Officially released Patchwork 3.8!

Download here: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/releases/tag/v3.8.6

There have been pre-releases floating around for the last few months, but finally releasing this officially! Here is a summary of what has changed since the last official release (3.7.1):

Blocking

There is now a "Block" button on each person's profile. If you click this, you will no longer see this person's posts. You will also be instructing others not to replicate your feed with this person so they shouldn't receive any more of your posts.

There is also now a warning on profiles when someone you follow blocks them.

2-degree replication (down from 3)

Initial sync is faster, and random strangers can now no longer message you. To see someone's messages, you now have to follow someone that follows them.

If a friend of yours replies to a message by someone that you can't see, a "missing message" placeholder will show. If they are using Patchwork 3.8 or higher, the placeholder will tell you who the message is from. It will also hint at who you should follow in order to see the message.

This is still a bit work-in-progress, and will be much improved shortly with "out-of-order" message support coming soon!

Profile / External Link Previews

Hover over someone's name to view information about why you are seeing their posts and whether they are likely to be able to see your replies. You will also be able to see their public key!

There is also now an icon next to the message header when you follow the author of the post.

Your Profile is no longer a free-for-all

In previous versions, anyone could assign a nickname or image to a person and it would appear on their profile. Now people will only see nicknames and images added by people that they or the profile actually follow.

You can now choose not see content in channels that you don't follow

In previous versions, if you follow someone, you see all of their posts in all channels in your main feed. There is now an option under "More > Settings" to "Only include posts from subscribed channels".

You will still see when your friends subscribe to channels and the list of active channels in the sidebar. You can also view "More > Extended Network" if you wanna take a peak at all posts in all channels.

Other changes

• hashtags are now included in active channels
• added "Send Private Message" shortcut on profiles
• smarter Emoji Auto-complete
• posts tagged with channels you subscribe to now show in your public feed (including if someone replies to a message with a tag you follow)
• likes no longer bump messages on any view
• posts that are taller than 1500px are compressed down with "See more"
• posts referenced on a profile by other people (liked, replied to) now show compacted to only 200px high with "See more" button
• more translations
• pending updates now reflects actual messages in view
• highlighted new messages are now preserved after refreshing if you hadn't scrolled to them yet
• "view full thread" now scrolls to the top of the most recent posts
• added font size selector under More > Settings

With any luck, I haven't broken anything last minute in this release

I kinda botched this release cycle up pretty bad by trying to get it too polished before releasing it. Then we had to keep hacking on more stuff, and then something in 3.7 broke and had to release it anyway.

Whatever, it's here now! It's not perfect, but it is much better than the last official release.

My plan going forward is daily pre-release builds (nightlies) when there have been changes to the code, and then weekly (or so) official releases.

Missing Translations

There are also still a bunch of missing translation strings. Thought I'd push this out now, and then do another release once those get updated.

Anyone is welcome to add new languages (as pull requests) or update the existing translations! Check out this thread for some (outdate, but sort of helpful) information: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/issues/654

Sorry @marina that it took so long to finally push this out officially. Hopefully the post above is helpful, but feel free to ask more questions

Exciting stuff @matt!

@musicmatze

Correct! But this is the first of the 3.8.x releases that wasn't marked "pre-release" on GitHub, so that means people running older versions will finally get the "New Version Available" notification.

Like I said, it was a total botch of a release

Thanks a lot for the release @Matt McKegg , patchwork is my main user agent for scuttlebutt <3 <3 <3

Quick question: on windows 10, I don't seem to have an about dialog showing me which version I am running. Is there a way to check? Would a PR to display that as a label on the settings screen be useful?

@SoapDog

I'm pretty sure you can press Alt to bring up the file menu and then select Help > About.

Would a PR to display that as a label on the settings screen be useful?

Yes I think it would since that file menu is not particularly easy to find!

@Matt McKegg

There is no About item on Windows 10, the learn more item takes me to the Electron page. The about item is not present on the other menus either.

I will prepare the PR

@SoapDog

OH no! So I guess you can't. Yes please

If you want, you could also try and put an about dialog in for windows (and remove the electron Learn More)

@Matt McKegg ,

I just sent a quick PR with a new information section on the settings screen that displays the version. Since I am new to electron and this codebase, I avoided changing the menus to remove the default electron learn more item but I will try to work on that at another time. In the meanwhile, this PR might be useful beyond windows as people running things on Linux might want it too.