BobaBoard, Chapter 5, Rated R!

Hello and welcome to BobaBoard's "Mostly Monthly" newsletter! I'm BobaBoard's Secret Final Boss (AKA Ms. Boba's co-conspirator) and your tour guide for today.

Ms. Boba’s been incredibly busy, which led to me stepping up and taking this newsletter’s reins in her stead. Why would she be any busier now than before, you ask? Get ready, dear readers, because this is big.

With the help of the most advanced technology ever, we’re finally able to generate real, working invites for new users. So long, manually adding people to the database. Hello, sending people one-use signup links!

This brings us to announce, on this blessed day of European 6/9, the official end of BobaBoard’s pre-alpha phase, followed by the launch of its alpha. What does being in alpha mean for BobaBoard? Well, in the words of Ms. Boba, it means…

unwraps written statement

clears throat

“Tell them they’ll hear more in the Boba's Last Month section, I’m busy now”.

Ms. Boba's been hard at work this past month, and the updates, like many on the !thirst board, have just not stopped coming. Let’s go over them!

Shortly after mailing out last month’s newsletter, Ms. Boba completely revamped the site's commenting function. Now our comments have an increased character limit, can be chained one after another, and even be directly replied to !

As we all know, the Draw Your Fave Getting Sexy With Thomas The Tank Engine Day fell on August 26th. In order to host a Thomas Day gallery on BobaBoard itself, some major work needed to be done, and major work means major debugging. Which is how Luigi came to be the face of BobaBoard testing.

Boobies were keen to join in on said testing, and soon, we all bore witness to the birth of something truly great and terrible.

The great and terrible Luigi, a handsome reminder of the work needed on image uploads, was hardly a setback though, as we’d already completed our primary testing by the time he made his debut. All manner of post and reply types were tested: Luigi images, Luigi tags, Luigi comments, Luigi—

Fine, if you really want to see Thomas instead, Ms. Boba has graced us with a live, sandboxed version of the (extremely NSFW) Sexy Thomas Gallery , which you can play around with. If you manage to break it, the feedback form is always open and , well, that’s just what being in alpha means. Most importantly, you can see that the gallery features a variety of tag types:

• Regular tags are whispertags, a non-searchable space to add further thoughts in.

• !tags are global search tags, enabling anyone on BobaBoard to discover any post through the search functionality.

• +tags allow users to search for things contextually, which means you can make your content filterable just within a specific thread or board, without making it searchable to the larger public.

• cw: tags—soon to be renamed "cn" (content notice), thanks to some thoughtful feedback—have also been added! A cw: tag doesn’t do anything special yet, but eventually they’ll show up at the top of posts so you can check the content of the post before seeing it!

  Another feature planned for cw: tags is the mapping of a tag to its synonyms: no need to tag cw: gore, cw: guro, cw: g*re and so on. Just use the one that feels most right to you! If people don't want to see it, we want to help them do so without much thought required.

In our previous newsletter, The Arcana's liveblog proved itself to be a formidable enemy. Has it been subdued? No, not really. But we've made great strides! As of last week, BobaBoard threads can now be displayed in three separate views: the classic thread format we all know and love, the aforementioned gallery format, and a third timeline format. In the timeline format, threads are displayed chronologically, independent of a thread’s structure. If, for example, the latest contribution is somewhere in the middle of a thread, timeline view will still show it last. This means you can easily scroll down and see how the thread evolved over time. Imagine a Tumblr blog, but with the ability to easily filter tags, see only updates, or mark the place you last left reading! So far, these viewing modes have worked great on smaller threads, but until we further optimize thread loading, we'll just have to live with the heavy, heavy weight of our long thread mistakes (or, at least, our browsers will have to). And, of course, the collective liveblog of people attempting to enter our one and only, ever-more-humongous The Arcana thread.

Say hello to Paracosm, BobaBoard's first interactive comic quest.

Boobies immediately began playing the quest, and in turn, the quest immediately began evolving. From there, things escalated quickly.

Ms. Boba’s other site improvements—including increased embedding capabilities for Reddit, Instagram, Pixiv, and Vimeo—were not without incident either. Within moments of new embed types being added, a new, endlessly loading enemy arose… Big Orange.

But not all new features come with—

As I was saying, not all new features come with garishly colored bugs! Some only have invisible bugs. Like post-specific links, whose development was suddenly re-prioritized because someone was horny.

Speaking of horniness, it seems that the unbridled sexual freedom (mixed with thoughtful and hard-hitting discussion) is one of the things our users most appreciate about BobaBoard so far. In the words of one Boobie: “it is really heart expanding to be able to use a site that services so many kinds of interests!! i'm filled with joy and delight every time i see people going hog wild around here.”

