Just a quick announcement to all subverse owners that Voat will be changing the default menu in less than a week (target is the 15th of this month).

Some subverses need to fix their CSS as the underlying HTML has changed. Cashmere on Light Theme is a known problem for example.

To change your menu from the current one (legacy) to the new one (dashboard) you can simply use a query string on any url on the site.

What we are talking about:

Picture of Dashboard Menu

Turns on new Dashboard Menu:

?menu=dashboard Turn On New Dashboard Menu

Turns on Legacy Menu:

?menu=legacy Turn On Legacy Menu

The HTML of the menu has been changed (top bar as well as drop down), even though we did try to make it as backwards compatible as possible by including as much of the old css attributes as possible. Please see comments in HTML.

Now is the time if we need to make any improvements or fixes to anything related to the new dashboard menu or html. Please post dev related stuff to the existing thread here: https://voat.co/v/voatdev/1689138

Thanks Voat.

Canary

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

I’ve banned all Sane alts (while leaving the main account alone) for spamming. If Sane (or his group) wants to post on Voat, they can do so without using alts to hide behind, thus preventing their main accounts from being downvoted and thus restricted. I am done letting this group stomp all over Voat unfettered* like a spoiled toddler and pushing me to enact draconian rules to prevent them from doing so.

Don’t for a second be fooled at the motivations this group has for Voat, they seek not to help. They seek only to force censorship, drive away users, and ultimately destroy Voat while ruining Voat’s commitment to Freedom of Speech. I will not let them win.

They setup an unwinnable situation for Voat, and no matter Voat’s action, they can claim a victory.

If Voat bans them, they claim censorship. If Voat does nothing, reasonable users depart. Regardless of the action, a user subset will be infuriated, and this is entirely the purpose, divide and conquer. We all need to recognize exactly what is happening here. This isn’t about a single user, this is about an organized effort.

If you ever wondered why Reddit has so many private and obfuscated areas in code, fuzzed counters, shadow bans, etc.? It is to stop groups like this. The problem is, as you all know, once this code is implemented it can be used for both good and evil. I choose not to use the little time available on such things, and will instead ban users who engage in Amalek/ManHood101 style spamming in order to maliciously claim censorship later.

A user is free to say whatever they wish, but if they resort to using alt accounts in order to circumvent the protections we do have, these alt accounts will be banned for spamming.

I’m also pulling Sane off v/TIL and v/ReportShills and moving both to @system. Both these subs were transferred to “him” and “he” has not been a good steward. What a joke. Enough of this as well.

* Screenshot taken from statistics page located at https://voat.co/statistics

--

Canary https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

Today Voat pushed an update meant to address three things: Vote manipulation, Archiving Data, and Feature Prep. I will keep this announcement as short as possible.

Vote Manipulation

I have been researching vote farming and brigading for about a month. And honestly, I’m pissed off. What I have found is simply unacceptable. These actions destroy Voat’s credibility and value and will be actively developed against. The following actions have been taken to increase vote integrity:

• Users no longer earn CCP in Private Subverses (Common farming technique)
• Users no longer earn CCP in Subverses with Minimum Downvote values greater than zero (Common farming technique)
• User deleted comments have their positive CCP removed (Common farming technique)

Archiving Data

• Voat is now archiving old submissions (current set to 3 months).
• Archived and Deleted Submissions, and their comments, can no longer be voted on.
• Vote counts are using individual vote counts instead of the up/down totals on comments/submissions*
• Users with High SCP/CCP should see an improvement accessing Voat when data isn’t in cache

* Please note that all point values will drop because of this new logic. Prior logic counted up/down totals on submissions and comments instead of the individual votes themselves (it was more performant this way). When a user deletes their account, their votes are removed but the up/down totals are not adjusted. Since new logic uses individual vote counts everyone’s points will be dropping unfortunately. Just heads up. @Atko was hit the worst of all, poor guy.

