Enhanced Experience

v1.24.0 - Enhanced Experience

This update consists primarily of improvements to the UI / UX. Fixing or adding Quality of life features. Improving or expanding existing systems primarily.

Minor Tweaks

• Updates report page: Adds a subject field to report form (previously reports were too vague / did not include the user who the report was written about). Now we can capture exactly who a report is concerning. The discord report bot also reflects this enhancement with the subject field.
• /graph improvements by @diingus
• Enable @'s in local by default
• Increased default TTS rate to 125%
• Reduced size of UI for TTS settings
• Increased chat FAB size
• Made chat FAB accent purple instead of primary blue to ensure it stands out
• Relocated chat FAB to bottom center as users were not seeing the button at the top of chat.
• Fixed /skip command getting sent to the chat.
• Improved lazy-loading of many components
• Add missing version property to all footer instances. Bitwave version now shown at the bottom of most pages.
• Improved chat scroll detection
• Improved chat scroll response
• Delay rendering streamer list in side navigation to improve perceived chat speed (fewer items attempting to load immediately at the same time reduce the hit to the CPU, and makes the page feel more responsive despite the time required for a full page load taking longer. This is similar to how many other sites work in that the primary skeleton application is loaded without content, and content is hydrated after initial load.
• This also reduces the load on SSR, which we immediately negated with the improvements made to SSR.
• Do not scrollToBottom on messages that do not get added to our chat. This means if another channel is spamming and you are ignoring that channel, the messages sent that do not render will not trigger a scroll down action. Previously this was not the case and could cause really weird / buggy scrolling behavior if you were not aware of the cause. This also increases performance when in a quiet local chat and a global chat is being spammed.
• Reduction of "forced scroll" timer from 1/4 second to 1/8 second. After a message is added, we attempt to smooth scroll the chat to the bottom. If we do not make it to the bottom of chat with in 1/8th seconds, we will simply trigger an instant jump scroll to the bottom. This ensure we cannot fall too far behind the live edge of chat.
• Rotate nav drawer icon on expand / collapse.
• Reduced min heights for channel descriptions and tabs from 750px / 500px to a consistent 300px. This means it's possible that our footer does not appear at the exact bottom of our pages, but this is more acceptable than being buried 750px below an empty description.
• Many minor UI tweaks, padding / margin adjustments.
• Fixed dense chat not applying to appended chat messages. Now all big text chat messages will be shrunk when dense chat is enabled.
• Decrease big text shrunken font size from 1rem to 0.95rem to compensate for the bold appearance that is maintained. This makes dense chats appear to be the same size as regular text despite being slightly smaller in reality.
• Reduced left padding of chat so that padding is symmetrical and uniform.

New Introductions

• Login dialog completely rewritten.
• hCaptcha support added to registration form.
• reCAPTCHA removed from codebase.
• Smart registration form: username is now verified against database live, so you do not have to wait for a full form submission before finding out the username you wanted has already been taken.
• Better form validation, and performance improvements due to better validation rules.
• Streamer Countdown timer support added. UI now has the ability to display a countdown to when a stream is scheduled to go live, and a message to display when streamer has not started their broadcast and the scheduled time has past. There is no UI to schedule a stream yet.
• Tooltips added to some chat settings options to help explain what various settings are for / what various settings do.
• Added recursive ignroes by @diingus which ignore messages that mention users you have ignored. Making ignored users more ignored.
• Removed nuxt-link from the entire chat, greatly improving the performance of chat.
• Greatly improved SSR for channel pages. Channel descriptions will not be pre-rendered on the server
• Added support for ?tab=replays in channel URL to specify active tab on channel page. Fully supports SSR.
• Added separation to chat settings options
• Improved logic for enabling / disabling parts of chat settings so behavior matches up with expected use cases better.
• Adds tri-spinner custom loading animation to video player.
• Adds more text commands and adds more autocomplete suggestions for text commands.
• Adds /purgeusers and /purgechannels options for purging users ignores and channel ignores.

