♫ Boba’s Back, Alright! ♫

After months of hiatus, it’s with great pleasure that we welcome you back to BobaBoard’s newsletter (Spring Edition)!

While we’re unfortunately not back to our regular monthly schedule just yet (you can refer to this tweet (cn: sick pet) for further details), it’s been several months since the last update, and BobaBoard’s Alpha has undergone major improvements. So, without further ado, here’s a little taste of what we’ve been up to!

First off, we’re now offering Alpha users 69% more control over their content: they can edit both tags and default thread view* after posting! These clearly revolutionary features were a long time coming, and will at some point be followed by cutting-edge technology such as actual content editing and deletion. As for whether those will come before custom emojis... Well, that remains to be seen.

• Need a refresher on BobaBoard’s different thread views? Aside from the traditional threaded style, every post can also be seen in a masonry-like ‘gallery’ mode, better suited for basking in the glory of your art collection, and a ‘timeline’ mode that, similar to a Tumblr blog, works best for sequential content from one main author.

But letting content owners edit their own tags wasn't enough to satisfy Ms. Boba's thirst for fine-grained controls: along with the already-existing role permissions ("edit board details" and "post as role"), we now have "edit category tags" and "edit content notices". This addition allows board owners (and their chosen vassals) to add/remove

or content notices to threads on their boards, without being able to modify search and whisper tags, whose ownership lies exclusively with the original poster.

As mentioned in our last newsletter, the BobaBoard side menu is newly S L E E K. Begone, olden last minute this-website-needs-to-be-released-on-meme-date hacks! Welcome, Discord copycat modern, industry-standard design!

The side menu has it (almost) all: pinned boards, muted boards, recent updates, a search filter, a ‘You Are Here’ board indicator, and a “we really need to find a better place for this” Dismiss All Notifications button. You can even swipe-to-open on mobile!

Over time, this menu will evolve to become the core of life on BobaBoard: manipulate board settings, create new feeds, and even switch between Boba realms...

A lot of blood was spat hard work went into redesigning threads from scratch. No UI element was spared, from posts now having full-width images and embeds, to being able to put images in comments (a feature which may or not have happened just because smart Boobies figured out how to do it anyway), to newly compact contribution indenting and technically-impressive escalator comment threading! Paired with the tag-switcharoo also mentioned in the last newsletter, things on BobaBoard are looking pretty cool.

But don’t take our word for it! To commemorate the newsletter’s tentative return, and to celebrate our Treat Yourself Day 2021, Ms. Boba’s created another ‘shrine sandbox’ you can play around with to see what BobaBoard looks like today. But that’s not all! Remember the Thomas Day Sandbox? Here’s a new version of it that you can compare with the 2020 edition to see just how far (and quickly!) BobaBoard’s come.

The look and feel of BobaBoard aren’t the only things that matter though. Since the beginning, Ms. Boba’s been hard at work to improve the performance of just about everything. While this is a fight that’s never truly won (and won’t be fully conquered until Ms. Boba decides to try her hand at reducing webpack bundle size, or

does so on her behalf), we’ve made progress with progressive thread-loading, embed-caching, and reducing unnecessary re-renders.

Thread-specific Filters

As seen on the

thread-specific category filters are back. But—now better than ever!—they're also accompained by content notice filters. See at a glance which content notices exist on a thread, and hide the undesired contributions before venturing further!

Personal Feed

Remember Bobaboard’s personal feed? This is them now! With the ability to filter between ‘updated’ or ‘all’ threads, the ones you created or simply joined, and soon, by which board the thread belongs in, some sort of complex search is beginning to form. While it isn’t a straight-up site-wide search yet, improving this feed’s UI will help us build the blocks to make BobaBoard’s eventual search as snazzy as technologically possible.

For now, you can witness our fancy new segmented filter, generously implemented by one of our volunteers.

Discord Integration

Ms. Boba can now subscribe Discord servers to boards and threads through webhook integration! This means she can do cool stuff like writing a "+release" entry in BobaBoard’s update logs thread, and having it show up in our Discord servers.

While this is currently a database-only feature that requires the manipulation of three tables to set up, it’s the first step to making it more widely available. Want to get an email whenever a new +fill is posted to your favorite kinkmeme thread? Or integrate an IFTTT workflow with BobaBoard? The hope is that, with time, it’ll be as easy to do as pasting some URLs in the appropriate places!

But Wait, There’s More!

