Team: Developers

We just finished a migration away from the unmaintained Pure.css CSS framework to the minimalist and modern Pico CSS. As part of this, we’ve made a few design changes:

• The site now has dark mode. If it changed from light to dark for you, that’s because your system appearance is set to prefer dark mode. You can change your preference in the site footer.

• A few pages that didn’t work well due to tables now display a more mobile-friendly card format on smaller sizes, notably the “invite link” page.

• On mobile/tablet screen sizes, we now collapse the navigation into a small menu. This menu should work with JavaScript disabled.

• In desktop mode, reviews are given more prominence on a few pages. User pages, team pages, and review subject pages now display reviews in a wide column on the left-hand side, and metadata in a smaller sidebar.

• Text pages like the FAQ now display a table of contents, auto-generated server-side from the headlines (no JavaScript needed).

We’ve cleaned up a few smaller things across the board - padding, alignment issues, etc. Perhaps most notably, text now has a bit more line-spacing and a larger font size to aid readability.

This is a big set of changes, and it’s quite likely that there are some design regressions. If you find any, please don’t hesitate to let us know, no matter how small it may seem to you. We want to get the little details right!

Huge thanks to lib.reviews user and moderator Nortix, who built out prototypes of several of these ideas here. There are other ideas in these designs which we haven’t implemented yet, but may add in future, such as review statistics on user pages.

Next up: user preferences. As part of that, we want to revisit how content languages are handled in lib.reviews, giving users the option to write in a language we don’t have a full UI localization for.

Instead of contacting us on IRC or Mastodon to get an account, you can now simply request it through a web form. Any user with moderator permission will be able to approve such requests as they come in. If you’d like to become a moderator, please don’t hesitate to reach out via lib.reviews@permacommons.org.

As with all web forms, we may have to tighten things a bit further if form spam becomes a problem, e.g., with a simple text CAPTCHA.

It’s pretty wild that we haven’t had this until now, but you can finally reset your password if you’ve lost it, provided you’ve configured an email address on your account.

To do so, simply visit: https://lib.reviews/forgot-password

To protect user privacy, the feature won’t tell you if an account exists for a given email address. To mitigate spam risk, it’ll also only send one token every 3 hours.

The main reason this wasn’t done sooner is that email is a bit of a pain to deal with. To mitigate against spam, it has to be carefully configured to pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks (various techniques used to ensure the email is legitimate). This in turn should reduce the risk of email landing in your spam filter.

We’re currently using the free Mailgun plan, which should work well while we’re small. Now that we have the first email feature, it will be a lot easier to add the next one, which will likely be the account request process (sending email to moderators to review/approve requests).