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.