Moera node & client 0.11.0-beta2

Beta release

• Automatically purge old post/comment revisions, notifications and newsfeed stories.
• KaTeX support in Web UI.
• Fixed paste of text with tags into rich text editor. Correctly set newlines and paragraphs in a text copied from Facebook.

Moera node & client 0.11.0-beta1

Beta release

• Navigation by name (in the top-left corner) now tries to search the name case-insensitively, if an exact match is not found.
• Privileged settings that only provider can change.
• Inserting math expressions (using KaTeX package).
• Preserve formatting tags when pasting into Markdown/HTML editor.
• Option to choose how user names should be shown: nickname only, full name only or both.
• Better algorithm for cutting text for post preview in a feed.

Moera node & client 0.11.0-beta0

Beta release

• Display user-defined full names instead of nicks.
• Upgraded profile with blog title and bio.
• User name popup showing detailed information about the blog.
• When entering a user name, suggestions appear from the list of your subscriptions and the current discussion participants.

Moera node & client 0.10.1

Changes

• Tags <video> and <audio> and embeds from Rumble and Spotify are now allowed.
• Newsfeed is now shown when a signed in user opens the mobile client or web.moera.org.
• After user clicks the "bell" icon, push notifications are now removed from all devices.
• ... and many bugfixes.

Moera node & client 0.10.0

New features

Standalone client. Now it is possible to use Moera without installing the browser add-on. Just visit web.moera.org. While I still recommend to install the add-on, in some situations it is impossible. Besides that, the standalone client simplifies the sign-on process for newbies. If you install the add-on later, the standalone client will detect and utilize it.

If someone views your blog without a client, there is now a button "View in Web Client" on every page that activates viewing through web.moera.org.

Simplified sign-on. Creation of a blog in Moera is now done from a client and takes only one step: user enters the name and the password she wants. After that, domain creation, name registration and connection are done automatically. In the dialog it is possible to choose a provider (for now, only one exists - moera.blog). Domain creation UI at moera.blog has been turned off. web.moera.org becomes a center of sign-on for newbie users.

Mobile. You can now access Moera on a mobile device using the standalone client at web.moera.org. The user interface was fixed in many places, where it looked badly on a small screen or worked incorrectly on touch screens. Select "Add to Home Screen" from the browser's menu to add Moera icon to the main screen of your phone or tablet. Android users may install the Moera client from the Google Play store.

Push notifications. On a desktop or mobile device it is possible to turn on push notifications, that will be shown when the Moera client is closed. Press the "bell" icon in the top-right corner of the screen and select "Enable Push" at the bottom of the drop-down list. Note that the browser will ask you again whether you really want to allow push notifications.

New formatting

Smileys. Smileys like :-) or <3 are now converted to emojis on input. I've done my best to include every smiley found in various lists. Long smileys :-)))) and :-((((( are also supported. Put \ in front of a smiley to leave it as it is (for example, \:-) will stay just :-)) or you can switch smiley conversion off completely in Settings.

• Markdown is now allowed inside <details> tag. Thanks @eliduvid for proposal.
• Embedding videos from YouTube, Vimeo and PeerTube, and also posts from LiveJournal and Facebook is now allowed.

Smaller changes

• Quick tips are now shown on the first login. Click the "question mark" icon in the menu to view them again.
• When someone answers to an author's comment under his own post, he now receives only one notification.
• User will receive a notification, if her home node failed to sign and send her reaction or comment.
• The list of notifications is now preloaded to appear faster after clicking a "bell".
• Solved a problem that sometimes led to creation of a shortened variant of a post, when it is not needed.
• When a shortened variant of a post is created, preformatted text formatting is not broken anymore. Thanks @eliduvid for report.
• When pages existing only in a client (the Settings page, for example) are viewed without a client, they do not return an error anymore. A stub page recommending to open a client is now shown instead. Thanks @eliduvid for report.
• Menu item "Change date/time..." is removed from the posts in the News feed. Thanks @akovalenko for proposal.
• Improved name cache utilization on the client.
• It is now possible to use either node URL or its name in the "Connect" dialog.
• Middle-click is now handled correctly where it wasn't before.
• There is "Subscribe" button in user's profile also. Thanks @tigra for proposal.
• Emojis are now shown correctly in post titles and comment reply quotes. Thanks @eliduvid for report.
• Added buttons to quickly jump to the beginning or to the end of the loaded part of the comments feed.
• Text is now copied with emojis in it, if any.
• Fixed crash after entering an incorrect date. Thanks @Malka for report.
• "Home" icon is now displayed in front of the current node name (in the top-left corner) if you are on your home node at this moment. The "home" icon in the top-right corner is now highlighted only if you are on your Timeline.
• moera-node now creates two logfiles: a regular one and a debug one.
• Notification subsystem is made more responsive.
• Names are now registered faster.
• API requests are now cancelled by timeout and retried.
• IP-address of the server may be set in the configuration file with node.address parameter. Fixed a bug that caused resolving of _default_ subdomain. Thanks @akovalenko for testing.
• The scope of cartes used for authentication in a communication between nodes is now limited to a single node. Thanks @akovalenko for noting the problem.
• Only one revision of a post or a comment is loaded now for signature validation. No need to load all revisions anymore.
• Changed parameters that configure multi-domain support in moera-node.
• Removed moment.js dependency, making the client 5% smaller.

Moera node & client 0.9.0

New features

Comments. It is now possible to add comments to posts in Moera. All tags and Markdown formatting allowed in posts is allowed in comments too. Long comments are collapsed - click the comment to expand it or to collapse it again. Comment authors may edit or delete their comments, post authors may delete comments to their posts. Reactions may be added to comments just like they are added to posts.

