What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [x] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

This PR makes the Pro Dashboard work with InstantClick and displays the correct analytics for organizations.

It moves all the code inside functions, removing globals and then loads the "initializer" inside InstantClick change event so that the transition between clicks is smooth.

Right now, if you have your own dashboard and your organization's dashboard, clicking between the two doesn't work. Also, if you go from https://dev.to/dashboard to https://dev.to/dashboard/pro from the internal link you have to refresh the page.

Another thing it does is to display the correct analytics for the organization. Right now we never pass the organization ID to the analytics business logic, which means that the data returned it's always that of the user, not that of the organization the user is looking at.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [x] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

We're having some performance issues with org notifications and this is a quick fix to help it out before we get to the final fix.

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Without the space between these two elements, this shows up as Change meta tagcanonical_url.

Related Tickets & Documents

https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/4223#issuecomment-380093772 describes how composing JSX elements over multiple lines needs {' '}.

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

I haven't actually tried this myself, but I saw the before image at https://www.cdevn.com/why-medium-actually-sucks/:

and looking at the code, I could see why it looked that way, and what to do to fix it.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

ActiveJob jobs are executed inline during rails db:reset which means that the app now that https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/pull/3057 is in, tries to fetch 1000 episodes from each Podcast, which is really slow if successful at all (it crashed after a while on my machine).

This PR disables fetching during seeding. Episodes can be fetched with rails get_podcast_episodes task if needed for local testing.

I know @lightalloy is working on improving Podcast fetching but I believe this was an unintended side effect of the good work she's doing.

The fact that we have to disable a callback it's also a good argument against doing this kind of things in callbacks which hides a lot of business logic in the first place (by separating creation of an object and fetching of dependent objects for example) but that's an entirely different argument :-)

Related Tickets & Documents

#3057 and #2952

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

This refactoring began when I was started taking a look at how the whole analytics worked in the Dashboard pro and noticed we could have computed it faster. I've also noticed that sometimes it requires multiple refreshes in production to be shown due to performance issues.

This PR contains two things: a refactoring of the logic in the AnalyticsController for the API and speed improvements for the analytics themselves.

Solutions taken into account

I've talked about possible improvements in #2311 and the possible solutions envisioned were:

• limiting the date range (not implemented here)
• adding indexes to columns that are part of the filtering/where conditions (part of this PR)
• use grouping in SQL (part of this PR)
• pre computing data in batches (not implemented here)
• low level caching (this is already in production but there are issues with caching each date separately as we can already see in production. Each date means a separate network call to the caching server, which means an average of 30 HTTP calls for a month range and possibly hundreds for "infinity". I've changed it to a single cache call per range but we'll talk more about caching later)

So, this PR contains a better usage of SQL (from 64 queries to 4 in the grouping by day) and adds indexes on columns that are going to be filtered on repeatedly (indexes are added concurrently by PostgreSQL with the Rails migration not to disrupt normal production flow)

Walkthrough of the steps taken and ameliorations

First thing first I had to set a baseline. You can't make things "faster" without knowing how slow or fast are they. So I wrote a script that uses Ruby's benchmark module to have a ballpark of what was going on:

require 'benchmark'

# disable logging to avoid measuring that
ActiveRecord::Base.logger = nil

user = User.find(11)

iterations = 1_000

Benchmark.bm do |bm|
  bm.report("totals") do
    as = AnalyticsService.new(user)
    iterations.times { as.totals }
  end
  bm.report("last week") do
    as = AnalyticsService.new(user, start_date: 1.week.ago.to_date.iso8601)
    iterations.times { as.grouped_by_day }
  end
  bm.report("last month") do
    as = AnalyticsService.new(user, start_date: 1.month.ago.to_date.iso8601)
    iterations.times { as.grouped_by_day }
  end
  bm.report("since the beginning") do
    as = AnalyticsService.new(user, start_date: "2019-04-01")
    iterations.times { as.grouped_by_day }
  end
  bm.report("date too much in the past") do
    as = AnalyticsService.new(user, start_date: "2018-01-01")
    iterations.times { as.grouped_by_day }
  end
end

This was the result on my meager development instance (not too much data in the DB):

                     user        system     total         real
totals               2.028109    0.231059   2.259168      (  3.594266)
last week            27.779555   1.734052   29.513607     ( 45.470222)
last month           120.701257  7.255624   127.956881    (206.690019)
since the beginning  225.478188  13.058602  238.536790    (384.704629)

since the beginning refers to 2019-04-01 which is the date DEV released Analytics.

