DEV Community: Philip How

Changelog: Updating the Stats Page

Philip How — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 14:55:22 +0000

We're working on several significant feature improvements here at DEV, including making the feed more relevant, empowering non-English speaking communities to thrive, and encouraging more discussion in comments.

However, these are all larger tasks, and it can take time to see progress in these areas. Determined to continue delivering more minor improvements to the community, we recently had a mini internal hackathon, looking at where we could improve our community in a single day.

Building up your audience in DEV is essential for aspiring authors who want to find their voice. However, it's not always clear who engages with your content most. Given this issue, we directed our attention to the <post>/stats page, which provides authors with critical data about how their post performs, including engagement over time and external sites pointing people to their content.

We've now updated this page to include a list of users who have reacted to their content. Likes and reactions are always private externally - I can't see that you've liked another author's post, but they provide vital feedback to authors on who is engaging with their content. These are sent as ephemeral notifications, but now this list is permanently accessible on each post's stats page.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent

To see it, click on the "Stats" link on a post in your dashboard or append /stats to any of your posts on DEV.

Do you have any more ideas for the stats page or want to know something specific about your audience? Let us know in the comments below!

DEV Community Contributor Spotlight: @joaogabriel55

Philip How — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:26:48 +0000

We like to (loudly!) remind everyone here that the DEV Community is powered by Forem, our community-driven open-source platform. Central to Forem's continuous improvement are the efforts of our dedicated volunteers and we like to highlight those who have gone above and beyond to help out and submit PRs to our repo.

This week, we want to highlight and thank @joaogabriel55, a member of our community whose contributions have been notably impactful.

Starting in January 2021, @joaogabriel55 has been consistently tackling issues ever since. Recently they have helped increase configurability for Forem admins, as seen in this pull request. In addition to this, @joaogabriel55 has addressed minor bugs and improved the user experience in areas like organization and podcast creation.

If you're interested in contributing or want to start tackling an issue, we encourage you to take the leap. Every contribution, big or small, helps in shaping our community. You can find more information about how to get started in our contributor's guide and explore open issues at dev.to/contribute.

A big thanks again to @joaogabriel55!

DEV Community Contributor Spotlight: @narender2031

Philip How — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:24:25 +0000

As many of you know, the DEV Community is used Forem, our community-driven open-source platform. This allows anyone to harness the power of an open community, and we've seen great examples of communities being set up for specific technologies, sports communities, gaming, and a lot more. Being an open-source project, we are indebted to the volunteers who step up to rectify bugs, enhance features, and augment the platform for everyone's benefit - especially those of us who log into DEV every day.

This week, a big thanks goes to community member @narender2031. Their remarkable contributions date back to March 2020. Most recently, they have introduced enhanced functionality to our organization pages and resolved multiple front-end issues.

The DEV Community has adapted and evolved a lot over the years - and we're excited to see that through all the changes, dedicated contributors are still giving up their time to our open-source project. Events like Hacktoberfest are great, but we're always open to contributions year-round!

If you're considering lending a hand or contributing to an issue, you're welcome to dive in! Our contributor's guide and the open issues available for contribution are at dev.to/contribute.

Community Contributor Spotlight: @ktmouk

Philip How — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 15:12:20 +0000

DEV is built on Forem, our open-source community platform, that’s available for anyone to use to help create their own community. As an open-source project, we rely on and greatly appreciate all of our volunteer contributors who take the time to fix bugs, implement features, and improve the platform for everyone.

This week, we’d like to thank community member @ktmouk especially, who has recently helped fix bugs with code block rendering, fixed a flaky cypress test, and improved the embed options for Stackblitz, along with other changes and fixes.

Without contributors like @ktmouk, we wouldn’t be able to address issues with the site so quickly, so thank you, @ktmouk again from all of the DEV team!

Thinking about helping out and contributing to an issue? You can find all of the details (including our issues open to contribution) over on our dev.to/contribute!

Changelog: Supporting Tag Moderators

Philip How — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Our Tag Moderators are part of our core community moderation team at DEV and play a super important role in ensuring that content on DEV is high quality and suitable for the tags they're moderating (plus a whole lot more!)

We want our tag moderators to be empowered and well-equipped when adding or removing tags on posts, which is why we've recently made some changes to the tag moderation section of our mod side panel.

Are you interested in becoming a tag moderator? Read all about it here. There's a submission form at the bottom of the post!

First, we've re-designed the moderate tags section of the mod side panel to be more straightforward and make it easier for tag moderators to see what tags they can and can't remove.

It's now easier for tag moderators to add or remove tags from a post

Secondly, we've made it easy for tag moderators to see the history of tags moderated on the post. If another tag moderator previously added or removed a tag you moderate to a post, you'll see it appear in the history section of the mod panel. You can see the entire panel as we only show the last two entries. Showing the moderation history allows tag moderators to discuss approaches to tag moderation in the super secret DEV Mod Discord (ssshhhh 🤫) before coming to an agreement on whether a tag should stay or go.

