Release 2026-07-05

Two batches of work shipped since the last post without a writeup of their own. A small one on the 31st of January was just some extra anti-bot geo-blocking. The bigger one, version 2026.05.17, included a couple of security fixes (one in how search results and post titles are displayed, and one that let icons get attached to someone else's gallery without permission), a fix for tags splitting across pages when printing [thanks miniBill!], and some link/dropdown text clarity fixes, on top of the usual pile of dependency bumps. Everything below is what's shipped since then.

Features and fixes

• Opening a permalink to a reply no longer silently advances your unread position past content you haven't actually read. You'll instead get a notice explaining what happened, with a link back to where you actually left off and a "Mark as read up to here" option if you did want to jump ahead.
• Post search now tells you when common words ("stop words") get dropped from your query, and falls back to substring matching automatically when everything gets pruned. There's also a new "Exact string match" checkbox to force substring matching for short or common terms.
• Added an "Exclude Continuity" filter to continuity, post, and reply search, so you can search everything except specific continuities (e.g. filter out Site Testing or a megacontinuity that would otherwise dominate results).
• Added a megacontinuity toggle, and posts in megacontinuities no longer default to inviting every author on the continuity as a coauthor.
• Added a per-user "moiety colors" toggle for the Unread page, matching the existing Daily Report behavior.
• Continuity and section edit pages no longer list posts you don't have permission to see.
• The icon uploader now correctly rejects SVG files: they render unreliably [thanks compwron!]
• Fixed a crash when an invited-but-unjoined coauthor removed themselves while editing a post.
• Search autocomplete dropdowns (e.g. the continuity/character pickers) no longer count against the general rate limit, so they shouldn't get you throttled during normal use.
• Late note: our throttling tries to prioritize logged-in users (and attempted logins) now when the site is overloaded. This should help avoid scrapers taking us down. Let us know if you see legitimate use-cases impacted! [Thanks Vona!]

Development Work

• Another vast multitude of dependency upgrades, including bumping Ruby to 3.4.10.
• Performance work: cached reply word counts to speed up post stats pages, skipped unnecessary COUNT(DISTINCT) queries and switched to subqueries for board/search filters, and re-enabled Active Record cache versioning (likely no impact right now, we don't really use Active Record caching).
• Attempted some new database connection resilience so the app recovers automatically after Postgres maintenance/failover events instead of needing a manual restart (not totally sure this will solve things, but it should be an improvement!).
• Various CI and test-suite improvements: fixed a flaky spec, sped up CI, surfaced RSpec failures in job summaries, uploaded Capybara failure screenshots as artifacts, fixed our Dependabot config, and tightened up linting.

Full GitHub changelog here: changelog