Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.
The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.
The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.
I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.
tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.
(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)

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Notes -
Can we allow for select Marseys? :marseybegging:
Please no. Embedded reaction gifs are cancer.
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At the risk of missing the joke, I hope not. /r/drama and the Motte have very different cultures. If you can thrive in both of them, that's honestly pretty impressive.
But it amuses me to think what emoji-like images would make sense for the Motte. (To be clear, I don't endorse supporting these. We need our words, words, words.)
Most obvious are parts of medieval fortifications – why stop at just the two? We'd need some kind of symbol for tribalism – I suggest a yellow-orange emoji face wearing a feather headdress, holding a zebra-skin shield and a conch shell, just to cover as many cultures as possible. A shovel in a hole that's still digging would see a lot of use. A baby being offered to Moloch could do double duty for coördination problems and abortion debates.
Yeah, this would end poorly.
Or we'd end up with the 'Human Being' mascot from Community... lol
I don't know... it's kind of nice that marseys are user created and not corporate emojis approved from whatever tech company nonsense.
I could also be too drama brained but I think they're better at expression too.
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I'm definitely not adding global emojis. If we have multiple communities at some point, it'll likely become a per-community thing.
That said, Marsey isn't this community's thing and wouldn't be made a standard anyway.
I feel like Marsey is part of our shared heritage... We share a codebase and similar treatment from reddit. Thought it'd be a fun nod.
I understand that desire to be taken more seriously and all that... I guess I like a little whimsy but I respect that's probably a minority opinion.
I appreciate the response tho! :marseyhug:
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:marseypathetic:
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