Tag moderators can now see the tag moderation history in the panel

Lastly, tag moderators were previously locked out from making any changes to a tag once one change had already been made (i.e., the tag was added or removed). We've removed this restriction, meaning tag moderators can re-add tags that were mistakenly removed or remove a tag that they or another tag moderator added.

We want to ensure our vital moderator volunteers are equipped with good tooling to make their valuable contributions as easy as possible. If you'd like to learn more about tag moderators or have any suggestions or improvements for tag moderation, please comment below.

A massive thank you to team members @rajatt, @dukegreene, and @ridhwana for implementing these fantastic changes for our tag moderators.

Changelog: DEV Community Bug Roundup - v1

Philip How — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Hey DEV Community!

Along with updating our platform to improve your DEV experience with new features, efficiency improvements, and design updates, we're committed to giving our community a smooth, bug-free experience.

Due to the complexity of the DEV platform (which is open-source, by the way), we're only sometimes able to get to these bugs as fast as we would like. But when we fix them, it's good to speak loudly about them to see our progress in these areas.

Did you come across a bug on DEV? You can log the issue directly on GitHub for us or reach out at yo@dev.to. We appreciate you letting us know when there's something not right about your experience on DEV. Fancy fixing an issue for the community? You can see a list of open, unassigned bugs for community contribution here.

That said, I'd like to recap the recent bugs that have been fixed.

Image Rotation Metadata

When you upload an image to DEV, we strip out all the metadata that could leak sensitive personal information about who took the photograph, where they were, and what kind of device they used. However, this metadata is sometimes required to tell us how to show the image, and one crucial attribute is the image's rotation, for example, when taken from a phone.

We've recently pushed a fix that ensures uploaded images retain the rotation metadata, ensuring they're always the right way up.

Special thanks to GitHub user jerinkc for submitting a successful PR for this fix!

Accessible Buttons in Notifications

Ensuring DEV is accessible for all users is essential, and we pride ourselves on our a11y setup here at DEV. Occasionally things slip through our testing and recently, we noticed that some of our buttons on the notifications page weren't accessible via the keyboard.

This issue has been fixed, and now all major elements and buttons on the /notifications page and a few other buttons on the site can be accessed via the keyboard.

Thanks to team member @ridhwana who fixed this issue!

Exiting Fullscreen Mode

GitHub user iamhoonjeong reported an issue that opening up full-screen mode within our code snippets/embeds was causing a problem when navigating back in their browser when trying to navigate through the site.

This issue was fixed through a PR submitted by a community member, and now pressing "back" when in full-screen mode will exit the full-screen view.

A big thank you to GitHub user zhangted who submitted a successful PR and also thankyou to iamhoonjeong for reporting the issue!

Homefeed Scroll Issue

Navigating through the homefeed is a great way to find great posts from community members based on your interests. It was frustrating; however, when navigating back to the homefeed, your existing position in the feed scroll was lost.

This issue was reported by Twitter user XenCodes, and we've recently fixed this to ensure you always go back to your previous position when hitting the back button.

A big thank you to team member @jaw6, who fixed this issue, and thanks to XenCodes for reporting the bug to us!

Disappearing Reaction Images

It's always interesting when a bug has been challenging to reproduce, and the solution has been eluding you for a while, and this happened to @peter, who kept returning to the homefeed to find the reactions images had disappeared. Peter then discovered this could be reliably reproduced using keyboard shortcuts, making the issue more curious!

A big thank you to team member @filleduchaos, who persisted with this issue and delivered a stellar fix that increases the stability and maintainability of our post reactions!

Suppressing Notifications for Blocked Users

User safety is another essential value here at DEV, and you should only want to see content and comments from users you want to see.

You can block users whose published posts and comments you no longer want to see on the platform. You can block a user by going to their profile, clicking on the three dots by the "Follow" button, and clicking on the "Block @username" option.

We recently fixed an issue where some thread replies from blocked users were still triggering notifications. We acted quickly on this issue as user safety is paramount to our community at DEV.

A big thank you to team member @dukegreene, who jumped on this issue and worked hard to get an initial version deployed ASAP!

And that's it! Thank you for reading this edition of the bug roundup. Please do let us know any bugs or issues you encounter on DEV!

Changelog: Tools for Organizations

Philip How — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:03:12 +0000

Organizations on DEV are a great way to represent an organization you are part of, whether a business, community group, publication, or special interest group. We want organizations to be first-class citizens on DEV and help them create content they can publish under one banner.

We've recently shipped some improvements to organizations I'd love to tell you about!

It's Now Easier to Create an Organization

We've made it easier to create an organization, meaning all you need to create an organization is a name, a username, and a profile image. As an organization admin, you can link to your Twitter, GitHub, and website, but you're no longer required to.

Organizations are a flexible tool to bring people together on DEV. Want to collaborate with some others on DEV to curate posts, rebrand your content, or start your own publication? You can do this with organizations and create them in your settings here.

