I'm still surprised how hard the female Draco Malfoy went viral

Hey everyone. All this time I've been working on new features. Most of them are built for goon-scrolling, but they can easily move over to the main app too. Please read the whole announcement. There are polls at the end and I really want your answers on them.

There are a lot of pictures and videos in this one, for those of you who don't like reading.

For those who are out of the loop: there's a new test app at test.rule34.xyz. That's where most of what's described below lives.

AI power

Some of you hate me for using AI.

Don't get me wrong. I had two options. Either I don't use AI at all, and then I only have enough time and energy to keep the sites running as they are, fix what breaks and add something new once in a while. Or I use AI and get to actually build a lot of new features for you.

As you can tell, I've already made that choice.

To the haters: I piss on your faces. Go back to your caves and deny progress there.

On to what's new...

Playlists in app-next

Playlists got a serious rework for the new goon-scrolling site. The preview now shows the last 4 posts instead of one.

And this is what a playlist itself looks like

Mobile UI

Desktop UI

Adding posts to a playlist

The way you add posts to playlists has been reworked too.

You can also add the same post to several playlists at once. Either long-press the post to enter multi-select mode, or tap the circle on the edge of the playlist card.

If you open this dialog again, you can uncheck playlists to remove the post from several of them at once.

All of the new UI works on desktop as well.

Everything else about playlists stays the same. You can still find the playlists you follow, edit them, create new ones and delete them.

New post viewer

It now shows a lot more useful information. There's a mobile version and a desktop version.

Ambient mode

Before, there was just a black screen behind the video. Now there's ambient lighting that adapts to what's on screen. You can turn it off.

Scrubbing

Scrub through a video by dragging your finger left or right anywhere on the frame. No more trying to hit the progress bar.

Viewer settings

A unified file manager

Until now, only post files worked properly on the server. Every other file in the system was scattered around, and each part of the site had its own way of handling and managing them. That made a lot of features hard to build: custom playlist covers, animated avatars, tag images and so on.

Long story short, I built that system. Working with any file on the server is now much easier, and it opened up things that simply weren't possible before. Here's what the site can do now:

Yes, animated avatars are real now. They will be premium only.

Video avatars are visible to other users on your profile and next to your comments.

On top of that, user files are now encoded to AVIF and AV1, so they take up less space without losing quality.

Profile and account settings

The user profile got a small redesign. You saw it in the video above.

I also completely rebuilt the account settings pages. I added a lot of new pages so you can customize as much as possible, and I don't plan to stop there. There are a lot of screenshots, so I'll leave just one.

New UX and features for the current sites

As I said before, the new site and the old one live in the same repository, so some features can be shared between them.

So the current sites don't get left behind, here's what I added:

Updated filter UI across many sections of the site, with tag filtering

Filtering and sorting for posts inside a playlist

Random sorting is in too

And a list of smaller improvements:

• Bottom sheets now close with a swipe down
• An auth error (401) no longer logs you out
• Likes show up in the counter immediately, no more waiting for the cache to refresh
• The goon-scrolling feed is faster on long scrolls
• Taps made before the page fully loads are no longer lost
• Tag search moved to a new index and should be faster

Polls

Before you vote, I strongly recommend going to the new site and trying the features I described, so you have a feel for how they actually work.

test.rule34.xyz

I would happily move all of this to the current sites right away, but I have a rule for myself: the current sites should stay conservative and stable, and goon-scrolling is my vision. So if you like the redesign, make sure you vote.

The new changes will land on rule34.world and rule34vault.com within a day or two.

A full release of goon-scrolling will take another 2 or 3 updates of this size. And what do you think of the name "goon-scrolling"? Any suggestions?

Honestly, I'm a bit burned out. This update drained a lot out of me, so I want to take it easy for a while.

Have a good day everyone. Love and kisses.