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Bubble version 5 introduces several new features. Some improve basic usability and some are smaller things that have been missing from the start. All of these have been informed by the experience of using BBS over the past weeks.
Comments are not meant to be tightly bound to their parent posts. Internally, a comment is equivalent to a regular top-level post except that it also has a parent post. This means we can elevate the status of comments a bit in the Bubble UI.
In version 5, every comment can be directly linked to and opened as its own page. When viewing a discussion thread, the author links have been repurposed to point to the individual comment pages instead.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of this change is that when you receive a notification relating to a comment, opening it takes you directly to the comment in question. No more hunting for unread comments in long discussions!
The comment page also gives you the ability to give thanks to the author of the comment via the Thanks feedback mechanism. Technically, likes and reactions would also be possible, but I decided against it for simplicity. You always have the option of reacting via a reply or @-mention.
Any later comments in the same discussion thread are displayed in the bottom of the comment page, making it much easier to check up on updates to a discussion. (Just be sure to open the earliest notification.)
In the Dashboard, you can now find a live index of all your posts and comments. While the equivalent information has been available in the export archives, it is naturally more convenient to look up your older posts and comments without doing an export first.
The index also lets you access comments on deleted posts. These orphaned comments have not been viewable by any means before, not even in an archive. (Archives contain the full discussion thread you participated in, but if the original post has been deleted, there is no page to represent it.) One might ask if it is appropriate to keep the discussion thread of a deleted post around, but this behavior follows from the access rules: regular users don't have authority to delete other users' content, and comments belong to their authors. Of course, the comments on a deleted post are not part of any public feed. They are only accessible via the Dashboard's comment index, and only visible to the comment author.
Bubble displays a lot of timestamps. While most of them are usually in relative format, your time zone still has an impact on dates.
Perhaps the biggest impact of this is in the clock times displayed in Notification History. The notification email "Do Not Disturb" range is also now set in local time and not in UTC, which is quite a bit more convenient.
Tinylog timestamps and Gemfeed dates are always displayed as UTC, the former because Tinylogs are meant for other people to view and we don't know their local time zones — your own time zone is private information — and the latter because UTC is the only sensible option for Gemini feeds since there is no provision for specifying a time zone.
As a technical detail, Bubble is now dependent on the "pytz" Python module.
Occasionally people lose their client certificates and thus also lose access to their Bubble account. Contacting the administrator is fine for account recovery but it also has some significant drawbacks:
The admin might be busy with other things.
The admin might not be able to verify that the account actually belongs to you.
To help with both issues, there is a new automated certificate recovery feature.
Then, when disaster has struck and you've lost your registered certificates, you can do the following:
1) Make your new certificate available as a PEM file at the previously configured URL. Do NOT include the private key — that is not meant to be published under any conditions.
2) Activate the same certificate in your Gemini client on the Bubble front page.
3) Select the "Recover certificate" option and enter your user name.
4) Bubble downloads the certificate from your recovery URL. If (and only if) it matches the client certificate active in your client, the certificate will be registered to the account.
5) For privacy reasons, remove the certificate at the recovery URL.
If you have a place where you can publish files on Gemini, such as your own capsule, I recommend going to your Settings right away and configuring the recovery URL. It's a good idea to use a directory and/or file name that doesn't currently exist and is unlikely to be easily guessable. In any case, this URL should only point to an existing file when you are recovering your account. You probably don't want to keep your client certificate published otherwise.
Comments and posts without comments can be unpublished to convert them back into drafts. Very useful when you accidentally publish something and prefer not to delete it. This is available as an action in the draft composer (bottom of page).
More consistent formatting of issue links: always include "[#num]" in the title.
Timestamps in exported archives consistently use a "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format.
A few additions to the Help documentation. (There is plenty more to write, though.)
2023-06-20 · 1 year ago · 👍 gritty, michaelnordmeyer, mozz, freezr · ❤ 3
Oh Man! How much is cool Bubbles? Thanks! 👏👏👏
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