A big thank you to GitHub user narender2031, who contributed to the UI work, and team member @dukegreene for working through the input validation

Add Co-authors to Your Posts

As an organization admin, you can now add co-authors to your posts on DEV. Adding co-authors is a fantastic way to credit joint posts, articles, tutorials, or write-ups that members of your organization co-write.

You can add a co-author by selecting the three dots next to your post on your dashboard

You can add up to 4 co-authors for your post. You can do so by heading to your dashboard making sure you have selected your organization in the selector. When clicking on the three-dot menu beside each post, you can add the co-authors by searching for their name or username in the co-authors field.

Co-authors show up at the top of a post on DEV

Co-authors appear at the top of the post but are still mainly attributed to the primary author. Let us know in the comments below if you'd like to see some improvements to how co-authors appear in articles.

Thank you to team member @jaw6, who added this feature for our organization admins!

Supercharge Your Organization With Pro Tools

Pro Tools is our advanced offering for analytics and advertising on DEV and runs via your organization. Pro Tools gives you free access to cutting-edge insights to better understand what developers are connecting with and advertising tools to lean in on the messages that are working.

Investigate the performance of your posts, enable unlimited CTAs on your own posts, or promote your content more widely on DEV using billboards. Pro Tools is easy to check out, and you can start promoting your content in a few minutes.

As we've recently decommissioned listings, we want billboards to be an effective tool for reaching the DEV Community!

That's it from our round-up of organization changes. Do you use an organization to post content on DEV and have suggestions for improvements? Let us know in the comments below!

Changelog: Take control of your feed with hidden tags

Philip How — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 15:10:34 +0000

Hey DEV Community!

DEV is an excellent place for encountering great content of all kinds: lively discussion posts, in-depth tutorials, engaging personal blogs, library updates, career advice, and a whole lot more.

It's this variety of content that makes DEV great, but it also poses a challenge in how our members can find the content that they want to see. That's why one of our focuses at DEV is to give community members more tools to help them find the content that interests them and help them connect with their community.

One key request from the community was a means of hiding content from their feed that they didn't want to see. Are you a backend developer who doesn't want to see any CSS posts? Well, now you can with our recently shipped hidden tags feature!

You can now set your hidden tags in two places: the tags page and over on your dashboard.

You can hide tags over on the tags page - use the search to find a specific tag you want to hide

You can also hide tags over on the "Following tags" section of your dashboard - press the three dots to access the hide option

Articles with tags you've hidden will no longer show up in your Relevant feed, and we're working on rolling out more areas of DEV where we'll hide the articles, too. We'll also be adding the hide button to the individual tag page, making it even easier to hide content you're not interested in.

Hidden tags are now shown on your dashboard, too, and you can access them at any time to unhide them to return articles with those tags to your feed.

You can see which tags you've hidden on your dashboard and unhide them

We want DEV (and Forem, the open-source community platform that powers DEV) to be as straightforward as possible for members to configure their profiles to optimize their experience - and that's why we've decided to retire our tag weightings feature to make room for hidden tags. We see hidden tags as a more helpful feature for users to tailor their feed experience, and we will review adding more powerful options to this area in the future.

As always, I'd love to hear any ideas, requests, or feedback you have on hidden tags or anything part of the DEV user experience. Feel free to comment below or email me at philip@forem.com.

A special thanks to @ridhwana and @jaw6 who implemented this feature!

Changelog: Don't forget to hit that notification bell

Philip How — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 22:35:07 +0000

👋 Hey all,

My name is Phil, and I’m Senior Product Manager at Forem, the folks behind the DEV Community. It’s great to be a part of such a vibrant and enthusiastic community and I’m really excited to bring some new features to the platform to help you all find great content and connect with other passionate DEVs from around the world.

We want DEV to be a great place for discussion, whether that be the latest front-end framework that you’re interested in, your favourite open-source repo you’ve contributed to, through to the intricacies (and dangers!) of using inline assembly. That’s why you can find great topics at #discuss and also on the thousands of great posts that hit your feed every week.

At DEV, you’ve always been able to stay up-to-date with the new comments on posts you want to keep track of, through post subscriptions, which you can activate using the subscribe button above the comment box.

I’m pleased to update everyone a new feature we’ve shipped to DEV - subscription indicators in /notifications. You can see them in action now by heading over to your notifications page.

These give you the option to subscribe to new articles that come through from users or organizations you follow, but also through any of your existing comment subscriptions - meaning you can easily unsubscribe from any article or thread that’s getting a bit too popular. This way you can never miss out on an interesting discussion on DEV, as it's happening.

We’re excited to bring new improvements to notifications, subscriptions and the feed over the next few weeks. So, stay tuned for more updates on #changelog!

I'm always open to any feedback or ideas. Let me know in the comments below, or send me an email at philip@forem.com - I'd love to hear from you!