1.0.0 Release

Hi everyone, it's been just about a year since our last update. In that time I have done some small bugfixes here and there, but haven't made any big changes that warranted release notes. Today, I do have a major update to announce, an I'm calling it version 1.0.0, rather than sticking with our previous version scheme. The biggest change you'll see is a sweeping overhaul of the frontend. This is because we migrated away from Bootstrap and to Tailwind CSS. This change was made to make the frontend more maintainable and to make it easier to add new features in the future. I really hope you like the new look! I aimed to make things mostly 1:1 but there are noticable changes, in particular I cleaned up some areas I felt weren't up to par. We've also migrated our front end from Javascript to Typescript, which has fixed potentially hundreds of bugs in the process.

Since the front end has been overhauled so thoroughly, there may be some gaps in experience that I missed - I would love to hear your feedback! Please reach out if you encounter unexpected bugs or you feel something doesn't look good.

As the site has grown over the past year, so have our costs. We've been able to keep the site running through a combination of our generous patrons and the ads we show on the site. You may notice that I've tweaked the ads, including adding a small video ad in the corner. To be transparent, this is to help improve ad revenue to keep up with our rising costs that have been scaling faster than our patron support. I hope you understand and I hope the ads aren't too intrusive.

Recently, you may have also noticed a sharp uptick on spam on the site. There are some mitigations I've added, included captchas on registration and on creating cubes. This has helped a lot, but there is still some spam that gets through. I've been collaborating with some other web admins who are also experiencing the same issues, and will be continuing to work on mitigations to prevent spam coming through.

We've also decided to stop using our Twitter page, and instead you can follow our Bluesky account for updates regarding the site.

There is a very long list of bugs fixed by myself and our community of developers who have graciously contributed to the site. I won't list them all here this time, but I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the site in the past year. I really appreciate all the help and support you've given us.