Version 4.4.2 of the Ecency web app is live on ecency.com. It is a large release, so instead of listing every change, here is what actually turns up in your day.
The headline is that curation stopped being a private process. There is now a page where you can watch it happen and point at a post you think deserves a vote.
The curation desk
Open ecency.com/curation. It is the queue the Ecency curators actually work from. It is open for anyone to read.
The queue lists new posts from every Hive front-end, not only posts written on Ecency. Each row carries the things a curator has to know before voting: how many words it is, which app published it, which community it landed in, whether the author is new plus the post's curation window.
The window is the part most people never see. The chain pays full curation weight for a vote inside 24 hours of the post being created, half from 24 to 72 hours, one eighth after that. In the last 12 hours before payout it scales a vote down linearly toward zero. The desk shows every row's state as a plain label: full, half, eighth or locked with the percentage it would count for. There is no early vote penalty, which surprises people who still remember the old reverse auction.
Recommend a post to the curators. This is the part that is for everybody. On any post on Ecency, open the post menu and there is a Recommend to curators action. Pick a reason, confirm and the recommendation is written to the Hive chain with your posting key. It costs no Points and no money, only Resource Credits, roughly what two votes cost. There is no quota.
Because it is on chain, it is a public record rather than a message in a private channel. The Recommended tab on the desk shows what has been pointed at and by whom. You can withdraw a recommendation if you change your mind.
Recommending well is tracked, openly. Every recommender has a scorecard: how many posts they recommended, how many the curators went on to curate, how many were dismissed. Picks that get curated raise your weight, picks that get dismissed lower it. Weight only orders the recommended list, it never hides a post. Ten or more recommendations at a weight of x1.2 or better earns a Trusted recommender chip. Curators count networks rather than accounts, so running five accounts to push the same post does nothing.
For the curators themselves the desk replaced a chat channel: a shared queue with per curator hand-off so two people do not read the same post twice, marks that say what was already handled, a quick view that opens a post without leaving the list, j and k to move down and up, keyboard actions for vote, reply, tip, skip, snooze and flag plus a set of filters that stay saved between sessions.
The rules are published. ecency.com/curation/guide writes down the mechanics that were previously folklore: how the vote trail works and what stops it, the five accounts that vote together, how the trail weight is chosen, the curation windows plus the etiquette the team holds itself to. It is worth reading even if you never curate, because it explains why a vote arrives when it does.
The desk is on by default. A self-hosted instance that does not run a curation team can turn it off in config.
Follow a hashtag
Following used to mean following people. Now it can mean following a subject.
Open any tag page and there is a Follow button. After that:
New posts carrying that tag reach you as notifications, under a Tags filter of their own. A quiet tag notifies per post. A busy one arrives as a single summary saying how many new posts are waiting.
Followed tags get a Tags tab in your bookmarks, so the list is somewhere you can manage it.
Followed tags become chips you can pin, which puts the subject next to the feeds you already read.
If you would rather not be logged in for any of this, a tag can be delivered as a weekly or monthly email instead.
Email digests reached the rest of the site
Email digests launched separately in August, in this post. What 4.4.2 adds is reach: a digest can now be a hashtag rather than only a person or a community, the About page of a hosted blog carries its own signup, a self-hosted instance can embed the subscribe form plus the sent digests list is dated by when an issue actually went out rather than when its period started. Anonymous subscribes now pass a bot check, which is the unglamorous half of running a mailing list.
Publishing tells you when it is going to fail
Hive charges no fees. It rate limits with Resource Credits instead. Until now the way you learned you were out of them was a broadcast that failed after you pressed publish.
The editor now prices your actual draft against your actual Resource Credits and warns you before you commit, with the same check on comments and votes. The estimate is calculated once, the way the chain does it, so every surface agrees rather than each one guessing differently. Earlier versions of this warning overstated the cost, which was arguably worse than not having it.
When you are short, the warning offers both ways out instead of a dead end: spend Points on a short term RC top up, or add Hive Power. If the publish does fail anyway, your post stays on the page rather than disappearing with the error.
The editor stopped mangling what you paste
A run of paste and formatting fixes, most of them from real reports:
Markdown tables with empty cells paste correctly instead of collapsing.
Empty list items and tables with no rows are repaired on paste rather than throwing an error at you.
Content the editor cannot render is no longer inserted as raw markup in the middle of your post.
Image URLs survive next to an @mention instead of being eaten by the mention chip.
Ctrl+B and Cmd+B bold text again, which they had stopped doing. The emoji picker opens anchored to the button rather than somewhere else on the page.
Wallet, notifications and reading
HBD savings interest is visible as a running estimate, with the claim action gated on it, so claiming is a decision rather than a guess. It also tells you the minimum savings balance interest needs.
Hive Power delegated to you is read properly again and shows on your wallet.
Notifications open on the right account. A notification about a post now opens on the account that wrote it rather than on yours.
The whole follow family is handled, so follow, unfollow, ignore and blacklist notifications all behave, instead of only the first one.
Deck columns stopped offering notification types that only make sense for you when the column is pointed at somebody else's account.
Feed cards no longer run long when an author sets a huge description. The small app label on a thumbnail is now a source glyph.
Faster, on purpose
This release spent a lot of effort on speed. Most of it is invisible except as time you do not wait.
List pages stopped shipping the full body of every post they list, which is the single biggest thing: a feed page never rendered those bodies, it just carried them. Server rendered pages that only draw cards no longer fetch voter records either.
Beyond that:
52 render blocking stylesheets became 7.
Only the fonts a page actually uses are preloaded.
The first trending thumbnail loads eagerly while the rest wait their turn.
The navbar arrives complete in the first frame instead of assembling itself.
Word count, read time and relative dates come already rendered rather than being worked out in your browser.
The FAQ articles load on demand instead of riding along in every page.
A feed card's language is detected once on the server rather than in every browser.
Link prefetching changed shape. It used to start when a link scrolled into view, which on an infinite feed means prefetching almost everything. Now it starts when you show intent to click. Turnstile loads on the same rule. The new posts poll stops running in background tabs.
The app looks calmer
The homepage was redesigned, with the performance work above kept intact rather than traded away for the new look.
Behind it, reading layouts were unified: posts, profiles, communities and discovery pages share one navigation and one set of surfaces, so moving between them stops feeling like moving between three different apps. Page backgrounds and content surfaces were unified too. On the desktop navbar the chat button now sits after Write.
Self-hosted and open source
Self-hosted instances got their sidebar toggles working, the following count renders so its toggle finally does something plus there is a subscribe embed for the newsletter. The render helper library that turns Hive markdown into HTML is loadable by plain Node now. It is also faster at finding a post's thumbnail.
Search engines also see the site more clearly. Sitemaps carry real last modified dates now, author and tag pages are judged on their own record rather than on an outside blacklist, so a post no longer falls out of the index because of a list we do not control.
Get it
4.4.2 is live at ecency.com. Every change above landed as a public pull request. The complete list is in the 4.4.2 release notes. Ecency is open source and always has been.
If something here does not behave, tell us. An issue on GitHub or a reply to this post both reach us.
Start writing on ecency.com, or go point at somebody else's good post at ecency.com/curation.
Very attractive additions. Ecency is becoming a complete transparent and everyone's platform.
Excellent updates; the curation and the hashtags are great.
Do check curation desk page and start recommending content/creators… 👍
An excellent exercise in transparency.
Wow! That´s curation on the next level!
Before I would use it systemateically though, I would love to see the KE value of a user. Shouldn´t be hard to add it somewhere in the curation queue list.