We are very excited to announce a new way to customize your appearance on Reddit! Through our improved Avatar Builder, you can create your own Avatar, complete with hair, jackets, jerseys, capes, and event themed gear. We're rolling this out right now, so check out your profile page! (click here for desktop, otherwise go to your profile on iOS / Android)

What’s the point of this?

Creating your own Avatar has been part of Reddit since 2015 (see here), when we built our first version of Avatar Builder. You all have told us how much you’ve loved it over the years, and unfortunately we haven’t had the time to do more with it until now.

We love when people express themselves on Reddit, and we're always looking for ways to make it easier to join and become part of communities. Before today, redditors had very few options to customize their Reddit profile picture; so we’re excited that our Avatar Builder will enable more self-expression.

Why are we doing this now?

We have invested in building out Coins, Awards and Premium (see our most recent posts here, here, and here) to enhance user engagement and Reddit’s “Direct-User-Pay” efforts. With Avatars, there are a bunch of accessories that are free for anyone to use. You’ll also see that there are some special accessories that are exclusive to Reddit Premium users, who already receive a number of benefits including monthly Reddit Coins, access to the exclusive r/lounge community, premium only awards, and other perks. One of our main goals with Avatars is to make it an important and meaningful part of Reddit’s ecosystem and the evolving Premium program.

Where will your Avatar appear?

Once you set your Avatar as your profile image, you will see it on your profile page and profile hovercards (coming soon: chat, RPAN and more).

On desktop, you will be able to customize your Avatar on your profile page and profile cards. On mobile, you can customize it by clicking on the top left where your profile picture is located then clicking on ‘Create an avatar’.

Our art team handcrafted a number of new accessories (like our Halloween pack, available now) and will continue to add more options for everyone - so stay tuned! If you have any accessories or items you’d like to see in the coming months, let us know below.

This feature started rolling out to users earlier today, and everyone should have access by the end of this week!

Happy National Cat Day! Today, the 29th of October, is a day to dream about, marvel at, and celebrate the lives of cats and raise awareness about cat adoption. And since cats are such a big part of the Reddit community, we thought we’d help spread the word by creating a few fun purrrks to help redditors and our many Reddit cat communities celebrate this most momentous of all days.

• FREE cat awardsGo all in on cats today and recognize posts and comments you appreciate with some a free cat award.

  • To get your free award, keep an eye out for an alert on the Reddit coins store saying you have a free award. Then claim your free cat award and distribute it as you see fit. (If you don’t see an alert, it may have been because you’ve recently used your free award. Stay tuned for our next free award if that’s the case!)

• New cat avatar gearOutfit your avatar in some pawesome avatar gear, inspired by our furry friends.

• Cat-a-day calendarMake cats a part of your day, by adding the Reddit cat-a-day calendar widget to your phone. (Sorry, this one’s only available on iOS.)

And if you’re looking for some premium cat content, take your new gear and awards over to your favorite cat communities. Not sure where to start? Here are a few you can check out: r/scrungycats, r/catswithjobs, r/chonkers, r/StuffOnCats, r/CatsStandingUp, r/catssittingdown, r/thecatdimension, r/StuffOnCats, r/CatTaps, r/TheCatTrapIsWorking, r/catpictures, r/Catloaf, r/catsonglass, or r/FromKittenToCat.

But the best way to celebrate is to save a life! So while you enjoy the day and celebrate our furry feline friends consider adopting a cat from your local shelter.

And just for fun, let’s take a look back at some of the historic cats that have blessed Reddit with their presence over the years…

edit: clarified how the free kitties work

edit the second because I broke things and really can't be trusted with a computer

tl;dr: Starting next week, sexually explicit content will not be shown in the r/all feed.

Hi Reddit,

After hearing from redditors in surveys, comment threads, and feedback in places like r/ideasfortheadmins and r/changelog, over the years, we’ve learned that unexpectedly stumbling across sexually explicit content is jarring and uncomfortable for a lot of people. Starting next week, sexually explicit content will not be shown in the r/all feed.

Our intent with removing this content from r/all is to make it easier for anyone to browse Reddit without accidentally viewing pornographic or sexually explicit content, while still allowing redditors who want to find that kind of content to do so at their own discretion.

Since the beginning of Reddit, there’s been SFW (Safe for Work) and NSFW (Not Safe for Work) communities, and there will continue to be so. That said, NSFW is a pretty broad category, and doesn’t give us a good idea of what type of content redditors actually want to see while navigating the platform (many redditors would like to separate pornographic content from other NSFW content, for example). Over the last year, we’ve worked with moderators and trusted community members to help us accurately evolve the NSFW tag to create more specific and nuanced content tags via our subreddit classification efforts. We're leveraging those tags to filter communities with sexually explicit content from the r/all feed.

