I am excited that Winter is nearly over, looking forward to Spring, and love that we just set clocks ahead for more daylight in the evenings! I wanted to check in and provide some of the updates that happened over the last quarter including a few new features and bug fixes that were released.
There were a couple of fairly significant upgrades, the first being the core activity system that is responsible for tracking actions and effectively awarding reputation/badges was swapped out for something completely different. This required quite a bit of reworking of code: 128 files changed, 3314 insertions(+), 4026 deletions(-). It should allow future work to be easier as the event/listener system is simpler and more straightforward with these changes. While quite a bit of work went into this, it's more behind the scenes and nothing that anybody would notice since the end functionality for users is the same.
The next feature worth mentioning is that the edit system is now fully implemented. While the editing capability was on the list of privileges, the functionality was not fully implemented, so it could not be used before. However, at this time it should now fully work. To be able to start editing posts you will first need the Edit With Confirmations privilege which can be obtained with 800 reputation. Once you have that when you click on the gear icon on any post you will see some additional actions for either editing the title (if the first post of a thread), or editing the post itself.
Any changes that you make will go into a peer-reviewed queue and once two others agree with your change (that makes 3 total counting yourself), then the edit will be made permanent and you will be awarded reputation for your contributions. Unlike some of the other ways to earn reputation that provides a fixed amount of points, the reputation earned from editing will vary depending on how much of the content you improved. The current maximum amount awarded for improving a single post on Ozzu is 10 points.
Once you earn the privilege Suggested Edits Review Queue then you will have the ability to review other edits:
Winter's Full List of Changes
- Created a system to allow suggested edits to be queued for review #2127
- Fix cookie expiration tests failing due to upcoming leap year #2246
- Fixed searching tags that don't reshow once no results are found #2245
- Created the network diagram for ozzu #2198
- Increased flag cap from 10 to 15 for review queue limits #2236
- Converted old style model attributes to new style #2238
- Removed no longer needed old Activity Model and relation for Rep #2202
- Updated structured data for threads and posts to include dateModified and datePublished #2235
- Replaced activity recording and separated from reputation system #2202
- Fixed the Twitter link on the about page to no longer go through a 301 redirect #2223
- Updated classifier in BounceHandler for new RBL rejection notices #2220
Some upcoming work scheduled for the next quarter includes upgrading to Laravel 10, optimizing page speed times (particularly the home page as its slower than I would like), implementing a native chat-based area on Ozzu and removing telegram, and finally having the tag review system fully implemented so that users with sufficient privileges can suggest and create new tags that can be used on posts.
