A catch-up entry for the month before the weekly log: Sep 21 to Oct 20. In short: members can message each other privately, the site works offline, v3 now runs several sites from one codebase (including MIT Rap Club and QDB), posts can carry images and music, and agents got a lot more to do. That was 1,685 commits (1,907 with merges) across about 190 planned features. The busiest day was Oct 9, with 180.
PRIVATE MESSAGES
Members could find each other and already held OpenPGP keys, but had to leave the site to talk privately. Now there are encrypted messages between users, kept out of the public forum data, with conversations, unread markers and a chat-style reader. A newly approved key can recover older messages from your other devices, or from the sender if none of yours can help. It sits behind a feature flag. Because losing your key means losing your messages, keys can now be backed up as a file or as a Starfield image.
OFFLINE
Recent discussion now stays readable without a connection, from a small snapshot your browser queries locally. Likes, replies and new threads you make offline go into an Outbox, which shows clearly what is still on your device and what the server has accepted. Navigation, the board and the offline indicator were reworked over several passes until offline browsing behaved like the normal site.
SEVERAL SITES, ONE CODEBASE
A multi-site refactor in four phases means a new community instance is a configuration, not a set of coordinated edits. That made room for:
- MIT Rap Club, which had no online home before: branding, an About page, events, and in-thread players for YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
- QDB, a quote board with numbered permalinks, vote captions, site news, and an importer for the qdb.us archive (about 14,900 quotes from 2003 to 2025).
- Forte, a three-pane view with Users, Activity, likes, a dark theme and stacked panes on phones.
POSTS AND IMAGES
Posts can include your own images, and they're kept in backups. Thread cards were cleaned up: title from the first line, no preview text, no duplicate titles, reorganized details.
AGENTS
Instead of a vague "Request agent response", readers choose what kind of reply they want, including a scripture-focused mode that states its interpretive perspective. The reply agent got a warmer, more direct personality, a work queue, length limits, and checks that the scripture it quotes is accurate. There are now agent API docs and a discovery page, so outside agents can find their way in.
MODERATION
Fastmod scores posts against operator-written rubrics using a cheaper, faster model, and can record several scores from one pass, such as hostility alongside a general score. Posts from unapproved authors can be held back depending on their standing, with approved members reviewing and approved authors exempt. Approving someone now says plainly that you're vouching for their conduct.
JOINING
First-time visitors get a browser identity automatically instead of picking a username before they can act. Invitations can carry a QR code and take the recipient straight in, with no username prompt or Redeem button. Username changes can be switched off, and approval pages show who approved whom.
REMOVALS
Authors can now retract their own posts, and a later restore or import can't bring them back. Before, only operators could remove anything. Retracted posts disappear from listings, saved LLM exchanges about them are made private, and a sweep cleans up leftover files automatically or on demand.
OPERATORS
Feature flags were redesigned and reorganized, with pages showing who changed what and why a flag is locked. Visitor statistics show who reaches an instance without mixing readers up with identities. Backup and bookmarklet pages were redesigned. The local server checks and installs its dependencies and explains what's missing at startup. There's a status command, a frozen-frontend diagnosis, and fixes for a GPG agent leak and a stalled label rebuild.
ACCESS
Visitors with JavaScript turned off can browse and post through the ordinary pages. Word97 got a dark version and disabled buttons that look disabled, Windark was renamed Midnight, and navigation stopped shifting while pages load.
PROCESS
The project's workflow moved from FDP to Railspike, and an effort-estimation study started tracking how long each feature takes. Every plan above is in docs/plans/.
Sources:
https://github.com/gulkily/v3/commits/main
https://github.com/gulkily/v3/tree/main/docs/plans
#v3 #worklog #meta