Just concluded 10 minute downtime which impacted all Win sites. It was not a DDoS.
Side effect of the downtime on the 20th.
Reddit's /r/WeekendGunnit community has joined Win.
This is their announcement:
Tired of tiny garbage subs created by lurkers and nopoops? Sick of big hugbox gun subs run by bernie bros and neocommunists? Bored with sending LeT mE iN i HaVe ToE pIcS to modmail repeatedly? Still butthurt about a linking ban because you were too stupid to read the rules?
Then migrate over to weekendgunnit.win. WG has been revived with the original mod team, including Wasome over on .win. It's still a work in progress to get it looking like it did here but the 4th of the July is as good a time as any to kick it off.
Make an account and have fun shitposting like we used to, now with slightly less rules. (Weeaboos need not apply)
They are now available at WeekendGunnit.win.
Reddit's /r/KotakuInAction2 has today launched their Win community, adding to their two existing backup sites.
The community describes itself as:
Dedicated to promoting ethics in journalism, and opposing censorship and political correctness.
It is now available at KotakuInAction2.win
A full list of communities is available here.
We had started working with the /r/ConsumeProduct moderators to provide a new home for them at Win prior to their ban earlier today.
For several hours prior to their ban, they had an announcement post up with the link, but the site was not yet active. Unfortunately, this means that a large portion of their userbase doesn't yet know where to go.
The community is satirical, and describes itself as: "Don't Ask Questions, Just Consume Product and Then Get Excited for Next Products"
Again, your credentials for this account work for all associated Win sites.
/r/ConsumeProduct is now available at ConsumeProduct.win
Today, Reddit's /r/KotakuInAction community joined Win.
From their announcement:
In addition, we are launching our lifeboat site officially. It's still mostly barebones, as we are having some complications with importing the CSS (as a simple copypaste from reddit would not function properly), but that should hopefully be resolved over the next week or so. So without further ado, I present to you https://kotakuinaction.win/ This site will have similar-yet-lighter rules to what you all are used to here, as we have a few things that become unnecessary due to different sitewide rules/TOS to worry about there. As we get the CSS and such functional we will get the new rules list up and running, but until then please treat it as being under effectively the same rules as here, with a bit lighter hand regarding some of the more insane things that we have had to deal with being pushed in place from above either by order or by watching precedent being put in place based on admin action against specific posts/comments/users.
See their full announcement here.
Your account here works across all Win sites. You will need to sign in separately, but the credentials work.
The community is now available at KotakuInAction.win
The most requested feature since our initial release six months ago has been additional forums for different topics: guns, gaming, sports, and so on.
While we set out to provide a fallback forum exclusively for /r/The_Donald, it quickly became obvious that we are in a unique spot, with a great opportunity to provide a truly free and open platform for content that is no longer welcome on Reddit - or anywhere else on the internet.
Today, we took the first step by opening OmegaCanada.win, which is /r/MetaCanada's official new forum.
In the coming weeks and months, we'll be onboarding a variety of communities that no longer believe they have a place on their current platforms. Eventually, we'll facilitate the creation of brand new communities.
Your .win login will work for all sites in the Win network.
To address the potential concerns: we host all Win affiliated sites, your data is not going to any third parties. We don't store personal information, all passwords and email addresses are hashed.
Finally, we know that some of you have been missing the update threads. The lack of threads has in large part been due to the fact that our development efforts have been focused on new communities.
Every update that we make is posted at communities.win in great detail.
Important updates will still be posted here, but typically, they'll be over there.
If you moderate a subreddit that wants a .win, feel free to contact us: [email protected]
In the interest of transparency, we took down a Win-hosted image and a thumbnail in response to a DMCA infringement notice.
Unreleased screenshot footage of the game The Last of Us 2, shared prior to release without the consent of our client, Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Limited, who is the sole copyrights-holder.
The post was created on 29th April, and the DMCA infringement notice was received on 18th June. The game was released on 19th June.
This quick update aims to address some, but certainly not all, of the smaller concerns that we've been seeing.