Loads of small changes have made BobaBoard better, fixed (or broke (or broke-then-fixed)) existing features, or introduced completely new ones! Here are some examples:

• Avatar Accessories: For those events like Christmas, when you’re truly feeling the holiday spirit.

• Best Effort Embeds: Embed anything from the web and watch as BobaBoard tries its best.

  

• Personal Identity Lock: Hide your personal identity! Want to take a screenshot without revealing who you are in a thread? Head to the user menu to lock your identity away.

• Link Previews: Links to BobaBoard now show some information on the board they’re from.

• User-Locked Boards: Only logged-in Boobies can access these secrets!

  

• Server-Side Rendering & Query Caching: If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it! Just know it’s cool (and a hard-fought battle).

• Dabbing Boba-Tan: She spins while pages load, and yeets you all the way back up if you click her! A harbinger of custom emojis to come.

New Happenings

Treat Yourself Day

As you might have seen, BobaBoard hosted

at the start of the year. But what you might not have seen is the way it chose to treat itself. Treat Yourself Day became Treat Yourself Week. With art, music, writing, and videos, treat ourselves we sure did!

Like we mentioned earlier, you can play around with this sandbox thread collecting all the entries (unfortunately, since it deals with Twitter embeds, you might have to turn off adblockers and, if you're a Firefox user, built-in tracking protection, to see it in its rightful splendor. We’re working on making the non-adblock experience better.)

And as a gift to the world, Boba-Tan has agreed to hold up any sign you want.

Once again, we asked Boobies what they had to say about their BobaBoard experience, and once again, Boobies provided.

• “I’m personally really hyped for realms, I’d like to see what happen when people use Bobaboard to create their own community with a different focus and philosophy.”
• “After a really hectic personal month(s), I jumped on bobaboard after being gone a while. I didn’t have to stress about losing followers due to inactivity. I could get right back to shit posting. Thanks to necro-friendly rules, I didn’t have to worry about missing out on any good threads. I just went through and dove in wherever I was interested.”
• “It’s nice to know that there’s one slice of the internet where the only time I’m going to see shitty takes is if I stroll into the salt channel. We’ve had problems but the anonymity helps a bit so problems in one thread doesn’t spread out of that location.”
• “I feel like this confuses people that I show Bobaboard to, but user identities are randomized for EVERY thread. So someone’s who’s Benedict Cumberbatch for one thread is NOT Benedict Cumberbatch in another thread. Some people I’ve showed Boba to have assumed that I made threads that I didn’t simply because of icons.”
• “Realms! Being able to onboard friends and give them a taste of the boba lifestyle.”
• “I like that thread about the Dipper/Paranorman ship history. Now that’s what we need to preserve. A month of tumblr where a crackship ran WILD.”

In the short term, plans are in place for more polish on the front-end, including more efficient loading of threads and embeds. We’re also working towards increased accessibility options, such as keyboard navigation, aria-labeling, and disabling GIF autoplay. Luckily, a kind Boobie volunteered to help with auditing, so work will begin with them to make Boba accessible to everyone.

Now, then. The elephant in the room. Realms. What are they?

If you guessed ‘separate BobaBoard instances moderated by someone else’, then you’re almost right! Separate instances are part of BobaBoard’s long-term roadmap, and a core component of its federation goals. BobaBoard? No, Boba Boards...

Still, the journey to faraway Galaxies (name subject to change) can be treacherous and full of unforeseen circumstances. Before reaching for the stars, why not learn how to fly from the safety of your own neighborhood? Realms are a stepping stone in our journey towards decentralization: moderated by someone else, but administered (and hosted) by Ms. Boba as part of her own instance. They’re our first baby steps in understanding how separate groups of Boobies might use the software and, more and more with time, interact with each other.

But as any seasoned adventurer will tell you, an unexplored realm is no realm at all. That’s where you—yes, you right there!—come in. If you’re an adventurous person who would be interested in exploring DIFFERENT REALMS , please get in touch ! If you're still on the fence, don't worry: we'll reveal more details in the next edition.

And lastly, for those of you who still remember what calendars are, here are some of BobaBoard's most treasured special dates:

...And that about wraps things up! Thank you all for attending, it’s been a wonderful evening. Please exit in an orderly fashion, and don’t forget that we’re always accepting volunteers of both the tech and non-tech varieties. (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.) For general inquiries and feedback, feel free to use our specialized form . If, on the other hand, you’d like a backstage pass to speak with Ms. Boba herself, be our guest. That’s all, folks!

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