Proud Immortal Boba Board

Welcome to

Greetings, weary travelers, and welcome to our convenient-yet-foreboding castle mansion newsletter. Continuing our time-honored tradition, it arrives no sooner and no later than in your witching hour of need, roughly once per calendar month!

As you might have already seen , BobaBoard is celebrating "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" with a few cosmetic changes, including cobwebs and a reasonable amount of Boos on the homepage. Not only that, but our anon identities got a seasonal makeover too, as seen by the changes in the "BobaDex", which, like its namesake, shows every identity the user has "captured" across BobaBoard's threads.

This has, predictably, led to some of our usual shenanigans.

But Halloween aside, BobaBoard has undergone many firsts since our previous newsletter, each one as bone-rattling as the last. With that, here's a spine-tingling thrill ride through some of our scariest hauntings:

• Our first ask blog! Boobies had the pleasure of asking Luigi a wide variety of questions, at least until Bowser crashed the party...

  

• Our first thread to reach over 300 contributions! You guessed it, it's the Arcana's liveblog.

  

• Our first art fill on a kink meme! A talented and generous Boobie heeded the call for—

【 Warning. Your plan just now was incredibly dangerous, and qualified as an act of violation;




please do not attempt, or the System will automatically dole out punishment. 】

SFB: What!?!

【 The ability to send "ahah, as if" in the newsletter is frozen. You will need to complete beginner level quest "Sign Up to BobaBoard" to unfreeze the details. 】

SFB: Ugh, fine.

• Our first art fill on a kink meme (take 2)! Unfortunately it was deemed to be too... ehm, spoopy to include here, but rest assured that the temptation was extremely high.

  

• Our first Boba-born ship! Ted Cruz anon/Elizabeth Warren anon are our new OTP. ‘But wait,’ you say.

  ‘You mean there’s an Elizabeth Warren anon identity to go with the Zodiac Killer one?’

  And, well, no. That’s not what we mean when we say ‘Ted Cruz anon’ and ‘Elizabeth Warren anon’. We mean the anons who are thirsty, respectively, for Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren.

  

Boba's Last Month

Once again, Ms. Boba's been hard at work this past month. Besides organizing our volunteers Discord server, writing BobaBoard's internal documentation, holding codebase install fests, creating a draft of the volunteer code of conduct—not to mention the hiring, then firing, then hiring of contractors—we also have exciting new features to showcase!

Board-wide Notification Management

With growing board numbers came the growing need to better curate our notifications. In addition to thread muting, we now have board muting, as well as the ability to dismiss notifications for a single board.

Not only does it help us better navigate the boards we already have, but it prepares us for the addition of future boards too!

Updates Feed

Speaking of curation, there’s a shiny new "personal feed" button as of the latest update.

Each Boobie’s feed consists of threads they’ve participated in, clearly labeled with their board of origin and, until new settings are added with time, sorted from the newly updated to the older.

Not only is this personal feed a handy way to go through notifications on threads you’ve had a hand in (plus refresh your memory on which threads you’ve created), but it's also one small step towards the ability to create more personal "collections" of favorite boards and threads to keep an eye on!

Roles & Permissions

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, we've started building out community management tools. The base of these tools is the new "roles" concept. Discord users might already be familiar with it: when an administrator bestows a role upon one or more users, those users are granted the special permissions tied to that role.

Roles are an extremely flexible mechanism for community management, allowing us to move beyond a simple set of "moderators" vs "users". This enables the creation of multiple community duties and services that those most suited to the task can take on. The hope is—with time—to both help give users a sense of ownership over the space, and help subcommunities self-regulate effectively.

So, what can roles do for now? The first permissions are "post as [role]" and "edit sidebar", which are... exactly what they sound like.

Board Categories

But speaking of the "edit sidebar" permission, this comes together with the expansion of their functionality. Not only does every sidebar feature the board's own image and description, but people with the right permissions can add as many sections as desired to provide additional information.

At present, sidebars contain two types of sections: text sections, featuring the same formatting options as any regular post, and tags sections, allowing board owners to specify suggested categories of posts to create within the board. Once a category has been "canonized", users will be able to easily filter posts from that category, as well as have it suggested when tagging a new post.

New Formatting Options

And finally, last but not least: with blockquotes, inline code, code blocks, bullet point and numeric lists, more heading sizes and even a fancy "remove all formatting" button, our editor grows more powerful by the day!