Step 1 - refactor totals

After refactoring the AnalyticsService.totals calculations I benchmarked this timing:

       user     system      total        real
totals  1.787045   0.128882   1.915927 (  2.999562)

a 1.17x speed increase over master branch. Not much but it's a start and there were less queries all around.

Step 2 - refactor grouping by day

This took considerably more time to achieve, but after playing around a bit with PostgreSQL, its query plans the number of queries went down from 64 to 4 (one per each metric).

These are the times measured:

                          user        system      total       real
last week                 3.164215    0.148648    3.312863    (  4.885400)
last month                5.232762    0.173115    5.405877    (  7.152623)
since the beginning       7.509549    0.204578    7.714127    (  9.507002)
date too much in the past 39.811000   0.820973    40.631973   ( 44.212027)

last week: 8.91x speed increase over master branch last month: 23.69x speed increase over master branch since the beginning: 5.87x speed increase over master branch

date too much in the past it's just me going back to 2018-01-01 to check how slow it would be with such a wide range

The speed increase is definitely significant, but there was something bothering me. That's when I thought about caching.

What's the deal with caching in the context of analytics?

Caching of analytics in the master branch is done 1 time per each day in the date range, which can potentially result in tens or even hundreds of network call to the caching serves. Yes, caching helps because (if I'm not mistaken) DEV is using a globally distributed memcached pool of servers so the data is likely to be near you BUT going back and forth to the caching servers might be slower than asking the data to the DB directly if the range is big enough. Basically the round trips added to the caching server speed might result in more time spent than asking the web server to get the data from the DB (which is likely near the server) and send it back to the client.

I still think caching is important but caching each day separately might be counter productive. Since the data now it's loaded in bulk from the DB (GROUP BY returns one row per each day in the same query), it might make sense to cache the whole result set instead of each row separately.

Step 3 - what happens if we remove all cache calls

                            user        system     total        real
last week                   2.369785    0.201472   2.571257     (  3.973177)
last month                  2.793212    0.148250   2.941462     (  4.483640)
since the beginning         3.373822    0.158784   3.532606     (  5.202688)
date too much in the past   5.493960    0.209581   5.703541     (  7.480122)

last week: 11.48x speed increase over master branch last month: 43.52x speed increase over master branch since the beginning: 67.57x speed increase over master branch

As I suspected, the bigger the date range is, the more counter productive N cache calls are. Given that I'm on development with a totally different hardware and software than what's running the DEV production site times are going to be different and speed increases likely lower but it verifies my logic from the previous section.

Step 4 - add indexes

One thing that happens with analytics on many rows is that indexes start to matter (not so much in my development tests). Keep in mind that PostgreSQL can still decide not to use indexes if the data set is not big enough, but overall, they are a good idea.

What indexes? I took each query run by totals and grouped_by_day and checked WHERE, GROUP BY and FILTER conditions. These are the fields I decided to add indexes on:

• articles.published (this is also going to benefit the entire website, since published articles is a super common query)
• comments.created_at
• comments.score
• follows.created_at
• page_views.created_at
• reactions.created_at
• reactions.points

Since DEV has been in production for long and those tables contain lots and lots of data (I reckon reactions and page views especially), it's a good idea to (again :P) use the whole PostgreSQL power and add indexes concurrently. That means that PostgreSQL is going to use its concurrency capabilities to write the indexes in the background without stopping the normal write workflow to those tables. Indexes are normally written locking down an entire table, which can slow down the website during a migration. You can read more about all the details in the PostgreSQL doc about the subject.

So, what are the benchmarked timings?

                          user        system      total       real
totals                    1.678849    0.194811    1.873660    (  2.974526)
last week                 2.410151    0.109961    2.520112    (  3.714314)
last month                4.619584    0.132775    4.752359    (  6.109809)
since the beginning       7.117115    0.159913    7.277028    (  8.774819)
date too much in the past 36.347774   0.402848    36.750622   ( 38.826439)

totals: 1.02x speed increase over no indexes version last week: 1.31x speed increase over no indexes version last month: 1.13x speed increase over no indexes version since the beginning: 1.06x speed increase over no indexes version

The reasons why they only slightly faster than the version with no indexes is that some indexes were already in place (those on the id/type columns and the user id) and that I don't have a big enough data set which, as previously said, can make PostgreSQL decide for a sequential scan or similar operations.

