New notification settings page

It's been a little while since we last shared a changelog entry, but we've been busy! There are a couple of new features and some smaller updates that may have gone under the radar. We've also squashed a tonne of bugs.

Let's start with notifications

We hate getting notifications for things we don't care about, things that cause unnecessary distractions. We think there's a better way of staying in touch, so we're rolling out the first version of email notifications.

You can now opt-in to two new emails:

• "Notifications digest" is a weekly email sent every Friday with up to ten of your most recent unread notifications. Have nothing to see? We won't send the email. You can also choose the time of day you'd prefer to be emailed; in the morning, afternoon/noon, or evening.

• "Updates and announcements" is a more ad-hoc email with updates, much like this one, and announcements related to Refrakt. These will likely be sent out monthly. Some months there may be more, but we won't send more than one in a week.

You can turn these on from your notification settings.

It can be pretty hard to stay updated since Refrakt is web-only for now, but we hope these new emails hit the right spot without being overwhelming. We'll be adding more types of opt-in emails over time, and we'd love to hear what you think about them.

All about discussion

We've also shipped improvements to discussions and comments. You can finally contribute to discussions on Series! Since we launched Series, the only way to talk about them was to comment on each post individually. Now you can let people know what you think about the entire series directly which is so much better.

Discussion prompts have had a little makeover. If you add one to your post or series, it will now be displayed directly under the description to highlight you're open to discussion. This should help spark more conversations, and we've loved reading prompts that have been added already.

The last thing about comments is they're now threaded! You can reply directly to a comment. Previously you could only mention someone else, but this small UX improvement should make following conversations a lot easier.

Coming up

There are some things we're building that aren't quite ready yet too. We've made some good progress on the Collectives feature, a way to create a space with others to collaborate on feeds, discuss specific topics etc. Collectives will be a little bare bones to start with, and we may keep them to Refrakt Official spaces while we test them out, but we're excited about where they could go.

We're also continuing work on Subscriptions, but it needs some more internal testing before it's ready to be enabled. We'll share updates later.

That's it for now. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback. We want to make sure we're building the right thing. A nice place on the internet to hang out, talk shop, and share your lovely images.

Improvements

• A new tagline: "A more meaningful home for photography".

• A whole new icon suite that feels more aligned with the Refrakt branding (the brand still needs some work, so if you know a brand designer, send them our way).

• The Series create and edit screens are now more streamlined and easier to use.

• Made the comment text box easier to use on mobile devices.

• Notifications have been simplified in design and should be faster to load too.

• Notifications now deep link to the content e.g. clicking a comment link takes you directly to the comment with a little highlight.

• Shiny new footer with more helpful links.

• Added a proper sitemap for better SEO on profiles and posts.

• More options for reporting abusive content on posts, comments, etc.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where some posts wouldn't show in the equipment feeds.

• Fixed a bug that prevented saving when editing a post with no tags.

• Fixed a bug where bottom sheet items didn't open in a new tab correctly.

• Fixed a bug that would set the wrong publish date when saving a series.

• Fixed popular tags not being calculated correctly on the Discover page.

• Fixed a bug that would let you create an incomplete film stock.

• Fixed a bug where you would get a notification if you replied to your own comment.

• Fixed a bug that would prevent deleting comments.

• Fixed a bug where social preview images would fail to generate for specific posts.

• Fixed a bug where hidden posts would show in the series preview stack.