- the title field when submitting a post is now a textarea
- textareas now auto-expand in height as necessary
- Twitter embeds will now respect your theme (dark mode users will see a dark embed)
- removed captchas for new users (previously, very new users would have to complete a reCAPTCHA before submitting posts and comments)
- added an error message if saving an edit fails, rather than loading forever
- fixed an issue where "continue reading thread?" would sometimes appear when there are no further comments
- reduced requirements for long term users with regards to the "recently joined" handshake flag.
- original revision in edit history will show as having 1 score rather than its score immediately prior to being edited
- added new rate limits for login attempts
- added robots.txt
Additionally, we've reset all save folders that had been renamed to "" (nothing) so that they are accessible again.
These are the Win changes since the last update post:
- fixed issue where posts and comments from prior to March 23rd would not appear in listings (such as hot and top) or profiles
- clicking the header text with 'community styling' disabled now returns you to the homepage
- fixed issue which prevented saving comments
- fixed issue where save folders could be renamed to "" (nothing)
We've also made the decision that holding plaintext email addresses is not in the best interest of the community. Around 50,000 Win accounts had associated email addresses, which is an optional field during registration, and is only ever used to request password resets.
We have now hashed all email addresses that are associated with Win accounts and deleted the backups. This means that we do not have any way to know your email addresses, and nor would any attackers in the event of a breach.
As a result, if you ever need to request a password reset, you will now have to provide both your username and your email address. We don't know your email address, but we can verify whether the one that you provided when requesting a reset is the same one that's associated with your account. If it's a match, we'll send the password reset to the email address that you just provided. This works the same way as passwords.
Finally, we now have RSS feeds available for the hot, new, rising, and top listings:
- https://thedonald.win/api/post/hot.rss (+ optional "tag" parameter, values "memes", "news", "videos", "tweets", "photos")
- https://thedonald.win/api/post/new.rss
- https://thedonald.win/api/post/rising.rss
- https://thedonald.win/api/post/top.rss (+ optional "sort" parameter, values "all", "month", "week", "day", "hour")
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most.
These are some further changes from today.
Primarily, you can now enable the highly requested (until coronavirus) 'work mode' theme. This is in the settings menu under the 'Community Styling' toggle, and it respects your color scheme setting (dark and light mode).
While in this mode, you can currently see a downvote button for posts - it isn't functional, which is in line with the absense of a downvote button on the regular theme. This mode is not finalized.
We've also added a light bulb icon in the top right corner, which allows guests to toggle dark mode on and off. This icon is not available for logged in users.
The 'context' button on comments has been removed when within a post, but is still present in the inbox and profile. We've added a 'parent' button for all child comments within posts, which will jump you to the parent comment (the closest parent, not the top level parent)
Finally, you are now able to rename save folders via the /saved page, by clicking the pen symbol and entering the new name. Note, folder names are alphanumeric + spaces only.
This is a summary of the Win changes since the last update post.
- Added 'photos' tag (this tag should be used for photographs, not screenshots)
- Truncated karma counts in navbar
- Replaced the navbar settings menu on mobile with a cleaner implementation
- Site will run in full screen mode on iOS when added to homescreen
- Fixed an issue where listings would get progressively larger as the pages go on (page 1: 26, page 2: 51, page 3: 71, and so on)
- Fixed an issue where listings (other than the main four) would have 26 items instead of 25
- Marking a message as unread will now immediately reflect that in the unread indicator in the navbar
- Started auto-removing select sites that are used by spammers (mainly link shorteners) - don't give new accounts spamming odd links any clicks.
- Fixed an error preventing setting default comment sort to 'controversial'
- Fixed an issue with profile headers on desktop
In addition, there have been a large number of changes in recent days in preparation for additional communities, if we decide to go down that route. These changes should have no bearing on the functionality of The Donald, but due to the breadth of changes, there are no doubt some unintended consequences and issues.
These sort of changes will continue in the coming days, so if anything looks off, just send us a modmail and we'll fix it up.
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
We've released an update today with regards to navigation and filtering.
This update aims to address the following:
- lack of ability to filter by tag
- unintuitive navigation for new users between listings on mobile
- unintuitively positioned search function on mobile
To start with, we've added the 'Content Filters'. This allows you to filter the hot (front page) listing between all posts, memes, videos, tweets, and news. This feature is accessible on both desktop and mobile.
On desktop, the only changes that you will notice are that sort options have been moved from above the main column, to the top of the sidebar. The impacted pages are the top listing, search results, and profiles.