Future Feature Prep

• Schema changes were made to prepare for the re-release of Sets (grouping of multiple subverses). Voat will begin set development next week as we have designed many upcoming features upon this basic structural concept including categorization, new user centric functionality (more info soon), expanded and more functional blocking capabilities, and the concept of “following” users who publish feeds (more info soon).
• Naming conventions and indexing has been cleaned up in database.

Warning to Vote Brigadiers

I will shortly be banning hundreds of obvious alt accounts used to farm/brigade at Voat. While researching this problem, I noticed that no one is really innocent, meaning that we have both obvious farming/brigading going on but we also have this behavior from good solid users too. It is for this reason that I am not retroactively banning any accounts other than the obvious ones mentioned above.

From this point forward, if you brigade another users’ content your account will be banned.

Consider this fair warning that brigading and manipulating votes is no longer tolerated at Voat.

There is a new Sheriff in town.

Canary Notice:

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

Well folks, it’s done.

The biggest update in Voat’s history has just taken place.

If we did it right you will notice absolutely nothing, and this is actually a good thing.

Some Additional Info

For those that are curious, Voat has just replaced its original runtime engine with a more dynamic and flexible infrastructure that will be necessary for expanding in the future.

Everything at Voat is now organized using Sets (a logical grouping of subverses). Sets, while rather simple in their concept, will allow Voat to introduce unique concepts in the near future, and thus we had to really invest in converting Voat over to this structure. We fully committed to this direction.

You will now notice that your subscriptions are organized into a Set called Front. Your blocked subverses are also organized into a Set, a set called Blocked. You can access your Sets by entering your profile and clicking on the Sets tab.

Please note that because of the size of this update (it touched nearly all code) we have disabled creating user sets until we can spend a bit of time monitoring the set code and are able to determine it is functioning as expected.

Testers

I want to personally thank the many users who reached out and helped test the preview version of this release. No one but people familiar with software can truly understand how intimidating large updates can be. You guys found countless issues that we would have never discovered before going live. I can’t thank you enough for breaking things!

To honor your willingness to contribute and help Voat, I have badged all the users who I sent an invite to.

Here is to the future Voat! Stay tuned.

Please report any issues to v/voatdev

Canary

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

This is just a quick message for anyone visiting Voat for the first time.

We have a known blocking issue in our code base. This means that the site is being a spoiled rotten no good son of... often will toggle off for about 10 seconds and then turn itself back on.

It truly is the most annoying bug you can imagine and we are just so happy to have it along for the ride. To make matters worse, response times are very poor do to traffic.

So heads up, it's a little like a goat track around here right now.

For two guys with fulltime jobs it is not easy to dedicate the time to find such an obscure bug. As we often do, we have to apologize.

Many apologies everyone. We hate it too.

What we don't have at Voat:

• Server Farms
• Engineers (or even employees for that matter)
• Infrastructure budget
• Marketing department
• Salaries ;)

What we do have:

• Freedom of Speech
• Annoying bugs
• Goats

Anyways, just wanted to say welcome to any new people and we hope that what we have outweighs what we don't have.

If you have the means, please consider donating. Every bit helps and means a lot to both of us. https://store.voat.co/donations

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

During the past 24 hours we have witnessed a large influx of new users. Current stats show that Voat has been visited by 168,213 people in the last 24 hours alone, making 9,571,200 requests and burning through 117 GB of bandwidth. We are currently running at 300% our normal volume. You can see the spike very clearly here.

Because of this, we were forced to scale up our hardware to accommodate the new users, but this will incur significant costs which we won’t be able to cover without your help. Voat gets money primarily from your donations and ad-sales, but ad-sales have so far been unable to cover the expenses. In the past 24 hours, we have received $1,085 in donations and ad-orders through our store http://store.voat.co, and $180 through bitcoin. This is amazing and we sincerely thank you for every dollar you contribute to keep Voat online, but our past experience shows that donations and ads combined can no longer cover Voat hosting fees.

Voat also has a major flaw: we have no fulltime staff. Voat is currently managed by two people who have full time jobs “on the side”, which makes things very complicated. Voat needs fulltime staff to monitor the servers, respond to support and abuse emails, process donations and keep the wheels turning. With donations alone, this has not been possible so far, resulting in poor site performance and user experience.

