Mostly Mochi pics in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone,

Happy new year, Lunar and otherwise! It’s been a bit since I last wrote, and I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday season and your 2020 is off to a great start.

Before I go any further, I wanted to touch a bit on why it’s been so long between updates.

I said when I took over PB almost two years ago (!!!!) that I would be honest with all of you, so I feel obligated to open up and and share that I’ve been going through an extremely rough patch over the last six months or so. I’ve been grappling with profound burnout in my professional life, and it’s been a journey to pull myself out of it. Picking up the pieces and moving forward has been a daily uphill battle. And, unfortunately, one of the casualties of that battle has been communication. In all aspects of my life. Until recently, on most days the best I could manage was autopilot.

Thankfully, I’m now able to share that I’ve recently turned a corner, and am feeling energized and ready to tackle whatever comes next. 2020 here I come!

While all of this was going on, I’ve found solace in quietly working on Prosebox. I’m eternally grateful for all of you, and I apologize for not being good at communicating lately. That’s going to change.

So, what have I been working on?

As you may have noticed, there has been a lot of spam lately. A big thanks to everyone that’s sent me emails pointing me towards offenders. And repeat offenders. And the other ones. It’s a lot. And it’s getting steadily worse.

In addition, I get a few complaints every month about hate speech or harassment. This is unfortunate, but it’s the reality of running a community. Usually these issues are resolved via email, but sometimes I miss things or am not able to respond quickly enough.

To make both of these problems easier to handle, I’ve been working on a new feature: flagging.

The first version will be focused on entries, but I hope to roll it out to comments and journals eventually as we iron out the bugs. This feature will empower all of you to raise a red flag on anything you see that breaks the site rules. The flagged entry will be saved and sent to an admin dashboard for review. That way I have a single place to review any of the issues that might come up.

As a reminder, hate speech and harassment are not tolerated on Prosebox. Until this feature rolls out, you can always contact me and I’ll do my best to resolve the situation.

In addition to flagging, security is going to be a big focus for me over the next few months. There have been a few issues happening in a non-visible way that I’ve been fighting off with the help of the developer over the last several months, and I’m confident we’ll find more as time goes on. In short, the code base that Prosebox is running on grows older every year, and unfortunately that means occasional but ongoing work to keep things secure.

Finally, I wanted to touch on the navigation research I did with PJ. I have the results, but need to work with her to synthesize them into something shareable. I’m happy to say there wont be and big changes to the navigation, but there are some places we can make some minor improvements that will make everyone’s life a little bit easier. More on that soon!!

I’m happy to be writing again. I’ve missed speaking with all of you. How have you been?

Mochi’s been well, but it’s been an eventful few months.

He had to dress up as a martini because he had a lil sore on his back foot:

But he’s doing well now:

We traveled home for the holidays:

And a few weeks ago he dressed up as the cutest lion for the lunar new year parade:

More soon.

<3,
-J

Last updated February 12, 2020