The Boba Board Feedback Show

At this point, we'd usually give the mic back to Ms. Boba to talk about the future of BobaBoard. Since this is our sixth newsletter, marking an entire half-year that BobaBoard has been in development, we wanted to make this an extra special "interview edition", answering both internal community questions and some of the ones we've received in our

.

That said, since this month was Halloween, we couldn't really miss out on the ~spoopy vibes~. Instead, we'll be cutting November’s newsletter short in favor of the retrospective, because nobody cares about Thanksgiving anyway!

With that, let's showcase more of our community hauntings, alongside the monthly feedback from our ever-growing amount of test Boobies (we onboarded ~25 new ones since the last newsletter!):

• Good Omens: There’s an oddly recurring phenomenon where longer anon identities interfere with a post’s layout. Rather than resizing the identity’s name once and being done with it, the name gets resized back and forth forever. Fortunately, it’s been brought to Ms. Boba’s attention that Tumblr once had this bug, signaling that BobaBoard’s surely on the right path.

  

• Questionable Warnings: From typos to unconventional onomatopoeia, posts on BobaBoard often spark discussion for completely unintended reasons. One such case was of "Dublin" being warned for—

  【 ... 】

  —in a post far too "spoopy" to include uncensored.

  

• Sharing The Love: People have been getting into new media because of fellow Boobies’ posts. From older cartoons like Samurai Jack, to newer games like Hades, every post can turn a random passerby into a fellow fan. A

  vine compilation

  is the reason we now have a Danganronpa liveblog, two Boobies have temporarily broken anonymity to gift one's favorite game to the other, and then there's Metal Gear. What started out as a humble thread soon became the site of three different people’s liveblogs, which is wholly befitting a series as eclectic as Metal Gear, where cowboys meow and war-obsessed legendary soldiers believe in Santa Claus—

record scratch, freeze frame

You’re probably wondering what this whole floating message thing is about.

Well, this is the part where we reveal the long-awaited opening of BobaBoard’s !bookclub board! After various delays as we navigated shifting priorities and emergency bug-fixes, our first book is

, a Chinese BL webnovel about the dangers of leaving inflammatory comments on authors’ works. Between meta, tropes that transcend culture, and a hero/villain slow burn, Boobies had a lot to discuss, guided in this Important Literary Journey by our Official Bookmistress.

But it hasn’t all been fun and games. As our community grows, the necessity to better delineate our standards of conduct does too, especially on sensitive boards like !salt. The candid and constructive discussions we've had will help better shape BobaBoard's community guidelines, inform its moderation tools, and will serve as a springboard for its eventual TOS. This is not a task we're taking lightly: the hope is that, with everyone's support, we'll be able to strike the right balance between freedom and safety in an increasingly hostile internet, giving people the appropriate tools to build the community enclosure in which they best thrive.

And speaking of community, what are Boobies saying about BobaBoard these days? Turns out, a lot! But that much feedback can be frightening to see at once, so we’ve taken the liberty of censoring the most terrifying parts:

• “I can tell my [REDACTED] I got a comic on here about a furby-obsessed lesbian that they can't read anywhere else.”

• “Where else on the internet could I have a nice relaxing discussion on whether [REDACTED] count as [REDACTED] enough for [REDACTED]?! Only on Boba.”

• “I can tell you exactly what my friend told me that sold me on Bobaboard: "someone is making a social media site to bring back that tumblr sex-positive energy. They actually have a mostly working site now! People are talking about [REDACTED] Luigi."”

• “Before joining, the burning question was pretty much "what is the board culture". I'm glad to see it's light-hearted and people are actually inclined to leave comments and discuss [REDACTED]!”

Final Words

And so our monthly time comes to a close! As mentioned before, stay tuned for the special "retrospective edition" newsletter in November. Until then, that’s all for this edition of the BobaBoard monthly newsletter.

As usual, if you have questions you want answered,

. If, instead, your question/feedback is best left yelled to the wind (or answered in our special edition), the

is always open.

If you'd like to contribute to our efforts and join our slowly-expanding circle of volunteers, you can now fill out our new edition of the volunteers survey for both Tech Roles and Non-tech Ones! (Update March 2024: We are no longer accepting volunteer applications through the surveys that were linked here. Please sign-up for our volunteering newsletter to hear about upcoming opportunities to volunteer.)