User may reply to someone else's comment by clicking "Reply" button under it. In this case the name of the author and several words from the beginning of the replied comment will appear before the new comment. Hover these words with your mouse and wait for a second - full text of the replied comment will be shown in a popup.

Further clicks of "Reply" button will just add a mention of comment author to the text of the new comment. If some text is selected on the page when "Reply" button is clicked, it will be added to the new comment as a quote.

Users receive notifications when they are mentioned in a comment or somebody replies to their comment. User may subscribe to any post (using its menu) to receive notifications when somebody comments to it. When you comment to a post, you are automatically subscribed to it, use menu of the post to unsubscribe.

Comments are shown in Web UI as well as in the client. In Web UI, if there are many comments, the comment feed is split into pages. In the client you can navigate a long comment feed using "Load future comments" and "Load past comments" links. To the right of these links you can see how many comments are there and which of them are shown. You can use "fast forward" and "fast backward" buttons to quickly move to the first and to the last comment respectively. Or you can click the number of comments to load them all.

You can use the menu of a comment to get the direct link to the comment. Comment's date is also linked to it. When opening a comment by direct link, the comment is emphasized with a dashed border.

Comments to the posts in your newsfeed are not stored on your node, they are loaded from the post author's node when you view them.

New formatting

• Subscript. Write H~2~O to get H₂O or use <sub> tag.
• Strikethrough. Write ~~don't mind~~ to get don't mind or use <strike> tag.
• Spoiler. Write ||her farther killed her|| - the text is hidden and revealed by click. Or use <mr-spoiler> tag for this. Tag also allows to set arbitrary text for spoiler warning: write <mr-spoiler title="be careful!">not really...</mr-spoiler>. Thanks @eliduvid for implementation.
• Videos. It is now allowed to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and PeerTube in posts and comments. Thanks @mvadik for proposal.
• Text alignment. It is now allowed to set text-align style for <p> tag.
• <a "target=_blank"> is now allowed in posts in Web UI.
• <details> tag is now allowed in both client and Web UI.

Smaller changes

• Automatically limit visible dimensions of posts and comments and embedded images and videos in posts and comments, so they do not cross feed boundaries and do not need horizontal scrolling. Images and videos in post previews are made even smaller, so they do not take too much space in the feed.
• Mentions are now correctly parsed when the name contains various special characters. Thanks @eliduvid for implementation.
• Number of positive and negative reactions is highlighted by green and red background respectively.
• Client is now loaded only on pages that have text/plain MIME-type. This is made to avoid possibility that some scripts in the page may affect the client. This also makes the client loading faster. Thanks @eliduvid for notice and the fix.
• Limit number of post revisions that are loaded at once when fetching a post for the newsfeed, to lower memory usage. Thanks @Alla for testing.
• Added a setting for changing feed width in Web UI. Thanks @Alla for proposal.
• Node URL is now updated when registered name of the node is prolonged.
• Subdomain creation date/time is now stored in the database.
• HTML in posts and comments is now sanitized before being displayed in Web UI.
• You now may click at any place in "Continue Reading" line.

Moera node & client 0.8.0

New features

Newsfeed. "NEWS" item in the main menu opens a new feed that collects posts from all feeds your node is subscribed to. To subscribe, click "Subscribe" button at the top of somebody's Timeline. At that moment, the latest 20 posts from this Timeline are automatically added to your Newsfeed. After that, all new posts published there are downloaded by your node and displayed in your Newsfeed. If the author updates a post, the changes will appear in the Newsfeed as well. Reactions you make to the post at the Newsfeed are sent to the original post, and all reactions made by others are visible in your Newsfeed.

For now, all newsfeeds are public, so you can read anybody's newsfeed. But this will be made optional in the future.

Click the "newspaper" icon in the top right corner of the page to quickly open your Newsfeed from any place. The icon also shows the number of posts in the Newsfeed that you haven't read yet.

Click "PEOPLE" in the main menu to open a page with all the information about the nodes you are connected with. For now, it contains two tabs: "Subscribers" - the nodes subscribed to your Timeline and "Subscriptions" - the nodes you have subscribed to. This page also appears in Web UI (viewable without Moera client). You will get a notification, when somebody subscribes to your Timeline or cancels the subscription.

If you're interested in details how the Newsfeed is working, I recommend to read the overview. An important thing worth noting is that your node caches the content of your Newsfeed, just like Google caches every page it finds. Your Newsfeed contains a copy of the original post. Note the "repost" icon near the name of the author of every post in the Newfeed. It means that the post you are viewing is a copy. Click the icon to open the original post. If you hold the cursor for a second over the icon, a popup will appear with details about how the post has come to you.

As a consequence, you can freely delete or pin posts in your Newsfeed - this does not affect the original post at the author's node, of course. And, just like with Google's cache, the copy of a deleted post is still somewhere on your node (not visible in the UI yet). In perspective, the UI will allow you to save a copy of any post on your choice.

Smaller changes

• Node software now requires Java 11 or later to run.
• If a node fails to deliver a notification, it will retry for some period of time, even after node restart.
• The client UI is now correctly resized on mobile.
• Extra newlines are not added between list items in citations.
• Post title limit is increased to 80 characters.
• Automatically resize images in posts to fit the feed width (works on Firefox 75+ and Chrome 79+).
• Fixed error appeared when clicking some notifications.
• Added "Copy link" item to post's menu - it copies the link to the post to the Clipboard.
• Added a new reaction: "Hot".
• Replaced triangle characters in "Top" and "Bottom" buttons, because they are not visible on some phones.
• Better clipping of draft preview text in "Drafts" button in the post composer.
• Fixed error message displayed after the first connection to a node, when the node does not have a name yet.
• Several "Re:" prefixes on reply are grouped together as "Re:[2]" and so on.