Mostly minor UX/UI tweaks here, but important to the look and feel and of the platform.
Performance improvements should additionally help improve loading and stability on weaker hardware and reduce battery drain.
Performance upgrades should also help increase max capacity limitation by preventing the site from crashing prematurely due to spam.
hCaptcha should reduce the number of garbage throw away accounts created without having to resort to stricter validation forms such as email validation prematurely, thus preventing the user accounts database from inflating (and slowing down) unduly.

This should greatly improve the user experience for all, regardless of use case. Spam is more efficient. Pages load quicker. User registration is more intelligent. Privacy concerns over reCAPTCHA have been alleviated. Streamers will be able to schedule streams soon. New users will be able to understand chat settings with less difficulty. Client side chat filtering is improved for those who wish to have a less spam-filled experience.

v1.23.1 - Simple Patches

Minor QoL improvements.

• Player sets to 1x speed once live edge is hit
• Fix overflowing description w/wide code blocks
• Add bulk unignore commands
• hindex code merged

v1.23.0 - Streamer Authority

Overview of new features & components:

• Create Dashboard page
• Admin menu / Admin tools consolidated into single drop-down menu:
• Old admin menu location replaced with channel management tools
• Chat Configuration Added
• Viewing & Unmuting Users Menu Added
• Adds Custom Loading Spinner

This update revolves around improving and increasing streamer authority on the bitwave.tv platform. Improvements to support expanded streamer control and via chat configuration have been added. A UI System for reviewing and managing channel mutes has been added. A (basic) streamer dashboard has been created for better oversight of overall stream activity and interaction.

This is far from being a feature complete system, but adds many missing Quality of Life (QoL) features that streamers might expect from other top platforms, and creates the foundational pillars for expanding and improving the current set of tooling.

Screenshots:

Streamer Dashboard Preview

Admin menu / Admin tools consolidated into single drop-down menu:

Old admin menu location replaced with channel management tools

Chat Configuration Added

Viewing & Unmuting Users Menu Added

Adds Custom Loading Spinner

v1.23.0-alpha - Streamer Authority

Overview of new features & components:

• Create Dashboard page
• Admin menu / Admin tools consolidated into single drop-down menu:
• Old admin menu location replaced with channel management tools
• Chat Configuration Added
• Viewing & Unmuting Users Menu Added
• Adds Custom Loading Spinner

This update revolves around improving and increasing streamer authority on the bitwave.tv platform. Improvements to support expanded streamer control and via chat configuration have been added. A UI System for reviewing and managing channel mutes has been added. A (basic) streamer dashboard has been created for better oversight of overall stream activity and interaction.

This is far from being a feature complete system, but adds many missing Quality of Life (QoL) features that streamers might expect from other top platforms, and creates the foundational pillars for expanding and improving the current set of tooling.

THIS IS PRE-PRODUCTION AND INCLUDES KNOWN BLOCKING BUGS RELATED TO HYDRATION. - DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION.

Previews:

Streamer Dashboard Preview

Admin menu / Admin tools consolidated into single drop-down menu:

Old admin menu location replaced with channel management tools

Chat Configuration Added

Viewing & Unmuting Users Menu Added

Adds Custom Loading Spinner

NOTE: WORK IN PROGRESS ALPHA - INCLUDES KNOWN BUGS AND ISSUES RELATED TO HYDRATION

v1.22.2

v1.22.2 Summary

This is a substantial update, upgrade and overhaul over multiple aspects of the front end.

