Hi everyone! It's been a while since one of these posts but we're finally marking the release of Hexbear 0.7.59!

I'll go over the new features in this release, and then I also have a tentative roadmap afterwards.

• Bugfixes hiding comms from the front page: A month ago or so we rolled out a feature to hide certain communities from /all, unless you're already subscribed to them. This has been a great compromise for comms like !strugglesession. However, there were a few edge cases when viewing comments and posts from those communities in user pages and elsewhere. We've resolved most of these cases with this release.
• Bugfixes after the rewrite of the front page: Rewriting the front page has given us a lot faster website while keeping the codebase up-to-date with idiomatic React. We've ironed out a couple cases where the list of posts or comments could fail to load under certain circumstances.
• Return post and comment counts: A couple months back, we moved to using a safer UserView to make it easier for us to send over sanitized user information. Accidentally, we also sanitized the number of posts and comments a user has - this has been fixed in this release.
• Username Scrubbing: We've had a couple cases where wreckers have registered usernames that are profane or that doxx others. We've added the ability for moderators to scrub the username while mass-removing an account. The account will still exist, but under a different, safer name.
• Removing banned user list from GetSite: Vanilla Lemmy sends over all of the banned users of the site through the GetSite endpoint, which is requested on every page load. As a larger site that gets targeted often, you might expect this list to be very, very long. We've removed this portion of GetSite which should increase loadtimes when GetSite isn't cached dramatically.
• NEW EMOTES: holy shit we have over 1k emotes now. Additionally many have been optimized or turned into SVGs which should make them both quicker to download as well as scale better if you have a high DPI display. Thank you to @WhyEssEff for putting this together as well as anyone else who has submitted emotes.

And now a tentative Roadmap.

Short-term:

• More bugfixes: Casually using the site there are still a couple things that aren't working quite right. These are being cleaned up.
• Keyword Filtering: Another comrade was working on this for a while, but in the finishing stages the progress stalled out. Our plan is to finish up this feature.

Longer term:

• Watermarking: We had an implementation of this a while ago, but unfortunately the image backend we used went through a massive update and our code was obsolete. This is still a priority for us, and we've been working on this off and on.
• Redesign: There are areas of the site that haven't really kept up visually with the feature progress we've made. We have a couple designs in their early stages that we're fleshing out - we'll keep yall in the loop if we're seriously considering using one.
• Rewrite: Many parts of our backend and frontend fall into a couple "bad practices" or are generally not idiomatic Rust/Typescript. This is a long and tedious process but we're working through correcting these.

A lot of us have been super busy over the last month or two which is why there haven't been as many updates to Hexbear as of late. I know my schedule is clearing up, and a lot of us have had more time to be more active. Expect more releases like this in the future.

If you have any issues or suggestions please head over to !feedback@hexbear.net. Viva la Hexbear!