All Notes view and some other stuff

Hi everybody,

Hope you’re having a great week! Per usual, there are a few things to talk about/announce today:

All Notes View

This was one of the most highly requested features that needed to be added to the new OD – and I’m excited today to announce that our Engineering team has completed an All Notes screen that will show you all of the notes you have received on your entries. The easiest way to get to this page is through a new item on the main menu – the second thing, right under Friends is Notes.

This takes you to a page in the Activity feed that is under your Profile, which will display all the notes that have been left on your entries, in most recent order. I think we can all appreciate having that in one place 🙂

We are also working on cleaning up the way notifications work – the notifications for notes and replies has been a bit confusing. Look for a release in the near future that will make a bit more sense out of the way notifications work, and where they take you.

Also, replies

In the original design of the site, we were hiding replies under notes, so that you had to click a link to show the replies. We thought that this would be a way to keep the site look and feel a little less cluttered (something we are constantly working on) – but after living with that for a few months it became obvious it is more of a pain than not. As of last night, we have made it so replies are shown by default when you are reading the entry and notes. You can still hide them if you want by clicking the link – but we think having it this way makes it much easier to follow the conversation.

Upping performance

Engineering has also been hard at work identifying slow spots in the system and boosting performance over the last week. Improvements have been made on the diary front page, user search, and a number of other places where we have been seeing slowness. The team has put in a number of improvements (including implementing Elasticsearch across the site, for the geeks in the crowd) to improve the performance of queries and searches.

On a site like this, keeping performance optimal is an ongoing project that we work at every week – if you notice slowness in the system, please let us know through the Contact Support link at the bottom of the page and include where and when you are seeing it so we can investigate.

Theme of the Week

I wanted to remind everybody that there is a new Themes diary that is posting all new Themes of the Week going forward. There was a new theme (#10) this week, just wanted to be sure everybody saw it. Make sure you friend the Themes diary so you will see updates from them. Also, feel free to leave suggestions for weekly Themes on that diary, thanks!

Spammers

Those of you who are on the site in the overnight or early morning hours (I’m talking in relation to the U.S. here) may have noticed there have been quite a few spam diaries trying to start up. We are being diligent about removing and blocking them, but this is a classic problem for sites like ours – how do you allow people to easily start diaries and post, while filtering out spam and ads?

The only real solution to this is human monitoring – we have already implemented software controls, but they are better at filtering out bots than at filtering out human spammers. So for now, feel free to report any that you see through the Contact Support link at the bottom of the page, and they will be removed. We will also be looking into adding a human monitor that can watch the site at the times that the staff here in the U.S. is sleeping 😴

Thanks!

We passed the first month of being “officially” open a couple days ago, I want to thank each and every one of you who have been here for our first month – it has been incredible seeing this site come back to life again. Seriously, we are just providing the tubes and wires – it is the community of this place that makes OD what it is, and it has been amazing to see all of you knitting this community back together.

I also want to thank all of our testers who were here for several months before that, making sure the site was going to be ready for prime time – you all provided an invaluable part of getting OD up and running again!