Step 5 - with indexes and no cache calls

Since the cache calls per each day were still in place, I tried without them:

                            user        system      total       real
last week                   1.870252    0.116198    1.986450    (  3.161371)
last month                  2.725406    0.144293    2.869699    (  4.278060)
since the beginning         2.924799    0.146779    3.071578    (  4.523648)
date too much in the past   5.456498    0.215746    5.672244    (  7.229783)

again, with no cache calls the calculations are significantly faster, but the same evaluations made above are valid for this example.

last week: 1.29x speed increase over no cache and no indexes version last month: 1.02x speed increase over no cache and no indexes version since the beginning: 1.14x speed increase over no cache and no indexes version

Step 6 (and final step) - with indexes and one cache call

                            user       system     total     real
last week                   2.259850   0.134709   2.394559  (  3.935191)
last month                  3.120629   0.161101   3.281730  (  4.906886)
since the beginning         3.539331   0.181215   3.720546  (  5.575235)
date too much in the past   8.353001   0.302818   8.655819  ( 11.406922)

if compared with the example with indexes and one cache call per each day, the biggest difference can be seen when the date range becomes consistent: 3 months in the past is 1.95x faster and 1 year and a half in the past is 4.24x faster

If compared with the current master:

last week: 12.34x speed increase last month: 39x speed increase since the beginning: 64.12x speed increase

I hope this walkthrough was helpful 😁

Related Tickets & Documents

Related to https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/issues/2311

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Bug Fix

Description

It seems that having a standalone copy of webcomponent-loader.js is both insufficient and breaking JS on some browser, particularly WaterFox. WebComponent's suggestion to use polyfill is in the follow manner:

<script src="node_modules/@webcomponents/webcomponentsjs/webcomponents-loader.js"></script>

but that also is not a viable option since we can't load dependency from node-module like that. The next best thing we can do is asynchronously load the polyfill from the CDN based this instruction. The README stated that the loader is efficient and will load only what is necessary.

I have tried to not rely on CDN by letting webpack dynamically import it but that also doesn't seem to work without additional webpack configuration. If there's a more viable solution or I missed something, please let me know.

Related Tickets & Documents

#3081 and quite possibly some users on https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/issues/2790

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

n/a

Added to documentation?

• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Bug Fix

Description

Related Tickets & Documents

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

Added to documentation?

• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [x] Documentation Update

Description

Added the DEV API link (dev.to/api/) in the account settings UI.

Related Tickets & Documents

PR Closes https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/issues/3114

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

N/A

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Currently, AdditionalContentBoxesController#randomize is a public method and it does not make a lot of sense to leave it public. This PR makes it private as it is only used in AdditionalContentBoxesController

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Refactors array creation in Api::V0::ArticlesController and Credit using Array.new

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Replaces conditional in Timeframer#datetime with a hash.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

This fixes the input's color of the reading list filters in night theme ( or any future theme that does not have black as theme color )

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

before

after

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

I'm not 100% sure why but it seems that putting the ID as a keyword parameter for a DELETE does not play nice with Rails. I've converted it to use an inline parameter following the same convention Rails uses for any other DELETE/destroy action

Related Tickets & Documents

Closes #3079

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Bug Fix

Description

Fixes a minor bug where a user's organization memberships were not destroyed when the user was destroyed.

Related #3077

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor

Description

Set default state of "Contact via Connect" to be checked (true) by default.

Related Tickets & Documents

resolves #3088

Added to documentation?

