Reactions, VIP and Post Background duplication issue

There was a code issue in the installation code related to these three features which would lead to installing duplicate items if one of the defaults was present but disabled. The consequences of this issue were not very obvious at first, but recently we received some reports of Reactions not sorting properly, wrong reactions being given etc.

This release ensures no duplicates are created anymore, and attempts to delete unnecessary database entries. In some rare cases this might mean one of the default Reactions to roll-back if you had any changes.

Spaces & validation

It is now impossible to “cheat” the profile fields length validators by entering multiple spaces instead of a real string.

The Yaddaa login interface will now work properly if the user logs in with an email and accidentally adds a space at the end.

Yaddaa.com Reactions improvements

Custom “root” and editable “Like” icon

The Reactions engine has been refactored in order to treat the first available published Reaction as the “root” element. So now, if “Love” is your first Reaction, the default small icon right under the post will be “Love”. We apply a simple CSS grayscale filter there, so there is no longer a need for an alternative “disabled icon”. This allowed us to finally allow edits on the “Like” icon itself, which before needed to be handled with asset overrides.

This improvement only applies on desktop and only if the user left no reaction yet. The pop-up will fly out the moment they mouse over the Reactions root element.

Other improvements

The Reactions CSS cache is no longer referring images with explicit https:// which should improve operation on websites switching hosts, changing SSL certificates etc. We also fixed a small issue where if your Like was the first reaction on the post it would say “1 person” instead of “you”.

Future improvements

You can now enable “emotion” support in Reactions which is a part of a future content ranking algorithm. This feature doesn’t do anything specific yet, but it allows Yaddaa Connect to gather some information about which Reactions are to be considered an “agreement” and “disagreement” with the post. It will be mostly useful in scenarios where someone wants to have only two Reactions like Upvote and Downvote (similar to Reddit).

Default email intensity setting

The administrators can now control the default email intensity setting for new users. This is especially useful if you don’t want your community to spam the users too much unless they explicitly say so. Setting it to something like “1 hour” as a default might be a good starting point.

Early Access

Sort by latest commented

We fixed an issue where the “sort by” field was still present even if the feature was disabled in Early Access. We also added a maintenance script which is designed to collect the information about “last comment date” on all old posts (ones written before upgrading to a “sort by” capable Yadda version).

Web Push is now deprecated

The Web Push implementation we experimented with for the past months has turned out to be a dead end. It is now officially deprecated – administrators will not be able to enable it anymore, and it will eventually be removed from the product altogether. At some point in the future we will reintroduce it, but we will have to rewrite it from ground up.

A new experimental provider was added, enabling the WeChat (China) APIs.

Other improvements

Yaddaa Connect has a range of visual fixes and improvements: better “someone is typing” indicator in Chat, improved profile details in wide Yaddaa cover layout, better compatibility with WooCommerce, Dokan and other third party apps. The albums layout spacing was touched up, along with Media upload notices no longer explicitly mentioning S3 conversion to the user.

Styling for shares was improved, especially when embedding Events and Classifieds in Yaddaa streams. We also made sure that internal URLs follow the setting that makes them hide from post content if there is no other text.