Hey everyone! Excited to have another one of these posts. Welcome to Hexbear v0.7.60!

This update is more focused on delivering a better new user experience, as well as implementing some anti spam/bad actor measures.

Here's the overall changes for this go around:

  • Admins can now set a list of communities for new users to be autosubscribed to. We're hoping this makes the initial sign-on a bit less overwhelming: still giving a good sample of Hexbear overall while making curating your feed more manageable for a new user.
  • New emotes and taglines by @WhyEssEff - great as always
  • Ratelimiting was actually always implemented - unfortunately it wasn't fully applied to websocket requests. We've fixed this, as well as created a couple new ratelimit categories to be able to better target and limit spam.
  • New users are locked out from making comments or posts for five minutes after they've created an account. This helps slow down any spam attempts as well as gives mods a grace period to vet new users during attacks.
  • The previous /communities page has been deprecated and removed after months of being broken (and also the immediate redirect for new registrations :/). New users are instead sent to the main page, and any requests to /communities are instead sent to the main page with the community dropdown open.
  • We've blocked out any incoming websocket messages while the post listings are revalidating - this should solve the infinite loading issue (but I did say that last time, soo...)
  • Added a couple new words to the slur filter. Note that this doesn't work retroactively.
  • Some fixes to error handling by @StalinistApologist to more gracefully handle null errors (which creepily displayed as "Hello there!")

Thank you to everyone who has contributed their time into making this update what it is! If you're at all interested in contributing, be sure to check out !hexbear@hexbear.net, our Gitea, and our matrix channel, #hexbear-dev:chapo.chat.

Remember to post all feedback or bug reports either in !feedback@hexbear.net or in our Gitea. Viva la Hexbear!

(aaand I forgot to tag this release. I promise this is .60, just... don't look at the bottom of the page.)