Sexually explicit content on Reddit isn’t going away—if you’re looking for that type of content, it’s still there and easy to find.

Over the next year, we’ll be working on more advanced filtering at the post level to give redditors more control over what they do and don’t want to see while browsing Reddit. Maybe you’re cool with sexual content, but don’t want the gore. Maybe you’re ok seeing depictions of graphic medical surgeries or violence, but are recovering from addiction and don’t want to see drugs or alcohol in your feed. As we evolve our classification system, we’ll advance the tools that let redditors control their experience on the platform as well.

As we’ve said in the past, nobody wants to pull a Tumblr (though in fairness it’s usually “pull a digg” as the main concern, so...). Our commitment is to keep the broad variety of content on Reddit open and public. It’s a priority for us to provide a welcoming environment with predictable experience for the diverse and eclectic group of humans that make up the Reddit community. We’ll continue to share our progress on this and other projects and are happy to hear other ideas or features you’d like to see to make the NSFW system work better.

Update (12/14): More holiday goodness is coming your way today, featuring more Elves, snowboards and even Robo-Santa!

Original Post below:

To get in the spirit of the season, we are introducing Holiday Avatar outfits featuring favorites like Santa, Rudolph, and even some Elves! Become a Reddit Premium member to get all the best accessories. Have fun mixing and matching the new Holiday gear and show off your perfected look.

Head to your profile and hit “Style Your Avatar” to get started!

tldr: We're archiving reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile which are playing an increasingly small role in day to day development at reddit. We'd like to thank everyone who has been involved in this over the years

When we open sourced Reddit (and as you can see in the initial commit, I’m proud to be able to say “FIRST”) back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization¹ and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do.

Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed, we’ve been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date. This is for a variety of reasons, some intentional and some not so much:

• Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing.

• Because of the above, our internal development, production and “feature” branches have been moving further and further from the “canonical” state of the open source repository. Such balkanization means that merges are getting increasingly difficult, especially as the company grows and more developers are touching the code more frequently.

• We are actively moving away from the “monolithic” version of reddit that works using only the original repository. As we move towards a more service-oriented architecture, Reddit is being divided into many smaller repositories that are under active development. There’s no longer a “fire and forget” version of Reddit available, which means that a 3rd party trying to run a functional Reddit install is finding it more and more difficult to do so.²

Because of these reasons, we are making the following changes to our open-source practice.

• We’re going archive reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile. These will still be accessible in their current state, but will no longer receive updates.

• We believe in open source, and want to make sure that our contributions are both useful and meaningful. We will continue to open source tools that are of use to engineers everywhere, including:

  • baseplate, our (micro?)service framework

  • rollingpin, our deployment tooling

  • mcsauna, our tool for finding and tracking hot keys in memcached.

• Much of the core of Reddit is based on open source technologies (Postgres, python, memcached, Cassanda to name a few!) and we will continue to contribute to projects we use and modify (like gunicorn, pycassa, and pylibmc). We recently contributed a performance improvement to styled-components, the framework we use for styling the redesign, which was picked up by brcast and glamorous. We also have some more upcoming perf patches!

Again, those who have been paying attention will realize that this isn’t really a change to how we’re doing anything but rather making explicit what’s already been going on.

¹ Though Adam Savage (u/mistersavage) was never actually part of the team, he was definitely a prime candidate to be our spirit animal.
² In fact we're going through some growing pains where it can be difficult for our development team to have a consistent local reddit build to develop against. We're doing heavy work on kubernetes, and will be likely open-sourcing a lot of tooling later this year.

Hi redditors,

A few years ago, we introduced the ability for people to follow you on Reddit which allows them to see posts you’ve made to your profile on their home feed. As the feature currently exists today, you are only able to see your follower count without additional details around who is following you. We heard your feedback that you'd like to see who's following you and also block individual people from following you.

With the above in mind, we're happy to share some long-awaited updates to how following works on Reddit:

Blocked users can no longer follow you (launched April 12)

If you block someone, they won’t be able to follow you anymore. If you’ve blocked a follower already, they’ll automatically be removed from your follower list.

With this change, blocked users generally can't tell if they've been blocked. They can still see your profile, but will not be able to follow you or receive updates in their home feed when you post to your profile.