And now, without further ado, I'll leave the metaphorical mic to Ms. Boba for...

Welcome, esteemed and distinguished guests from all over the gender spectrum, to the BobaBoard Alpha phase. You surely have many questions, like "what does alpha phase even mean?" or " did you really make us read a devlog formatted like a mid-2000s fanfiction? " But let's go in order.

Detractors might see the Alpha announcement as a mere arbitrary choice for European 6/9, and BobaBoard's release labels are definitely "open to interpretation". Still, like with everything BobaBoard, a kernel of seriousness is always hidden within the memes. Some weeks ago, I gave the "congress" (A/N: a group of Boobies) permission to invite more and more friends to our small collection of boards. In no time, invites have begun multiplying, to the point where I've found myself adding 4 more people in just the past 2 days. These, of course, aren't huge crowds, and the number of Boobies is still cozily small (a really nice break from the larger internet). Overall, however, the trend is clear: people on BobaBoard want their friends on BobaBoard. So, as the posting experience reaches good levels of usability both on mobile and desktop, and activity picks up—we had ~300 new comments & posts in the last 24 hours—our priorities need to shift to accomodate a larger number of users. And to do this, it's time to get myself out of BobaBoard's way. Because, in the end, the only way BobaBoard will grow is by becoming able to outgrow me .

How will I make this happen? First of all, I really need to start leaning into the help of volunteers. While this month I've taken the first, hesitant steps into outsourcing tasks—including, as you've seen, part of the newsletter—there is a pool of talent bursting to help that I've simply been too busy to harness. Ironic, isn't it? So, next week, I'm taking a pause from feature releases, and dedicating myself to the ascetic practice of writing down volunteer tasks, documenting code and processes, finally reaching out to candidates ( including new ones wink wink (Update March 2024: We are no longer accepting volunteer applications through the survey that was linked here. Please sign-up for our volunteering newsletter to hear about upcoming opportunities to volunteer.)), and streamlining all that's needed to have others come help shape this space. In a similar fashion, I've decided to "bite the bullet", and use some of my budget on paid help. I hope this will be a good way to work on my managerial skills with someone compensated to put up with my lack of experience.

But nevermind all the organizing, what are we actually going to work on this month? 6/9 memes aside, the initial roadmap (and much, much more) has been mostly completed. This means it's time to move to the next step: attention & community management tools. Attention management tools include all the tools users need to make sure they don't miss what they want to see, and to help them never see what they don't want to. This includes better notifications management, boards pinning/hiding/muting, search, tags denylisting, and everything that will help reduce both overwhelm and FOMO as the site's spaces (and the number of boards) grow. Community management tools include the tools the community will need to self-manage in the medium term. This means adding the ability to assign "permission roles" to users in certain boards (think Discord!). These will include giving the ability to edit sidebar, board descriptions, and pinned posts; the ability to add content notice tags or categories to posts that might need them (a privilege that can be revoked when misused); the ability to post as special admin identities; and, eventually, the ability to create their own boards for their friends OR the larger public.

These things are, of course, not going to be built in a month. Still, looking back to what we had 30 days ago, it's incredible to see how much has gotten done! Please stay tuned for the next newsletter, or come read the weekly "Monday-but-Tuesday Updates" on Twitter.

I'm sure many will wonder "if there's an official alpha, is there a waitlist to sign up to? " Once again, the unfortunate answer is: not yet! Presently, as mentioned, the community has been expanding by looking at "friends of friends". Once the attention management features are solid enough, I plan to experiment with disconnected groups of people hanging around on the same boards, bringing people from different Discord servers together without introducing them to each other beforehand. And, of course, volunteers (and their friends) will always be welcome into the space they're helping to build. With all this it's hard for me to make predictions on the pace at which expansion will proceed. While I might be overly cautious, I believe these initial stages are fundamental to shaping the culture of the community. Many Boobies are, for lack of a better term, "an incredibly diverse set of unapologetic freaks", and their freedom in an increasingly hostile internet is a precious equilibrium that I am committed to protect. I hope to have time in the next newsletter to spotlight the longer-term vision of "a network of smaller, decentralized fandom communities". But, if that were not the case, I've been drafting a collection of principles. I hope these will help you better understand how I'm thinking about the future.

...and that is all for this month! We hope the first Secret Final Boss edition has entertained you and given you a taste for what's to come. As usual, if you have questions you want answered, Ms. Boba's email is all yours. If, instead, your question/feedback is best left yelled to the wind, the appropriate form is always open.

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