• [x] no documentation needed

Bug Fix - Action Space

Buttons Edit and Manage | Add inline-flex to have action buttons always on same line

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [X] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Fixes the Action Space Buttons on Mobile to display in the same line. Added display: inline-flex to have the elements always maintain the same horizontal space.. causing them to wrap around together when there isn't enough space

Related Tickets & Documents

Fixes #3061

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [X] no documentation needed

[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor

Description

Moved SlackBot.delay.ping calls to a separate ActiveJob. This may seem redundant compared with moving handle_asynchronous methods to ActiveJobs, but still I think it's worth doing because in such a way:

• we reduce dependency on the DelayedJob
• it's easier to debug in case of errors

Related Tickets & Documents

#3136

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Extracts compound conditional in TagAdjustment#user_permissions to a method.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [x] (Design) Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

The channel with unread messages gets a yellow highlight but the text is hardly readable (See screenshot below). This PR fixes it by making the text black (#0a0a0a).

Before

After

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Implemented ActiveJob for the following methods on Mention:

• Mention.create_all
• Mention#send_email_notification

Related Tickets & Documents

#2497

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Removes UserStates class as it is not used anywhere in the codebase. Also removes the tests exercising the UserStates code.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Misc

Description

If Service-Worker ever decides to serve 500.html, an error will now be outputted to the browser.

Related Tickets & Documents

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

Added to documentation?

• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor

Description

• removed an after_create callback for fetching podcast episodes
• added fetching podcast episodes to the admin controller action
• created request specs for podcast creating from /admin/podcasts/new
• removed hacks that disable fetching podcasts while seeding and running tests

Creating a podcast and fetching episodes shouldn't be tightly coupled. We sometimes want to create a podcast without fetching episodes, e.g. for tests or for seeding the database.

Related Tickets & Documents

#2952

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Bug Fix

Description

Implemented proper validations for podcasts and podcast episodes to avoid failing in the future.

• added model validations: fields presence, slug uniqueness, slug uniqueness with usernames and organization slugs
• added db constraints
• added validation specs

Before merging need to check that all the podcasts and podcast_episodes records don't violate the provided constraints (non-null values and uniqueness)

Related Tickets & Documents

#271 https://github.com/thepracticaldev/team/issues/177

¯_(ツ)_/¯

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Bug Fix

Description

• сhanged notifications indexes so that they take into account possible null values in user_id, organization_id, action fields Postgres allows to create records which contain the same fields if some of them contain null values, so I
  • created separate indexes for user_id and organization_id because notifications has either user_id or organization_id
  • made partial indexes for cases when action is null and when it's not null
• added specs to check that notifications are not duplicated even when validations are skipped

Before merging, all the notifications that have duplicate fields %i[user_id organization_id notifiable_id notifiable_type action] must be deleted

Related Tickets & Documents

#2525

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Bug Fix

Description

• validate usernames and organization slugs not only against each other but also against podcast slugs
• added specs to test usernames and org slugs uniqueness and not being equal to reserved words

Podcast slugs validation is in another pr #3123

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Optimization

Description

Added organization_id index to the notifications table.

Explaining query without an index:

Notification.where("organization_id = 3 and read = false").select("count(*)").explain
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=780.32..780.33 rows=1 width=8)
   ->  Seq Scan on notifications  (cost=0.00..775.94 rows=1753 width=0)
         Filter: ((NOT read) AND (organization_id = 3))
(3 rows)

With the provided index:

Notification.where("organization_id = 3 and read = false").select("count(*)").explain
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=338.36..338.37 rows=1 width=8)
   ->  Index Scan using index_notifications_on_organization_id on notifications  (cost=0.28..333.98 rows=1753 width=0)
         Index Cond: (organization_id = 3)
         Filter: (NOT read)
(4 rows)

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

I'm not sure how this is happening on production, but I guess there are page views that have time_tracked_in_seconds that is nil for specific articles. If the average results in NULL then the analytics page breaks.

This is a fix for that.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

There's a Dashboard::Pro class that was lying around, I think it predates the AnalyticsService @Zhao-Andy started. Since it's not used anywhere, I'm going to remove it

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

resolves #3024

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [x] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [x] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Rails pluck forces an additional SQL query, such query is not always needed when the objects are already in memory or the requested ID is the primary key ID.

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [ ] Feature
• [X] Bug Fix
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

In Safari reader mode, icons become simply huge. I used the unused class which is added to icons only in reader mode: .reader-image-tiny.

Default view:

Safari reader mode view:

Related Tickets & Documents

I saw nothing about that.

Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

The same on Apple smartphones

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [X] no documentation needed

[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?

(impatient given that it's my first contribution to this awesome project 🤘)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Short Links.

