The Road to Beta Update

Hey everyone! Long time no see.

Not gonna bother with apologizing for the long delay between updates, mostly because I’ve apologized enough already on the Discord and other places. So instead I’m gonna hop straight into the changes for the “Road to Beta” update (1.0.0-alpha.10) and then detail the plans for 1.0.0-beta.1—the update planned for right after this one.

Patch Notes (1.0.0-alpha.10)

New Features

• The Offprint Guide—an all-new layout for the side-menu to enable quick access to things like content creation, reading history, settings, notifications, and (eventually) messages. It also helps a ton with keeping the navigation bar clutter down, so bonus points for that!
• Updated Works List—the Explore page now has a section to view works that have received updates. This was always in the cards but it wasn’t until recently that it became A Thing, so I hope y’all are glad it’s here now.
• Volumes—a brand new option for authors, Volumes introduces the ability to create named and themed subdivisions of your work for organizational purposes. Think of them as a lot like volumes for Manga or Light Novels: effectively organized parts of a far larger whole. This will help a lot for stories where sequels were often continuations of the same storyline, so they don’t need to create entirely new works and point people in that direction. Keep in mind, you can still create new works for sequels, but this just provides another option.
• Banner Art for Works—authors can now upload banner art for their works, which will be featured at the top of every work page, as well as on the work cards. I think they look great, so please make use of them as much as possible to make your work stand out from the crowd!
• Hiding/Showing Works—authors can now hide or show a work after it’s been published. This isn’t the same as reverting their work to a draft, as it does nothing to mess with the publishing state of the works themselves, but it does help when authors want to quickly take something down in order to provide corrections, or spruce things up a bit in private.
• Basic Formatting Options—readers can now choose what kind of font they want to read in. The selection right now is limited, and we also plan on adding stuff like choosing text size and high/low contrast modes and such, but that’s all coming in due time.
• Bookmark Sections—readers can now bookmark sections in order to come back to them later.
• Show What You’ve Read—Offprint will now detect whether you’ve read a section for the first time or not and show it to you on a work’s section list.
• Add Blogs to Your Favorites—readers can now add blogs to their Favorites list, and we surface this new info on all Blog cards and Blog pages.
• Reporting Activity—you can now file reports on users, blogs, works, and comments all throughout Offprint, and moderators/admins can see and take action on them. To be clear, this is still fairly limited, but the available tooling for moderators is only set to grow over time, so expect to see a variety of ways for us to keep Offprint a safe and fun environment for everyone.
• YouTube and Image Embeds—the editor has been extended to support embedding YouTube videos and images. Do note that this is still fairly limited, but we’re hoping to expand the things you can embed in the future.

Changes & Fixes

• Tons of fixes for mobile and small devices (with tons more on the way!) (much of this work was done by @SigmasonicX, so make sure to give him your thanks!)
• Form layouts for blogs and works, both for creating and editing, have been changed to provide more information for each individual thing
• Profile pages have been rearranged to provide clearer insight into all the info you’d wanna know about someone
• In fact, the style used throughout Offprint has been updated to be more modern and less cramped, while highlighting more information all at once.
• Search has been nerfed for now, but expect its full featureset to come back in the future
• Library and Feed have been split off from their former pages and have become dedicated outlets
• The “Home” page is no more, and instead we have the “Explore” page, giving a window into all the content on Offprint
• Dropdown menus have been added to Work and Blog cards in order to provide easier access to specific features on certain pages
• Genres are now tags we can add to the database, making it far easier to grow the amount of genres we can serve
• Our backend API has changed languages from NodeJS to Swift to provide a better and more performant experience when serving and updating content over our old API
• Our database has changed from MongoDB to PostgreSQL to provide a better and more performant experience when serving and updating content over our old database
• And a ton of other stuff that I can barely remember fixing

Other Items

• Our GitHub repository has changed! We’re still looking through all the stuff raised in the previous repository (located here), however we’re also now tracking issues filed on OffprintStudios/Sailfish—the new project home. So come check that out to see if something you’ve noticed has been talked about before.
• We’re also now fielding support requests and suggestions on our Discord server, in #the-suggestion-box, so if you have an account, come and join us!

The Road to Beta

This newly-released update, 1.0.0-alpha.10, is the last update until the Beta. Offprint is now considered feature-frozen until then as we work through all the issues and fix what needs to be fixed before we dive straight into the Open Beta. Anything not fully implemented by the time we’re ready to say “open the floodgates” will be either removed from Offprint entirely or given on-site placeholders until they’re added in post-Beta launch.

And to be clear, Offprint is only feature-frozen for now. There’s still tons of great things we’ve got in the pipeline once the Beta launches: Groups, Messages, Popularity, and lots more.

I personally do not expect this period to last more than a couple weeks. Between then and now, however, there’s still a lot to get done. I hope you’ll stick with us and blast Offprint out to all your friends and friends of friends so we can get the Open Beta rolling on a positive note!

Until then, catch you all on the flip side!

—Your friendly neighborhood existential crisis