Waterhole 0.3

Waterhole 0.3 is here with pinned posts, comment hiding, smart mention suggestions, performance improvements, and a ton of other improvements and fixes.

Highlights

0.3 contains some essential features to help manage posts and comments in your community, improve the user experience when posting, and more. To explore all the smaller details, check out the Release Notes.

Pinned Posts

Moderators can now pin important posts to the top of the feed to give them increased visibility and make sure they can't be missed. You can have as many posts pinned as you like, although it's recommended to only pin one or two at a time so they don't take up too much space.

Comment Hiding

As an alternative to being deleted permanently, comments can now be hidden to clean up a discussion. Anyone can expand a hidden comment to read it in full. Moderators can also specify a reason for hiding a comment – such as off-topic, inappropriate, or spam – which will be displayed on the collapsed comment.

Post Trash

Instead of deleting posts and all of their comments permanently, posts can now be moved to the trash, allowing them to be recovered if needed. Only admins and moderators can view trashed posts.

Smart Mention Suggestions

When you type the @ character while writing a comment, Waterhole will now suggest recent commenters as well as the original poster. Additionally, your comment will be marked as a reply to the selected user's most recent comment in the thread.

Performance Improvements

Waterhole is now even faster thanks to a few optimisations. In particular, reaction users and action menus now load lazily, speeding up page loads. The default number of posts and comments per page has also been slightly reduced, though this is configurable.

Other Improvements

There are a whole range of minor enhancements and bug fixes, including:

• Add a Comment button in the post sidebar
• Use a more compact layout for comments on small screens
• Use color to make search result keyword highlights more prominent
• Get a "mention" notification when someone replies to your comment
• Make "follow posts I comment on" preference also automatically follow posts you create
• Limit one notification per user per new comment
• Show links in channel picker when creating new posts

Upgrading From 0.2

In your composer.json file, change the waterhole/core requirement:

- "waterhole/core": "^0.2"
+ "waterhole/core": "^0.3"

Then run:

composer update waterhole/core --with-dependencies
php artisan migrate
php artisan waterhole:cache:clear

What's Next

The next release, 0.4, will focus on integrations: single sign-on with external authentication providers, integration into existing Laravel apps, and a JSON API so you can read and write forum data outside of Waterhole.