Describe the solution you'd like Have an alternative link which is shorter than the full article link for sharing on platforms where characters are counted against you.

Describe alternatives you've considered I can use short link tools but would feel there is more trust with the dev.to url

Additional context

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. It's a brand-new feature request.

As I am reading posts, I see many posts that are related or more advanced topic of another posts.

As an example, first post below (Testing your apps like a boss...) is an intro on how to test React components (using jest & shows mocking) while the latter (A bit about Jest mocks) is more of an in-depth post on "Jest mocks".

1. Testing your apps like a boss with React.js and Jest
2. A bit about Jest mocks

Describe the solution you'd like

This might require two features.

1. Create a new "suggested/related post" at the bottom of the post above "Classic" & "Another post you might like".
2. Add "suggest a related post" below "Suggest a Tweet".

Describe alternatives you've considered

Instead of creating a new category of "suggested/related post", we can display it as a "Another post you might like".

Additional context

May require a tag/moderator status for this feature.

Describe the bug

The UI moves or covers other UI (in the case of mobile) when an image is selected to be added to a comment.

To Reproduce

1. Go to any post and click on the image upload button of a comment.
2. Select a file for upload.
3. The file gets uploaded.
4. The text input that contains the URL of the newly uploaded image appears causing the image upload button to move up (desktop) or covers other UI (mobile).

Expected behavior

The UI should not shift or cover other UI.

Screenshots

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: macOS 10.14.5
• Browser: FireFox, Chrome, Safari
• Version: latest

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: iPhone 6 SE
• OS: iOS
• Browser: Brave
• Version: not sure

Additional context

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I occasionally find my feed clogged with posts that I guess are bots? Or users trying to push users off site.

Describe the solution you'd like Rate limit users posts per hour. Perhaps loosen limits for people who have old enough accounts and/or enough post interactions.

Describe alternatives you've considered Creating a bot to filter out any similarly titled articles?

Additional context Example of my latest feed:

Examples of users who have been created today and have posted 15+ posts each within the last 40 minutes:

Describe the bug In dev.to/dashboard, the footer is aligned more to the right compared to the center column of articles. This happens between the widths of 950 and 1119 and it seems fine for anything wider or narrower.

To Reproduce

1. Go to 'dev.to/dashboard'
2. Adjust your width to between 950 and 1119
3. Scroll down to the bottom
4. See footer

Expected behavior The footer should be centered in pages like /dashboard where there are no cards to the right or left of the center column.

Screenshots

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: MacOS
• Browser: Chrome
• Version: 75

Additional context Note that the footer is used all throughout DEV and is not always center aligned depending on what page you're on.

Describe the bug

When I click a listing on newest listings,

Sometimes I get a black screen like the screenshot below and I have to refresh the page to load the listing.

To Reproduce

Expected behavior

Load the clicked listing and show it on the screen. Screenshots

Screenshots are given above.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Mac
• Browser: Chrome
• Version:Version 74.0.3729.169 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device:
• OS:
• Browser:
• Version:

Additional context

Describe the bug Dev.to pages won't load on Facebook built-in browser

To Reproduce Open a dev.to link from a Facebook share

Expected behavior Load the page correctly

Screenshots

Smartphone

• Device: nubia z17 lite (nx591j)
• OS: Android 7.1.1
• Browser: Facebook (Browser )
• Version: 224.0.0.33.114

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Right now the reading list only displays the latest 64 items. If a user has more they can't access the other items until they've unsaved or archived "N - 64" articles.

See https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/blob/master/app/javascript/readingList/readingList.jsx#L24

Describe the solution you'd like

Either have a "Load more" button like listings have to load other items, or have infinite scrolling based pagination

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

From the homepage it is possible to see how many items there are in the reading list. Once inside https://dev.to/readinglist that information is not accessible

Describe the solution you'd like

Add the number of articles in the title.

From the current

to something like

Additional context

This number has to update anytime an item is removed or archived I guess

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. As a user, I'd like a hotkey that toggles the article preview when I'm writing a post so I don't have to manually click back and forth.

@michael-tharrington commented on Tue Jun 04 2019

Describe the bug A particular post's (https://dev.to/backendandbbq/what-does-a-tech-lead-do-1cpj) estimated reading time is 1 minute, but the post is quite long and should be given a higher estimation.

