DU updates and announcements

[EarlG]

Hello DU!

I have a few updates and housekeeping items you may or may not be interested in. The updates are happening today (Monday). Don't worry -- no downtime is required. Please read on for the scoop.

POP-UP FUND DRIVE

During our last fund drive (the Hearts fund drive in February) we let you know that like a lot of independent sites, DU has been going through some financial struggles recently. Many of you suggested that we run an additional fund drive during the year, and so we are going to give it a try.

Starting today, we'll be running our new "Tip Jar" fund drive. We don't want to be overly annoying, so to begin with there will just be a small banner at the top of every page, a reminder at the bottom of every thread, and the fund drive will just run from Monday-Friday. All we're asking you to do is kick into our "Tip Jar" with a one-time contribution.

The fund drive asks you to show your appreciation for DU, but DU wouldn't be the community it is without its members, and so we also wanted to recognize the DUers who YOU think make this community special. As a bonus for contributing during the Tip Jar fund drive, you'll be able to leave "kudos" for another member. This is going to be pretty low-key -- we're not going to send out notifications or leave hearts on people's posts like we do in February. But when I announce the end of the fund drive on Friday, I'll recognize the DU members who received the most kudos, for their contributions to the community.

EDITORIALS & OTHER ARTICLES

By popular demand, we're restoring Editorials & Other Articles to DU's "Main Forums" section. Starting today, it will appear just below Latest Breaking News in the navigation sidebar, and will also appear in the Main Forums section on the All Forums page. The forum will once again be hosted by the Main Forum Hosts.

TAB TEXT

This is a very minor update, but starting Monday the "Subs" and "Posts" tabs are going to say "My Subs" and "My Posts" just to make things a bit clearer.

TWITTER EMBEDDING

Given all the shenanigans over at x.com, we've received a number of questions about what will happen with tweet embedding on DU. As of right now, tweet embedding still works as it always has done, provided that you use "twitter.com" in your URL, and not "x.com"

x.com URLs do not currently work to embed tweets on DU, and getting them to work could be a lot more complicated than it might seem. So as of now, nothing has changed -- we're continuing to allow embeds with the twitter.com URL until x.com officially prevents that from happening, and after that we'll have to see what happens.

"THREADS" EMBEDDING

We are making embeds from Meta's Threads platform available, starting today. This will work the same way as other embedded content on DU -- simply paste the URL of the Thread into your post, and the embed will appear on preview. It only requires the first part of the URL, so we recommend previewing before you post, so you can remove any unnecessary characters.

Threads embedding seems a little "jankier" than tweet embedding, by which I mean that during testing, we noticed that sometimes it might take an additional page refresh to make the content appear. Unfortunately we don't have control over this, but hopefully it won't be too much of a problem.

We do not yet have a Threads "indicator" like we do for YouTube videos and tweets on the Latest/Greatest pages and in forums, but if posts containing Threads ever become as prevalent as those other two platforms, we'll create one. Speaking of which...

YOUTUBE/TWEET INDICATORS

It came to our attention recently that many DU Star Members might not know that there is an option to see at a glance which OPs contain YouTube videos, and which contain tweets. These can be particularly useful if you *don't* want to click on OPs that have videos or tweets in them.

These indicators are handled by an option on your Account Settings page. When turned on, little blue boxes appear next to the thread titles of OPs which contain tweets, and/or little red boxes appear for OPs containing a video, like this:



This setting is supposed to be turned on for all Star Members by default, but we think it might not be. So at some point (not this Monday though) we are going to remedy that. However, if you want to turn them on manually now, you can, by going to your Account Settings (My DU > Account Settings) page. Scroll down to the section titled "Social media integration" and set "Show tweet indicator" and "Show video indicator" to "Yes."

MAILING LIST

If you're not already on the DU mailing list, you can now sign up via the form on our Contact page. Right now, mailing list subscribers get a weekly "Week In Review" email from me, highlighting the most recommended threads of the week, but should we ever need to notify you of emergency downtime or problems with DU, being on the mailing list will ensure that you stay updated.

OTHER UPDATES

Although our major database project is now over, work continues behind the scenes on security updates and other essential items as we head into the second half of this election year. Aside from that, we are finally almost back in development mode (hence the updates above). I plan to start a "feature request" thread this week to take some suggestions on what you think we should work on next. And we have our own ideas for some future improvements either later this year or going into next year. But for now...

Thanks for reading!

EarlG, on behalf of Elad -- The DU Administrators