We have all witnessed in one way or another how a website which takes on investors can slowly degrade and become outright unusable. Given our commitment to Freedom of Speech, we have to be very careful about who we partner with. Because of this, we have rejected several offers from investors who we believe would not be compatible with Voat’s core philosophy. For the record, we have had investment offers from all over the world during the past 2 years, many of which we were either too busy to entertain or too concerned with underlying motives of the parties involved.

So, what do we do?

We want to keep Voat alive. We want to be able to work full time on what we love and do best. We don’t want to change what Voat stands for or Voat’s core principles, and thus we need your help. If you have contacts or relationships with potential investors who also believe in and support our Freedom of Speech commitment, please let us know and please let them know that we need their help.

Until we have a permanent solution, we need you to donate, buy ads and merchandise (to be announced soon). Every bit helps.

Edit 1: typos

This announcement is going to be both fun and serious. First for the fun side.

The Fun Part

After a lot of work, we have finally put something together on merchandise. We are very excited to offer two high quality items:

• December 2016 Limited Edition (DEC16) t-shirts (even women’s cut) and hoodies.
• Vinyl stickers in four different formats and three sizes (including the adorable Voat Goat)

Please note that all the t-shirts and hoodies are Limited Edition releases, meaning that Voat will never release the same design again in the future. In other words, if you don’t pick one up now you won’t be able to do so in the future. Ever.

DEC16 Limited Edition Merchandise:

https://store.voat.co/official-voat-merchandise

P.S.

In order to help Voat market we are selling the sticker packs at cost. Our thoughts are that you can stick them all over and have enough to give friends.

Black Sticker Pack:

https://store.voat.co/voat-sticker-pack-black

White Sticker Pack:

https://store.voat.co/voat-sticker-pack-white

All credit to an old time Whoaverser @Zinnsee for the idea! Thank you fellow owlcat. ;)

The Serious Part

As you all know, Voat has not finalized financing. This means we are ENTIRELY user supported (from viewers like you!). This is where things get serious: If we cannot sustain operation costs via donations and merchandise our runway is limited. By purchasing Voat merchandise you help in two very important ways: It helps keep Voat running, and secondly you are helping Voat with grassroots marketing. Both are critical to our community’s future.

To save costs in production and fulfillment we will only be taking orders for a short duration on the limited-edition t-shirts and hoodies. Afterwards ordering will be closed. When the window closes, orders will be tallied, materials will be ordered, shirts and stickers will be produced (in a single run), and then shipped out. This allows for our partner on this venture (a fellow Voater) to produce in the most cost effective and efficient manner. In fact, I have to really commend our partner on this deal as he is sacrificing his profit to maximize Voat’s. He is doing this because he, like so many of us, values Free Speech.

EDIT(S)

Sharing a short vid from part of the sticker manufacturing process: https://voat.co/v/voatmerch/1468618

Cut off date for DEC16 LE Shirts/Hoodies:

@VoatMerch: The cutoff for wearables is Dec. 12th 7pm UTC. The cutoff for Vinyl Decals is Dec. 16 7pm UTC

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

Ever since I graduated and moved from Sweden to Switzerland and started my first full time job here in Zurich, working for Voat became increasingly difficult for me. A project of passion and learning turned into one of business administration, community management, and essentially a 2nd job. A nonpaying, yet rather stressful and demanding job.

I started Voat under the name “forbidme” (which later became Whoaverse, which later became Voat) because I wanted to learn more about .NET and web development in general, but as more and more people started to use it, it became clear to me that there was a need for a platform like Voat. I never imagined that Voat would grow this big or mature the way it has. I’ve been through so much with Voat during these past 3 years, and if I could go back in time and face the same challenges, the same victories, and the same defeats - I would do it all over again!

