Belacam v3.4 Patch Notes
December 12, 2018
These patch notes cover the upgrades that come with Belacam.com v3.4. To read the previous patch notes for Belacam v3.3, click here. Now, let’s introduce the new features and bug fixes that our team made over the past week!
Animated Loading
While waiting for posts to load, animated placeholders now fill the feed in place of the old 1–2–3 dot loading GIF. This new animation better mirrors professional loading practices applied by all major social media giants: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. This new feature makes the site feel faster and look better.
Major Speed Improvements
Over Thanksgiving, we noticed the site grinding to a halt in terms of loading times. Some pages, like the Discover page, took an average of 27.9 seconds to load—as if it were the internet in 1995!
A lot of these speed improvements were rolled out as hotfixes rather than waiting for v3.4 to release. As a result, we’ve been able to collect data on the effectiveness of this work. Today, on Wednesday 12th, 2018, Belacam is loading at an average of 2.3 seconds per page. That’s more than 11 times faster than before.
We continue to optimize the server, refactor code, and refactor our APIs to streamline things further. At this point, we are aiming to shave off tenths of a second here and there.
Lightbox Reworking
One of our company philosophies for operating in unfamiliar areas is to push forward first, evaluate, and be willing to backtrack later if things don’t go well. The lightboxes on the site are a perfect example of this.
All social media sites handle lightboxes differently: Twitter has them while Instagram does not. We initially applied lightboxes quite liberally. Clicking on any image would pull it up into a lightbox.
Our data over the past couple of months told us that people rarely used this feature on normal feeds, but it was very helpful for looking into small photos that are shown in grid view, like on the Discover People section.
Lightboxes have been removed from the Feed, Discover Photos, Discover Tags, and User Profile Feed sections. This also helps increase speed because our server no longer needs to load lightbox data in the background for each post in that sections.
General Improvements
Six more comments are queried at a time vs. all comments queried when “View All Comments” was clicked
Fixed a bug where clicking on a video in Safari would open up a lightbox
Sped up post uploading time
Added support for Russian to the sign-up page
Fixed a bug where users couldn’t change their profile picture or cover photo
Fixed a bug where notifications wouldn’t show up
Fixed a design bug with the posting form where the top border radius was not properly displayed
Fixed a bug where lengthy location text would fit poorly in a post
Improved design of the Discover Tags page on small (less than 375px) mobile devices
Editing a comment now resizes the box larger
Added (24h) to the Top Earners and Top Likers daily leaderboards
Non-Tech Milestones
We also spent time laying the foundation for ads to be incorporated into Belacam. We want to maximize revenue while minimizing the negative user experience that ads supposedly bring. By creating a Sponsors section on the right sidebar, other companies can get their message out in an unobtrusive way. The Sponsors section is not yet live, but it is ready to be deployed once we secure a few more advertisers.