The hot (front page) listing now has the content filters option at the top of the sidebar, too.
The mobile changes are a little more significant: firstly, the fire icon has been removed and replaced by the search icon. Clicking this icon will open the sidebar and focus on the search box. This is important due to how many users did not know that we had a search function - or even a sidebar.
We've also added a new fixed bar, which allows switching between the four primary listings (hot/new/rising/top) as well as any applicable sub-filters. For hot, the sub-filters are the tags, and for top, the sub-filters are the timeframe filters such as hourly, daily, and weekly.
Now that we support filtering by tag, we encourage you to assign relevant tags to your posts when submitting. Assigning relevant tags will help your content reach more people who are filtering by tag - we're not going to be tagging posts at a moderator level.
These are the Win changes since the last update post:
- fixed pagination in search (previously would lose the sort option)
- switched caching from Caffeine to Redis (and then dealt with the intermittent issues it caused in various places such as inbox and, rarely, posts)
- improved title suggest function (it's a bit slower, but supports a wider variety of sites, including those protected by Cloudflare)
- fixed issue where embeds would double instead of close if 'expanded' when auto expand embeds is enabled
- adjusted the image uploading error messages to better indicate what is wrong, as well as allow you to try uploading again without refreshing the page
- fixed issues with some servers being unable to connect to the media upload server
- csrf changes to reduce error rates when submitting content after extended periods of inactivity (fetch csrf from cookie rather than HTML, in case cookie was updated after page load in another tab)
- fixed an issue where you could potentially jump between servers every 30 minutes or upon IP change (now you will stick to one server unless it goes offline, by cookie)
- fixed an issue where expanding a comment thread would also try to jump it into view - expanding a comment thread should not jump the page.
- following an issue with the above change, later fixed issue where collapsing a comment thread would jump way further down (the point to which it should jump to was being calculated prior to the thread collapsing)
- fixed an issue where the site would be temporarily unavailable for 1-2 minutes every few hours for automated backups (which, at high traffic times, could have a knock-on effect when a flood of users are trying to get back in)
- updated ToS wording
We're also working on the stability during press briefings. Beyond the automated backups which were mentioned in the above changelogs, performance has remained good for the past two days of briefings.
Another update will be coming tomorrow.
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
Alexa ranked Reddit at #5 in the U.S. in December, they fell to #6 in February, and today they have fallen to #7.
On April 4th, they also fell from #18 globally to #19.
We've made some updates to Win since the last post:
- added setting to hide embeds on post page (so when viewing a post directly, images/videos won't be automatically loaded)
- you can now mark messages (and comments in your inbox) as unread
- fixed issue where quickly triple clicking the expand embed icon would mess things up
- added 'context' button to all comments (behavior pending change)
- fixed issue where the 'hide voted posts' setting would hide posts that were voted on, but no longer are
- unread messages indicator now more accurate when in the inbox (previously if a page load had marked some messages as read, your icon may still be lit up until the next page load)
- redirected www.thedonald.win to thedonald.win (if logged in via www, will need to log back in)
- fixed issue where 'recipient' field in messaging would not auto-fill when clicking through from user's profile or messaging moderators via the sidebar
- dark mode button styles adjusted / normalized
- fixed margin issues with textareas since last update
- miscellaneous mobile design changes
You may also notice when editing a post or comment, there is now a new field in which you can state your reason for the edit. This is not a required field, it can be left blank.
Edits that are made after the initial 3 minute grace period (in which edits are not saved to allow for immediate fixes) will be viewable by clicking the "(edited)" text on the top line of posts or comments.
The revision page shows all edits (except in the first 3 minutes) made to a post or a comment, as well as the reason, timestamp, and the score at the time of the edit.
Deleting a post or a comment will also delete the revisions. No revisions were saved prior to the addition of the 'reason' field.
Here you can see an example of revisions.
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
On February 25th, Reddit, Inc. demodded /r/The_Donald's core moderator team, leaving us with far fewer resources than we needed to operate the subreddit.
This came as no surprise, since Reddit, Inc. had spent the last four years openly plotting to kill the largest forum in support of the President.
