Developer update May 2019

The community has spoken about how important transparency is to us. In the spirit of that I am going to try and post a quarterly developer update to let you all know about the progress on PaperDemon.com and what's coming.

Note that there's other work being done such as creating content/videos, marketing and growing the community, running challenges, etc that is not captured here.

Work completed

Things completed since our last developer update in December.

NOTE: there are things listed below that have been completed but are not yet live on the PaperDemon site. All the things listed here should be live within the next few weeks.

Features

  • gaining experience points for participating in art challenges

  • easily toggle between a users red curtain and non-adult artwork

  • promo features so I can easily update the banner at the top PaperDemon with important community event stuff. Thanks Woozle for this one!

  • Linking to our community wiki content from the PaperDemon site main menu.

Blogs feature progress

Progress on backend improvements to blogs feature. This is not yet accessible to you. It's a behind the scenes thing.

Little itty bitty fixes

Lot's of misc bugs and UI fixes. Some of these are submitted but not yet deployed

  • Remember me feature finally fixed. You have no idea how happy this one makes me.

  • Slowness of loading on the PaperDemon homepage

  • easier access to the challenges XP dashboard in the user menu

  • improvements to the art comment box

  • users who don't have an avatar can still access the menu

  • making the filter button visible when viewing an art that filtered

  • fixing artwork so it's viewable if you have an ad blocker

Code cleanup

Woozle removed a lot of features that were going unused like the polls and site chat feature. There is also various updates to the code to make it easier to maintain.

There's still a lot of work to be done in this area that will be coming later this year.

Wiki

We started a wiki. I'll post another blog post about why we started a wiki but one of the reasons is because it's difficult to keep page content on PaperDemon.com up-to-date without having to do a deployment. For example things like the site rules, about PaperDemon, etc. It's really time-consuming to get content updated and isn't easily editable by others. So it made sense to move a lot of it to the wiki.

Upcoming development work

This is work that will likely span the next four months at least.

Lots of spam

We're getting constantly bombarded with spam accounts and I have to spend time each week cleaning it up. I'd like to pause development on other features and build some tools to make it easier for me to find spam and more quickly delete it as well as prevent it. If anyone has suggestions on how to prevent spam being posted, please reply here or post to #suggestion-box in the discord server. I'm thinking we might have to do something that prevents new users from posting links at all anywhere for a certain period of time or until they reach a certain XP level.

Megasubmission proposal

I have this idea to make PaperDemon easier to maintain while still providing the rich feature set it has. The basic idea is to make art comics writing and blogs all one type of thing. My next step is to come up with a proposal that clearly explains this idea and share that with the community to get feedback.

Blogs feature

Finish migrating the blog feature to new frontend/backend. I'd like to drastically improve the feature set for blogs but can't do that until I migrate it.

Improve art submission flow

I think there's too much friction in the art submission process so I'd like to simplify it. In particular at like to replace the galleries feature with tags. The purpose of tags and galleries is nearly identical so it makes sense to consolidate to just tags.

This is a complex task given that our filtering system is dependent upon galleries so it will take multiple months.

More code deletion

There are more features that are still not use that need to be removed like the groups feature

More itty bitty changes

We've got a pretty big backlog of bugs. I'll spend some time knocking out the ones that are most annoying or quickest to fix. I'll also make little usability and accessibility improvements along the way.

Convertkit integration

So that we can improve the new user experience I'll be integrating PaperDemon.com with our email list better so that when a user signs up they immediately can start getting emails that help them with their account.

What do you think? I'd love your input if you have any suggestions or questions.