Waterfall Staff

Community Update

This will be a more text heavy update than the others because honestly, there's not a whole bunch interesting to show about most of it. Buttons are only interesting for so long.

Group Blog Overhaul

I got halfway through rebuilding group blogs when I realised there was a much easier way of doing things than emails with convoluted codes. Instead, group blogs are now managed entirely from within user settings, including accepting invites and leaving them.

Also, I added a few extra permissions since I figured if I'm going for granularity I might as well go all the way.

Badges Overhaul

There's been some new badges added, and I've completely redesigned the way badges work internally. What's staying the same is that blogs can have up to three.

The differences are that now, they're broken into categories. The initial idea was that badges can be used to display achievements of some kind, and, when BiNet pulled the shit they did, was extended to have the Bi flag as a fuck you to them. Then the rainbow pride flag was added, and it sort of snowballed into the 12 we have right now for various reasons. Anyone who looks at the option list and how it displays can probably guess that it wasn't intended to have so many badges as options. At the same time, I can't really get rid of them now they're there without upsetting people, so the obvious solution is going to be categories of badges.

This is split into two bigger categories - User Badges, and Blog Badges. User badges are stuff available at the user level - stuff like the pride badges, any patron badges, Doctor/Scientist, Exterminator etc etc. Blog badges will be locekd to that blog, and will be mostly sort of achievement related, as well as the Artist badge when the CM is re-added. There'll be a lot more to choose from, and also earn - and this time the page is actually designed to take it into account. Oh yeah, you can reorder them now too.

There's a lot of badges added for actually participating in the site, that sort of serve as achievements. They'll be awarded automatically without need for intervention from me.

Emoji

I realised I use emoji a lot on Discord, and that bleeds over into some of my shitposts on here as well. So I went ahead and added them, meaning that when the update hits, all your :sparkling_heart: stuff will show as the actual emoji. In fact, if you're reading this after the update, that should actually show as the emoji rather than text.

There's also a second component to this system. I've designed it to support custom emoji sets, meaning that, as you can see form the second one there, custom stuff can be added. This means that in addition to the inevitable Official Waterfall Emoji Set, individual artists can upload their own sets for the site to use - or, if I ever get off my hands at make it/figure out what licenses I need, the Patreon alternative I talked about building a while back can allow artist's patrons to get access to special subscriber only stuff for artists.

For now though, it'll be manually curated by me. I have a couple artists in mind who I'll approach soon about it (or you can offer in the Discord, if you feel brave), but the exact criteria I'll be using for now on which artists have custom sets uploaded is still in the air and will likely evolve as the site grows. Uploaded emoji (other than the patron stuff) will be usable by all users on the site.

EXPERIMENTAL - Chat

Been a long time coming, but I have a working prototype of a chat system. However, it's a little buggy right now, so if this makes it in, it'll be marked as experimental and opt-in. It currently supports one-on-one, and group chats with no defined maximum limit. More on this next time, but I wanted to mention it.

It's especially broken when I try it in the app prototype, so this might be someting pushed back to a future update.