people tend to put several things in one journal so not to clog up the notices and i'm not saying you should have to make a separate journal for each but maybe by having a checkbox you can fill when making the journal you could select multiple options for one entry. Then when you look in your notices you can quickly find them.
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Well, streams should be posted as stream announcements… are you looking for something in particular? For example, do you want to see the commission requests or offers, but not the regular journals?

We have been considering making 'offers' of various kinds be a separate type (possibly attached to submissions like character sheets are) which would work in a different way, just as streams work differently to journals, and be filterable in a similar manner.
SmusserD
8 years, 4 months ago
Thank you so much *-*

I have a question, how I can participate for mascot? OuO
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
Create a nice image of our mascot as interpreted by you that will work there (at whatever size works for you, but preferably as PNG on a transparent background), upload it, and drop us a support ticket!
SmusserD
8 years, 4 months ago
thank you so much :3
rAndoMCitIzen12
8 years, 4 months ago
I don't know if it's just my internet but I can't see anything; icons, arts, they don't load for some odd reason, and I use chrome. This started with the update
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
That's not this update specifically, but it may be a problem with your ISP's connection to your closest content server - someone else in your location reported an issue, too. We'll take a look!

Edit: That person reported that it fixed itself; hopefully this happened for you, too. :-)
DarkMacroMaster
8 years, 4 months ago
Wow! You guys rock! Only wish it was possible to get and InkBunny app.
kakurady
8 years, 4 months ago
Yay for transparent PNG icons! But why they can't be in indexed color?
GreenReaper
8 years, 4 months ago
ImageMagick is not a fan, at least with our current workflow. We decided that rather than bang our heads on it for a few more days we'd just tell you the situation and how to fix it for now.

The most likely issue is that downscaling the image causes it to have more than 256 colours, which IM used to deal with but now just barfs on. It's probably fixable, we didn't have time this release.

As a secondary consideration, IM really doesn't like/support alpha channels with indexed PNG.
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