To Reproduce

1. Visit this post - https://dev.to/backendandbbq/what-does-a-tech-lead-do-1cpj
2. Look at the reading time
3. Look at the length of the article

Expected behavior I expect the reading time to be a clearer estimate. This post is much longer than a one-minute read.

Screenshots

Picture of article:

Picture of email from reporter:

Additional context The reporter also referenced another issue (O minutes in link preview) that has already been reported - https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/issues/3024.

Describe the bug

One of my articles uses various math symbols, which was fine when I wrote and published it. But today I've looked at it again and there are various encoding issues. Besides the math symbols, also plain dashes now cause issues, for instance:

[…] described situation – the GUI element identification problem […]

Which once was:

[…] described situation — the GUI element identification problem […]

You can check the expected behavior on the Medium version of the article.

To Reproduce

Go to https://dev.to/beatngu1101/a-formal-look-at-seleniums-nosuchelementexception.

Expected behavior

Compare with https://medium.com/@beatngu13/a-formal-look-at-seleniums-nosuchelementexception-bafce97df2e7.

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: macOS Mojave (10.14.5)
• Browser: Firefox Quantum (67.0.1, 64 Bit)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. A user wrote in asking if it was possible to opt out of having their GitHub link shown up next to their comments. They signed up via GitHub, but don't necessarily want their GitHub shown publicly. This option would give them more privacy.

Describe the solution you'd like We could add inputs specific to Twitter and GitHub under "Links" in the profile section of https://dev.to/settings. I'm thinking it'd be good to fill these in by default if the user signs up via one or both. However, the user could then easily visit their settings and remove what links are visible so that GH and Twitter icons could be removed.

Describe alternatives you've considered We could do the same as above but not fill in the GitHub/Twitter inputs by default. However, I think that generally these are quite nice to have, so I prefer the idea of filling them in by default.

As described in #2497, to be less dependent of DelayedJob we also need to move jobs which are created by calling delay method to ActiveJob:

Here is the list of the calls:

• [x] Slackbot.ping
• [x] reaction.create
• [x] ArticleAnalyticsFetcher.new.update_analytics
• [x] HtmlVariantSuccess.create
• [x] HtmlVariantTrial.create
• [x] message.send_push
• [x] RssReader.new.fetch_user
• [x] several calls in trigger_delayed_index
• [x] index.delay.delete_object("users-#{id}")
• [x] user.follow
• [x] chat_channel.delay.index! - https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/pull/4317

Actions for each of the calls:

• create a corresponding ActiveJob, specify a queue name
• call the required method inside a job
• replace the delay method calls with a job perform_later call
• you may need to modify the existing tests by using perform_enqueued_job instead of run_background_jobs_immediately helper

Remember to pass record ids (if needed) instead of ActiveRecord objects to a job to avoid deserialization errors (#1621)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. With the recent occurrence of spam (see issue #3091) it would be useful to have the ability to flag or ban users from their profile page. This would save time marking individual posts if an account is responsible for more than one spam-like post and/or is clearly a spam account.

Describe the solution you'd like A button or icon to flag an account - visible to everyone, and another to ban - visible for moderators and above (depending on how people feel about moderators having this ability). Once marked, the user would choose a reason for why the account has been flagged or banned, with a field to provide further context for admins similar to the report page but perhaps wrapped in a modal? I can provide a mock-up if helpful.

Describe alternatives you've considered None, as the described actions of flagging or banning users are common-place among online communities.

Additional context After finding many spam posts on the latest feed I sent a list of the offending accounts to a dev.to admin, Michael, who pointed me to issue #3091 and the suggested improvements seem like they would prevent similar activity in the future. But in the case that spam accounts still get through it would save time if all users could flag accounts, and moderators could ban these accounts. I'm aware of the report page as I mentioned above, but having direct options of flagging or banning users from the profile page feels more appropriate given the actions that would be required anyway to moderate an account once it had started posting spam.

Describe the bug I've been working with one article for about a week now. Yesterday I added an organization and moved the article to the organization. Later on I noticed upon loading the article for editing that it was missing all the meta information. The editor only contains the article text. I can see the metadata flashing before the editor boots, but it disappears after boot (as buttons appear in bottom). In addition to this the editor shows New changes (clear) in the bottom all the time.

