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This release fixes a number of bugs and significantly expands the flair mechanism added in v8.0. You now have control over your own flairs via a flair composer UI. The presentation of flairs has been tweaked accordingly. Moderators of a subspace also have new flair-related abilities.
The fact that flairs were fully admin-controlled in v8.0 was largely due to implementation details: at that time I didn't have any functionality that would allow non-admin users to manage flairs. I want to approach this with appropriate seriousness and sophistication, so v8.1 adds a complete UI for managing flairs. All of the previous admin functionality has been kept, but users can now set flairs on themselves, and moderators have the ability to manage flairs on users affecting the moderated subspace.
The mechanism is now much more fine-grained: each user can have multiple flairs, flairs are categorized into predefined types, and flairs can be limited to apply only to a specific subspace. This enables new ways to indicate your status and responsibilities related to a subspace, and express details that you'd like others to know, such as language, interests, affiliation, or gender. While a general-purpose instance of Bubble may not have a great need for these, users of more special-purpose ones (or specialized subspaces) may find several advantages with having this information visible inside discussion threads, not just on user profile pages.
The flair composer can be found in profile settings:
Due to the fair amount of complexity involved, the composer helps you create flairs in a wizard-style multistep manner, letting you specify the type of flair, its scope, and the actual flair text.
The subspace options menu (bottom of page) and post/comment actions menus now also show a flair-related action when appropriate, for modifying your own flairs or moderated subspace flairs.
The addition of user-defined flairs means that it is no longer appropriate to display the flairs in the same way everywhere, as that would easily add too much noise to the UI. Flairs are now displayed in their full form only on the user profile page, and in other places abbreviated forms are used instead.
The user profile page shows each flair with a complete explanation of the flair category, showing its icon, label text, subspace scope, and whether it was assigned by the administrator or not. This should have enough precision and clarity to communicate the meaning of the flairs unambiguously. On the opposite end, in feeds and comment threads where information density needs to be higher, flair texts are omitted and only icons are shown. Viewing a post shows the author's full flair text, and likewise viewing a comment page shows the commenter's flairs. The idea is to keep the flairs visible in the proper context while not polluting long lists with too much additional information.
There is a new setting for hiding all flairs in feeds, if you find the new notation distracting:
There are automatic "OP" and "mod" flairs to indicate the original poster and moderator(s) of a discussion thread or post.
When a post is moved between subspaces, the followers of the destination subspace are notified as if a new post had been made. (Moderators are expected to follow their moderated subspaces.)
The sign up process has been made easier: there is a "Sign up" action on the front page that will prompt you to activate a client certificate, after which you can proceed with the account creation. Relying on manual activation of a certificate at the correct URL path, like was the case previously, is error-prone and more awkward.
Added an admin notification when a user changes their name.
Jan 15 · 4 months ago · 👍 michaelnordmeyer, Addison, wasolili · 🎉 1
I am curious to see if there is any uptake for the new flair functionality here. My expectation is that they will not be used very much.
Moderators should be aware that these are available for you to set _on other users_ in your moderated subspaces, for whatever purpose you find appropriate.
I neither see OP nor mod flair on threads with fitting comments, either logged-in or out. Example:
Looks like a bug. Let me check...
@michaelnordmeyer Should be fixed now!
Thanks. Do you think the abbreviation of the flair list is helpful?
I know that too many flairs can bork the commenters line, but an ellipsis is not helpful to understand what the flairs actually are. How many people will click-through to find out?
This defeats the purpose a flairs, IMHO.
Which context do you mean, just for comments specifically? I could see that in a discussion thread, in a list of comments, it could be helpful to see more of them unabbreviated.
I'll give it some time and see how the current presentation feels.
can I make a flair that says admin or OP?
I like a lot the [OP / Mod / whatever]. That is pretty cool and helps a lot.
@gritty That is currently not prohibited but all flairs are subject to moderation by the admin and subspace moderators. They would appear as personal or self-description flairs on a profile page.
I'll probably add a list of disallowed words to prevent the confusion and manual moderation work.
I look forward to experimenting with this. Thanks skyjake!
Moderating comments is hard enough, but at least there's a chance to distinguish between facts, fiction, and opinions. Moderating flairs seems much harder.
@michaelnordmeyer Flairs are different to moderate for sure. They are an extension to people's names. As a rule of thumb, the CoC still applies: no slurs etc., and the flairs should be about the person themselves and not an unrelated message to some other party. Subspaces can have stricter rules about flairs, like requiring them to be about some specific detail related to the subspace.
It might be worthwhile to add a subspace option to prevent adding flairs specific to the subspace.
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