Today though, primarily thanks to PuttItOut, Voat is a stable and scalable platform which happily serves over a million monthly unique visitors. I was the guy who had the crazy idea to start this project but now, 3 years later, I feel that it is time for someone else to assume this role.

Effective as of this announcement, and with a heavy heart, I am resigning as CEO of Voat, Inc. and handing over my role to PuttItOut. PuttItOut has been with me side-by-side through all the ups and downs, all the long nights, all the difficult conversations, all the challenging decisions, and proven he is both committed and capable to moving Voat forward as a platform for Free Speech. I am confident and excited that Voat will do great things in the future.

I will still be at Voat, just in a different role, as a user and member of the community.

To every user I’ve gotten to know, for every funny comment I’ve come across, for every post that has opened my eyes or made me mad, it has all been worth it and I’ll never forget the fun times. Here’s to more in the future, but with a bit less stress for me. ;)

Atko

Edit: canary stuff: https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

Reporting

Voat pushed a new reporting structure yesterday to help with content management, especially spam. Before yesterday we did not have an adequate way for users to report content and what we did have simply sent messages to smail as Spam reports.

Now Voat has a way for users to report content that violates different rules. Currently we are only exposing system rules, i.e. Spam, Dox, and Illegal content. We will shortly extend this to subverse moderators so they can add rules as well.

You can send reports by clicking the report button on submissions or comments.

Subverse moderators (Owners, Moderators, and Janitors) now have access to grouped user reports by clicking the user reports link in the mod tool box. You can choose to ignore reports which mark them as “reviewed” if they are not actionable.

Credit where credit is due:

Thanks to @Cynabuns spending countless hours researching, organizing, and filtering spam reports, Voat is now currently operating more spam free than at any point in our past. Voat really owes a lot to @Cynabuns and the many users who have helped by reporting spam for their thankless work in this area, so when you don’t see spam, think of these unsung heroes.

Blocked Users

Blocked user functionality has now been extended into comment sections. If you block a user, their comments will be collapsed.

Please note that currently when you block a user, all notifications and PMs are dropped entirely. We will shortly be adding code to allow the notifications from blocked users to reach your inbox but be marked as “read” so as to not allow harassing.

Canary Notice:

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

Part 1: Beta! Beta! Beta!

First for the big news that isn’t really news news but more of a milestone for Voat: We have officially declared Voat to be in Beta as opposed to lifelong declaration of Forever-Alpha. You have probably noticed the slightly more Alpha Beta logo and the Beta badges on new accounts. It’s bittersweet leaving the highlands of Alpha and traveling into the valley of Beta, but we always said that once the API is live, we will move to Beta. For the record, Beta bits where pushed live Oct 10 2016.

For 2-3 weeks prior we made a huge push to move this code into a beta condition. We have nearly fixed every known bug as well as implemented a ton of long overdue features such as block users, reasons for deletions, and countless other things that I can’t even remember now. It was a grueling process but we crossed the finish line.

Please note that this was a huge effort and we at Voat have had a great group of people working with us to accomplish this. I can’t say thank you enough to those who are walking hand in hand with us to Make Voat Great Again (yeah I know). When you consider that everyone involved in these efforts are freely contributing to Voat, well, it just touches my heart. Thanks guys.

We originally wanted to make this Beta Announcement a big deal (because it is huge for Voat actually), but the reality is that we just didn’t have time to pat ourselves on the back.

Yeah, so congrats goats, we did it.

Part 2: Subverse Mail (Smail)

Yesterday’s software update was a rewrite of Voat’s message system. The new system supports Subverse Mail (Smail) inboxes and sent queues as well as fully supporting all notifications Voat uses. It was also built to support threaded conversations (not implemented yet) that users have often asked us for. We have a few issues yet to address and some areas to polish up, but the core infrastructure is there.

Here is how you can use it:

• The Summary button will show you inbox unread counts for your user inbox as well as the smail inboxes for any sub you moderate. This tab is available on every message inbox btw.
• The Mod Toolbox has a hyper link to the sub mail inbox as well.