Also if I go to settings and change between v1 and v2 version of the editor I see no change happening to the editor. I never touched the setting before but the editor changed to something visually different on it's own a week or two ago.

So far I've noticed that if I open private (Firefox or Chrome) and login there the editor works as it should, so it also seems to be linked to session somehow.

To Reproduce

I have not seen the trouble to see if this duplicates, but these are roughly the steps that have happened during the history of writing the article:

1. Login
2. Create a new unpublished article under your own name (no organization)
3. Edit the article text also on another machine or browser
4. Edit the article in the first machine/browser: swap it to organization and also change some of the meta like the title
5. Now each time you load the editor for this article it removes the meta

Expected behavior

Editor should never remove metadata for any reason.

Screenshots

Here I'm reloading the page and you can see how meta gets removed when the editor has booted:

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 10
• Browser: Firefox
• Version: 67.0.1

Moderators and admins take certain actions on the platform. Those actions can be discovered with certain breadcrumbs in our deeper app logs, the various things being created and destroyed, but we don't currently have a useful record of all actions taken.

I think it would be worth creating a table called mod_actions or something like that. It would be a table that we append to any time a mod or admin does anything. For better overall auditing of what happened and when. It would be visible to other mods within a tag and for all admins to pay attention to.

I think others might have better insights on how to think about it, but I feel like these would be my high level feature thoughts:

• Who took the action (a user ID)
• What category (tag moderation, general community moderation, admin action, etc.)
• Info about that user's mod/admin roles at the time (which could change over time but this keeps it as a moment in time
• markdown to capture all info about the action, generated contextually to include relevant links etc.
• a dedicated name/slug for the type of action it was, e.g. tag removal, downvote, vomit vote, and all the other types of actions we might take. We could keep adding to this list as we go.

It should define an API to let us drop log lines in where relevant. They should execute with the lowest footprint possible, so they should execute asynchronously.

This would be a very helpful feature! I feel like it doesn't need a ton of existing knowledge of our codebase to implement in and of itself.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. It seems like if there is a way currently to block another user on the platform, it’s not intuitive. DEV is a happy place (especially when compared to the rest of the internet!) but there are still many risks and reason someone might want to block another user.

Describe the solution you'd like An easy-to-find button on a user’s profile that says “block.” Maybe there’s a form that requests feedback for the admin team about why there’s a block (maybe that person is being abusive outside the platform and the blocker just doesn’t want to see their activity on DEV, or maybe the blocker doesn’t want/need to give feedback)

Describe alternatives you've considered Contacting an admin to request a block could be one alternative, but that might make the blocker feel they’d have to explain or justify their request, making them less likely to request the block. Requiring that much “extra work” might also drive them away from requesting the block.

Additional context tl;dr: DEV.to is a happy place, but Bad Guys on the internet will follow us around anywhere they can find us, let’s help keep users safe and protect them from content or people they don’t want to see!

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. There are no official statements/pages/documents describing the state of analytics. I've read through the open issues and existing PR's and think I understand the current state, but many users are not going to find this info on Github.

Describe the solution you'd like I do not believe the analytics API is currently available. Regardless, whatever does/doesn't exist should be clearly documented in the frontend UX. I think most users (including myself) assume that a site of Dev.to scale would have analytics available (more than basic views, and reactions) and it's nearly impossible to find information about that.

Describe alternatives you've considered Impossible from user space.

Additional context I think basic information such as

• when your content was viewed
• region/languages it was viewed from
• avg read time
• % conversion
• user entry method (linked from Twitter, Google, Direct etc...)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Both posts and comments on posts are editable, but direct messages between users are not. Regardless of preference (twitter style of no editing or slack of edit everything), the UX should be consistent throughout the site.

Describe the solution you'd like Make direct messages editable (keep history if worried about abuse).

Describe alternatives you've considered Technically you could make comments uneditable because it would be consistent. Please don't do that though.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. After a post is published, it's often necessary to make drastic changes/corrections if something was missed in the initial editing process. Un-publishing the post is perfect for this, but when you re-publish the post it goes back to the exact same place in the "queue" (latest queue for example). Dev.to does not have a simple/clear discovery mechanism or visible persistency for content, this means the updated version of the post is unlikely to be seen.