For context, our moderators did 42,567 manual mod actions in the month prior to the demoddings, dealing with user reports and patrolling the community to seek out trolls and content that may have violated Reddit's content policy - and many months that number was 2-4x higher, depending on the newscycle
In addition, our own bots would take up to 250,000 monthly automated actions on top of up to 150,000 from AutoModerator. And in a new initiative from mid January to late February when we were demodded, our moderators reviewed an additional 134,000 comments that our systems flagged as high risk, not included in the other bot statistics. Each comment was manually reviewed in context for anything that could be against Reddit's content policy, which resulted in approximately 2,500 of those comments being removed, erring on the side of caution every time.
This firmly placed us as the best moderated community on the whole site, but since Reddit, Inc.'s policy lead, Jessica Ashooh, is an employee of George Soros, /r/The_Donald had to go.
The Donald is the first Reddit community to successfully transition off of their platform, these are some of our stats so far.
March 2020 Totals
Unique Visitors: 4,020,000
Requests: 440,000,000
Bandwidth Usage: 15TB (mostly before we added image hosting)
Last 30 days
Pageviews: 80,000,000
Images served: 310,000,000
Average Comments Per Day
On Win in April 2020: 20,200/day
On /r/The_Donald before demodding: 10,000/day
Average Posts Per Day
On Win in April 2020: 2,460/day
On /r/The_Donald before demodding: 1,200/day
All Time Totals
Comments: 1,043,823
Posts: 161,662
Post Votes: 21,000,000
Comment Votes: 6,300,000
Images Uploaded: 20,300
Web Rankings
The Donald is up massively on both Alexa and SimilarWeb in the first month off Reddit. We're currently ranked in the top 1,800 in the US on Alexa, and top 19,000 worldwide. SimilarWeb ranks us at 2,665 in the US, and top 12,900 worldwide.
Reddit has started to drop rankings. After sitting at #18 worldwide for many months on Alexa, Reddit has now dropped to #19. On SimilarWeb, Reddit has dropped from 19th to 20th.
Virality
In our first month off Reddit, we experienced virality the likes of which we haven't seen in many years. A single post, with a mere 300 upvotes, brought in over 2.5 million visitors and over 10,000 new users.
The potential for The Donald is far greater than the potential we had on Reddit. Remember that even if we had been unquarantined, which simply wasn't a possibility as evidenced by our increased efforts in January 2020 that we largely haven't spoken about, we still wouldn't be allowed on Reddit's front page.
A huge success
The Donald's transition to Win is unequivocally a huge success, and our potential is unlimited.
Reddit is no longer a platform for discussion, nor is it a platform that you can trust - not only with the egregious election meddling we've seen with The Donald, but also their increasing protection of China following a $150,000,000 investment.
We're committed to making sure no Reddit communities face the same kind of treatment that The Donald did. If your community is at risk, send us an email: [email protected]
And finally, share TheDonald.win with all the Trump supporters in your life.
We've made a number of changes to Win since the last update post on April 5th.
- if you sent a message, it'll now show as "to <recipient>" rather than "from <you>", as it wasn't possible to tell who you sent a message to.
- when collapsing a comment thread, if it goes out of view, you'll be scrolled back to the comment that you just collapsed (so if you're far down a comment thread and collapse it, you won't jump past a lot of comments that you haven't seen yet)
- fixed an issue where the site would render without CSS, then again with CSS
- clicking the title of a link post (no embed) from a listing will now take you to the post, rather than to the off-site destination.
- fixed issue (hopefully) where /new and /top of all time would rarely get mixed up briefly (caching issue)
- fixed 'unread' inbox style in dark mode
- fixed comments inbox style in dark mode
- stability improvements for thumbnail scraper
- fixed mp4 issue for logged in users where it would display an iframe overlaying the video element.
The biggest change in this batch is the ability to save comments, as well as the ability to save to folders. Previously, we only supported saving posts, and there was no folder functionality.
Now when you click save on either a post or a comment, you'll see an overlayed window where you can select an existing folder (there are three default placeholders) or create a new one. You will then be able to access those save folders at the same location as before, /saved.
Update: To unsave a comment or post, you'll have to go through the saving process again, since posts and comments can be in multiple folders simultaneously. You'll see a slightly different icon to the far right which represent "add to folder" and "remove from folder", depending on if it's already in that folder.