The primary focus being on:

1. Chat refactored and library introduction, unifying our our chat SDK and front end repos
2. Video.js upgrade and Improvements
3. API Upgrades
4. Chat rendering performance improvements
5. Redesigning chat settings

Specific Details:

• toast message improvements
• Chat settings redesigned
• Chat rewritten
• Creation of bitwave chat related library
• New & Improved chat statistics
• Mute API
• Faster SSR, less variation in SSR results
• Improved Chat Alerts
• Chat Alert TTS
• Better push notification documentation for brave
• Additional methods to report bugs in case you cannot type in the chat box
• Multiple UI refactorings to separate components better
• new http-streaming version
• new video.js version
• fixes background tabs freezing when inactive for a long time
• fixes occasional and obscure video loading issues
• Fixed DVR not available until 30 seconds after stream is live
• Improve UI live config
• Minor spacing / padding / typo issues resolved.
• Nuxt 2.13+ update
• Converted some models into new import methodology
• FIxed components that shared the same name.
• Fixed chat scroll on hydration issues
• Fix chat not always loading hydration data.
• Added additional CSS text styling options
• Updated homepage banner / Message of the day from "Freedom of Expression" to "Open Platform"
• Improved TTS function
• Improved chat's banner message
• Filter alerts to channel
• Switched API for variety of services.
• Improved share link for twitter
• Added option to purchase color in the same menu as coins.
• Dependency, library, and OS upgrades.
• Improved chat's performance handling during large amounts of chatting / spamming / raiding
• Investigating solutions with similar small companies to establish mutually beneficial relations

Regressions

• Removed polls temporarily
• Removed whispers temporarily

Both are currently broken, so not having them fully implemented currently means we should likely show a message to the user.

Summary

This update has taken 23 days to complete, is still not feature complete, but has substantial feature fixes that are urgently needed on production servers.

Additional features / flaws should be report via discord or github for us to address. We can optionally rollback to an older version is absolutely needed.

v1.21.9

Tagging this release in case a rollback is needed from 1.22.x

v1.20.1 - Improved Chat Functionality

New Features

• TTS option to read usernames
• Set max TTS duration
• Receive @'s from global chat while in local
• Replay Thumbnails

Other

• Replays player will get cover image from thumbnails
• Better thumbnail support for replays in various locations
• Fixed /local and /global chat commands not toggling setting
• Converted streamerlist sidebar to new fetch API
• Removed sidebar code from vuex
• TTS timeout

Contributed by @diingus

• TTS warning shown if no voices found
• Added option for TTS to read out usernames
• Added support for dragging and dropping emotes into the chat box
• Added support for receiving @'s from global chat while in local chat
• TTS timeout for limiting max TTS duration

v1.19.0 - Chat Alerts

New Features:

Create API endpoints and payment processing handling for chat alerts, a basic implementation of a monetized feature.

Users are now able to buy and spend credits on chat alerts. Additional features to be added to the alert system in the future. At the current time, they are fairly simple, but usage will determine the direction over time.

Bug Fixes:

• Show all users by default in viewerlist
• Reduce chat alert padding
• Support custom colored alerts.

v1.18.8 - Base Support for New Features

New Features Being Tested

• Chat Alerts: 5d93b75
• Custom Stream Covers: 333a6ca

Chat alerts mark the first expansion of the socket expansion, with the ability to deliver additional data and messages into chatrooms, independent of user messages. This is the first step in creating site-wide chat announcements as an alternative to site-wide banners. Channel announcements, channel notifications, and additional data structures.

Custom Stream Covers mark an expansion of bitwave's backend API services and expanded image processing capabilities. Uploaded images are recorded to each user, uploaded and resized to the required size (scaling up, and adding black bars if necessary) to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio at 720p. Improved asset tracking and ownership allows us to ensure users cannot delete each other's files, and we can removed unused assets when no longer in use.

These are the first steps we need in order to build additional scaffolding on in order to support additional features such as custom emotes.

This initial release is not changing anything the day-to-day user will see, but allows for further expansion and feature usage through server side updates and account flags, allowing us to do a slow rollout.

v1.18.6

Fixes:

• #152 - Fix regression: TTS rate cannot be changed