Just yesterday I made a post with a bad title. 10 minutes later I realized, changed it and got 0 views or traction because it's window had passed. I ended up deleting, and then recreating the post which felt borderline abusive. Within minutes of reposting it ended up becoming my most well received post of all time. If I had not deleted it I would have lost out on that content.

I know it was partially discussed here https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/issues/3062. But that didn't feel entirely focused around the bump aspect.

Describe the solution you'd like Add a mechanism that allows you to bump/retweet/refresh existing content so it has another discovery window.

Describe alternatives you've considered Reverse bump (users positively receiving content causes it to move up the queue) might be possible, but not great if your content is already undiscoverable.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Right now, users are able to react with 3 different emojis on each post. Although this is a fun way to interact with content, it's also a public rating mechanism for content. Anytime "points" are assigned to something, you need to worry about the way people will abuse/value those points. But because the reactions are so indirect in terms of what they represent to each user, nobody seems to use them consistently.

On the author side, this leads to a lack of visibility into how many users actually reacted to your post. You know the minimum (total reactions / 3) but not the true value.

On the poster side, if you're the type of person who gives only 1 reaction, you may perceive a post with 30 of each reaction as "Amazing". But in reality, that could have only been 10 people, not the 30 you expect.

This design would be less problematic for other platforms, but because Dev.to hides both follower counts and public page views, it leads to a potentially unhealthy feedback loop.

Describe the solution you'd like

Reader experience unchanged, they can react with 1-3 of the emojis. But externally, any number of reactions will be treated as 1 total reaction which increments the count on all of the emojis. That way, you can see the total number of unique reactions, as opposed to guessing.

Describe alternatives you've considered Always choose the reaction count with highest reactions.

Describe the bug

If you publish a post with any cover image, then you edit it and change the cover image again and you try to tweet the article, Tweeter only shows the first cover image you set. It's the same for the title if you changed it after first publication.

To Reproduce

1. Publish an article with a cover image
2. Share it on tweeter
3. Edit your post and change the cover image or the title
4. Share it on Tweeter again (error is here for title and cover image)

Expected behavior

Tweeter must show the latest cover image

Screenshots

The post's cover image and title:

The tweet (with the initial post's cover image and title)

Describe the bug

The top parameter in the query string does not top the results.

To Reproduce

Without tag: https://dev.to/api/articles?top=2

With tag: https://dev.to/api/articles?tag=react&top=2

Something weird:

This does top the results https://dev.to/api/articles?tag=Angular&top=2

While this does not https://dev.to/api/articles?tag=Angular&top=1 https://dev.to/api/articles?tag=Angular&top=3

Expected behavior

I would expect that the results would be topped, for example top=2 should return 2 results.

Additional context

There are tests written on the API, but these aren't validating the length of the returned results https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/blob/master/spec/requests/api/v0/articles_spec.rb#L56

Describe the bug Two days ago, I tried to open the app and it just shows me the offline screen (see screenshot).

I have been using the app for more than a month without any issues. But since two days ago I always get this error. I can't do anything, like logout or something.

If I open Google Chrome and type "dev.to" I can use the web app without any problems. Only the apps returns me this error.

To Reproduce I am sorry, I hate to tell you this but I really don't know how to reproduce. I was just using it and one day I tried and it started to show me the error screen. From that day, it always does that and I can't do anything.

I am a software developer and I hate when people report a bug and tell me they don't know how to reproduce... But it is the case here. 😞

Expected behavior Show the dev.to feed

Screenshots

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
• OS: Android
• Version 8.0.0

Additional context

I don't know what happened. Let me know what I can do to get more data to help you.

Describe the bug A clear and concise description of what the bug is.

I keep getting the error about URL does not exist when trying to save posts - please see attached screenshot. It was using the DEV app on Android.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior: Log into account via mobile app. Click on edit for one of your articles Click on save The error appeared

NOTE! This error only was raised when trying to save some articles but not all of them so I cannot tell what the cause is or how to reliably reproduce the issue.

Expected behavior A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

You should click on save and it doesn't show the error and it successfully updated the article.

Screenshots If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: Samsung A50
• OS: Android 9
• Version 9

Additional context Add any other context about the problem here.