Hello everyone!

Today we are proud to announce our latest round of new features and tweaks, assisted by the feedback and input you’ve given us though the ‘feedback’ button on the site. We’ve also finished a rough draft of the ‘commission’ system, and will be testing it out and gathering feedback with a carefully selected group of users. Of course, we’ll be collecting screenshots and preparing a few demos of how it works to show you all over the next few days. So far – it’s looking awesome!

Submissions Inbox & Notifications

Many users have contacted us about submissions, and how it’s not clear where you go to see your ‘submissions inbox’. As a result, we’ve reworked the “Activity Feed” page to relate more to “What’s New” – and give you a familiar Inbox-style way of keeping up to date on new content from those you follow in the Fandom.

You can now remove items from your “What’s New” feed, much like an inbox – which is great for keeping track of new art and working through it at your own pace. We have a bunch of tweaks in the works for making this aspect of the site better, including ‘select all/none’ options for categories, and numbers to show you how many items are new – and of course the familiar gallery view will still be available to see artwork from people you’re following (hint: click on ‘artwork’, then select ‘following’ from the menu)

A proper notification area of the site is coming soon, and will let you know of all activity that relates to your account (new followers, new comments on your work, new faves of your uploads, etc), together with useful statistics, like how many views each submission has. We are expecting great things!

Posts have been revamped

Posts (similar to Journals) have been revamped to include permalinks (so you can direct people to a specific post), can be set as adult, are now visible on their own pages, and are linked to from the “What’s New” feed. They’re now subject to content blocking settings, and can be easily filtered!

Tickets

You can now see tickets which you’ve sent to the moderation staff, and communicate directly with our moderation team in real-time, right from the Ticket inbox. This makes it easier to work towards resolutions with our staff, and to solve problems in minutes, rather than weeks or months!

Character Profile Tweaks

Character profiles have had their navigation updated to allow for more sections to be added in the future (Commissions!) and include submission counts on each tab. When there’s no content for a given tab, it’s hidden automatically – so it’ll only show ‘stories’, ‘multimedia’ etc if there’s something there!

We are working on some tweaks to the ‘bio’ fields shown on the left, and will be allowing far more customization, to let you show much more content (including icons of friends, and featured submissions). If you’ve already filled out this section, don’t worry – your bio info won’t disappear; it’ll be automatically moved across to the new format when these changes go live.

We’re really excited to see what you do with the bio section – there’s a lot of potential for really expressing yourself, as well as building a really cool looking profile, all within a tidy and easy-to-use interface. No more guessing what to put for ‘tagline’ and ‘bio’ – put whatever you like up!

How do I submit feedback or report a bug?

We continue to recieve a ton of great feedback about every aspect of the site – thank you all! As always, the best way to send in feature requests and bug reports is via the ‘feedback’ button, shown on the left of every page. This is by far the most useful way for us to collect data on what to fix; we always advise using this method to report things to do with the site, as it lets us categorize and sort them effectively to direct our efforts.

If you don’t see the little ‘Feedback’ button (or speech bubble with a camera icon on it), make sure that Adblock, NoScript, Ghostery etc are disabled in your browser. Similar plugins also block the feedback tool by default – so please double check to make sure it’s not being automatically hidden by your ad blocker of choice.

 

How do I request a beta key?

As always, you can request a Beta access key for the site from our homepage. Simply put in your email address, and we’ll send you an email in a day or two with your very own access key!

Full Changelog

• “My Feed” page has been renamed to “What’s New”
• Users now have the ability to remove items from What’s New, much like an inbox
• Coming Soon: number of items in the What’s New feed, notifications for new items, and count of items by category
• Posts are revamped to include permalinks for sharing, can be set as adult, are now viewable on their own pages and linked from the newsfeed, and can be blocked content settings.
• Users can now see tickets they’ve submitted to admin across the site and can communicate with admin directly through the ticket inbox
• An “up” button was added to gallery views on submissions pages for quick navigation back to where a user entered a gallery
• Character profiles have updated navigation to allow for more sections to be added in the future (commissions!) and include submission counts on tabs with tabs hidden when no content has been added by the character. Of note: Bio fields are still available in user profiles and will be migrated over with the addition of custom/key value fields in the next release. No one has lost their bio information, it’s just not currently being displayed until we have that functionality fully built out.
• Staff badges were added to user tickets
• Adult content is now being blocked on stories

Next Steps & Future Progress

Our development team is taking a well-earned break for the next two weeks, and will be back in action in the first week of January. We’ll be spending the holiday period getting feedback and collecting tweaks for the Commissions aspect of the site, as well as developing (and testing!) rules and a Code of Conduct for commissions. As a furry-specific commissioning system of this extent has not been done before, we want to make sure that it maintains our commitment to safety, confidence and security in buying and selling commissions. This will be a complex task, but is one we feel will be totally worthwhile!

Thank you everyone for your patience! It’s been a long road since we’ve started, but we’re confident that you’ll love the site more and more as we near our official launch.

-Varka and the Furry Network team