Most moderator messages will stop going to individual user inboxes and will be sent to/from the sub mail inbox. Ban/Unban messages, spam reports, and Message the Moderators all go to sub mail now.

Please note that we have yet to finish:

• Notifications for new sub mail. You have to check the summary tab currently.
• Threaded messages

Part 3: Notification (Reply/Mention) Data

Because of the way old notification data was stored and the resources it consumed (Fun Fact: Notification data was Voat’s second largest data subset), we did not port it all to the new structure. From our analysis very few users ever navigated past the first page of notifications which makes nearly 90% of this data unneeded. Less data leads to better performance and lower costs, so this is the logic behind why we did what we did.

What we did port:

• All Private Messages (Inbox and Sent) for every user
• All unread notifications from the last 30 days for every user

If you want us to port your notification data please PM us at Send Message to v/voatdev and we will do so.

P.S. If you have suggestions for Smail, start at thread in v/voatdev and I'll link it here so input can be provided.

Thanks Voat!

https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806

Voat will be down for a bit this weekend as we update various components of the system and finalize the API code base in anticipation of a limited public release next week.

This update will wrap up nearly all the large changes we’ve needed to make to Voat’s underlying code base since we started refactoring months and months ago.

It’s been a long road but we are finally here.

A couple random notices:

1. We’ve taken back the user account @Voat and @VoatBot for Voat’s own purposes. These accounts were inactive and appeared to be registered by squatters. @Voat is a system account we currently send messages from and @VoatBot will become Voat’s open source bot that the community can help develop. Looking over Voat’s user names I think we might offer some of these squatted names up for auction if there is a demand. Just a thought.

2. I’ve modded @Cynabuns to a couple system subs to help with spam. @Cynabuns will perform only spam deletion in these subverses. Many have asked us to extend our trust to some of the community to help with various things. This is our first step in this direction.

Thanks Voat

Edits:

1. Most of the major things are done. We've changed infrastructure things with markdown rendering, urls, and user profile pages so if you notice anything off, just ping me. Thanks everyone.
2. There has been some concern expressed about the mod limit for system subs. I will post something tomorrow about this topic so everyone knows what we are moving towards.

Requests

We have received 0 NS/FISA requests.

We have implemented some new features today that will help Voat increase its transparency.

Reasons For Deletion

Moderators that remove any submission or comment must now provide a reason for their action. This feature was previously not implemented and had forced the moderator to communicate the reason why by other means which was often times missed or not done at all.

These reasons are displayed in the mod log as well as sent the user in the form of a PM for both comment and submission deletions. The PM sent to the users also allows the users to respond to the deletions by replying.

Here is a mod log with some submission deletions: https://voat.co/v/test/modlog/deleted

This is just another step in the direction of implementing full transparency on Voat.

Submitters

In an unrelated feature we have implemented an additional moderator level called Submitter. This moderation level is basically powerless in a subverse except that they can submit to Authorized Only subverses. This allows moderators of curated subverses to add submitters without exposing moderator functions. These moderators have an [S] designation on the moderator list.

Rule Changes

We have decided we are going to consider L3 / Janitors full moderators on @System subs. Thus our previous rule that a user may not moderate more than 3 @System subs remains unchanged. I want to sincerely thank @Cynabuns for graciously stepping down from a few @System mod positions so that this rule is not violated. Thanks a ton.

We have yet to decide on a few things but will soon. These include:

• What should restrictions be for L4 / Designers
• What should restrictions be for L99 / Submitters

Moderator Permission Changes

Based on the community’s feedback (https://voat.co/v/ProtectVoat/1322494)) moderator permissions have changed when it comes to adding / removing moderators. The new logic is as such:

• A moderator may only add new moderators with a lower level than theirs

• A moderator may only remove moderators that are a lower level

Subverse Bans

We have extended the length of the ban reason field so you can be more descriptive with the reason for the subverse ban.

Requests

We have now created a dedicated canary post. This post will be updated so as to renew the notice. From this point forward we will stop including disclaimers on announcement posts.

Official Canary Notice

Edits

Cleaned up Canary text