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
We've released a number of changes today.
- you can now reply to comments and posts by users who have you blocked (this was a very poorly implemented feature from a time when we were not able to exclude posts from listings)
- you will no longer receive comment reply notifications from users who you have blocked
- we now support MP4 embeds for all HTTPS-enabled hosts
- fixed issue where MP4 embeds would auto-play
The biggest changes are to the mail system. The most obvious change is that we have replaced the inbox icon with a notification bell, and instead of the icon turning red when there's an unread message, a small number will appear in a blue circle. This number indicates the quantity of unread messages that you have, but it will cap out at 9 at this time.
On the backend, there were more significant changes. Previously, we tracked only whether or not a user had an unread message. We did not track how many, and individual messages weren't ever really 'read' or 'unread'. That's changed, and unread messages now have a different style to read ones.
How messages are marked as read:
- if you load the 'unread' messages tab (the whole page will be marked as read)
- if you load a specific message thread directly
- otherwise, you'd need to click the message which will remove the 'unread' styling and mark it as read
Lots more changes coming soon.
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
These are today's Win updates:
- adjusted the rising tab to no longer include actively stickied content, and a limit of 90 minutes rather than 120 minutes. This will hopefully help to bring attention to more high quality content that doesn't get stickied.
- added an icon to indicate users who have recently joined (we'll review the impact it has)
- fixed the remaining errors on login (let me know if you still encounter this)
- renamed NSFW toggle setting to more accurately reflect its function
- added a new report option: "Requires NSFW Tag" (reminder that you can mark your own posts as NSFW, but use this report option for other people's posts that need the tag)
- fixed issue where dark mode comment minimize bar was no longer dark
- fixed issue where points would not visually update when voting on comments on mobile
- updating of points when voting on comments on mobile
- updated Facebook/Twitter metatags
- fixed bracket inconsistency around comment scores
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
We've made the following changes to Win today:
- added NSFW functionality, can set your own posts to NSFW, as can moderators (thumbnail will be blurred, small NSFW warning icon, and if auto expand embeds is enabled, NSFW content will not auto expand)
- added a user setting to ignore NSFW warnings
- can now sort search results by top/new/old/controversial
- can now sort profiles by top/new/old/controversial
- reworked mobile voting and collapsing a little, largely thanks to u/wethepepe
- added button to post pages which toggles child comment visibility (hide/show all child comments)
- added /blocks page in which you can see active blocks as well as toggle blocks
- expanded textarea size when writing a comment or a message
- reorganized the settings page (moved toggles to top, added link to delete account, added link to manage blocks)
- opening comments from a post will not open it in a new tab regardless of settings
- deleted comments can now be minimized
- added facebook and twitter meta tags (subject to more changes)
- adjusted hover on social media icons (largely thanks to u/wethepepe)
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
We've made the following changes to Win today:
- added ability to block users from a private message
- added ability to delete private messages that you sent
- changed 'disable account' to 'delete account', plus it now deletes all your posts, comments, and messages (/deactivate)
- fixed issue with exempting posts from listings (should now work perfectly)
- updated privacy policy
- fixed issue with tagging when more than one username
We've also made some changes to reduce the number of errors encountered immediately after logging in. We'll track the impact the changes have and focus further on this issue depending on how it goes.
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.
We've just released a new update, these are the changelogs:
- added the option to exclude posts that you've already voted on from listings ("listing" = hot/new/rising/top)
- when a post is hidden and therefore exempt from a listing, a post from the next page will fill in the gap
- blocking users will now hide their posts in listings
This is part two of the listing update from March 20th. Actively stickied posts do not abide by the above options, they will show regardless.
This is the first changelog in a week. While there were a number of changes over the past seven days, the majority of progress was made on unreleased projects. These are some of the live changes from prior days:
- Imgur album links will now attempt to find the direct link (in which case your link will be automatically adjusted to the direct link)
- fixed some issues with pinging with trailing punctuation
- fixed Streamable embeds
- fixed issue where bots (TrumpTrainBot, TrumpBrickBot) could send their response multiple times
- hidden pagination buttons if endless scrolling is enabled
Leave your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments. Upvote the suggestions that you agree with most. We'll use this as an indicator of what's most important.