You’ll be able to view and manage who’s following you (coming in May)

When you visit your profile, you’ll see a link to your follower list. From the follower list, you can see a list of everyone who’s following you, with the most recent follows appearing first. You can follow someone back from your list or visit their profile to take other actions such as blocking or messaging them. You can also search for a specific username within your follower list.

This is in development now and we plan to roll this out to both mobile and web in May. Here’s a sneak peak of what it will look like:

Opting out of followers (planning development now)

We’ve also heard feedback that some redditors would like to opt-out of letting people follow them altogether. So this functionality will be added during phase two of this rollout, which we plan to ship over the next few months. We will be sure to provide another update once this opt-out setting is available.

We’ll stick around for a while to answer your questions about followers and hear your thoughts and ideas.

Hey changeloggers,

We announced the first of the updates to Gold here a few weeks ago, and now we’re excited to finally go live with the rest!

Live Now!

• New tiers of Awards: Coins can now be used to give out two new types of Awards in addition to Gold:

  • Silver: Silver is all about recognizing content that… well, doesn’t quite deserve Gold. Recipients will get a shiny Silver icon next to their post or comment. Costs 100 Coins.

  • Platinum:. Recipients of Platinum will get a shiny new icon and one month of Premium membership (which comes with 700 Coins). Costs 1800 Coins.

• Reddit Premium is now $5.99/month for new subscribers only. Legacy subscribers will keep the same prices that they had before, so if you purchased an ongoing subscription at $3.99 per month, you will continue to pay $3.99 per month moving forward.

If you'd like all the details, you can read more about Coins here, Premium here, or click on "Give Gold" to see today’s updates in action! To recap all the changes over the past few weeks, once again, we present you a lovely visual, courtesy of u/AcidTwist.

Thanks, and happy gilding! ^{or silvering, or platinising, or whatever you want to call it}

Hi everyone,

I’m Andy—I recently joined Reddit’s product team, and have some great news to share today.

We’re super excited to begin rolling out in-house image hosting on Reddit.com to select communities this week. For a long time, other image hosting services have been an integral part of how content is shared on Reddit — we’re grateful to those teams, but are looking forward to bringing you a more seamless experience with this new feature. Starting today, you’ll be able to:

• Upload images (up to 20MB) and gifs (100MB) directly to Reddit when submitting a link.

• Click on a Reddit-hosted image from any listing (such as the frontpage, a subreddit, or userpage) and be taken directly to the conversation and comments about that image.

• View gifs within Reddit’s native apps with less taps and without leaving the app.

Today, we are partnering with mods to launch native image hosting in beta to 16 default communities across Reddit, followed by 50 more next week. In this iteration, native image hosting will support single image and gif uploads.

As always, thank you for being a Redditor and providing us with the feedback we need to make Reddit better. If you have any questions, I’ll be hanging out in the comments below!

Cheers, u/amg137

Edit: These are the communities you can try it in:

• r/GetMotivated

• r/EarthPorn

• r/Gaming

• r/Space

• r/OldSchoolCool

• r/Sports

• r/Art

• r/Aww

• r/Dataisbeautiful

• r/Food

• r/Funny

• r/Gifs

• r/mildlyinteresting

• r/movies

• r/photoshopbattles

• r/pics

• r/redditfruit

• r/stonerrock

• r/wwiiplanes

• r/MEOW_IRL

• r/ceh

• r/volt

• r/applespeculations

• r/circlejerk

• r/Xechpeigngemdahehodb

• r/boating

• r/Sherlock

• r/homeworld

• r/camping

• r/campingandhiking

• r/meirl

• r/DoctorWho

• r/Plex

• r/Gallifreyan

• r/theNetherlands

• r/ImageComics

• r/linuxmasterrace

• r/JurassicPark

• r/blackpeopletwitter

• r/Autos

• r/MadeMeSmile

• r/windowsinsiders

• r/Windows10

• r/nyc

• r/Pic

• r/sexyhair

• r/Animemes

• r/modeveryonereborn

• r/baseball

• r/awwnime

• r/teenwolf

• r/unixporn

• r/camaro

• r/Phoenix

• r/Arizona

• r/civbattleroyale

• r/web_design

• r/naruto

• r/reactiongifs

• r/StarWars

• r/gentlemanboners

• r/AnimalsBeingDerps

• r/iWallpaper

• r/GoldReplies

• r/Supertribes

• r/PokemonGoRed

• r/Walkingdeadtrader

• r/SpecArt

• r/livesound

• r/wtf

• r/notmyjob

• r/SurgeryGifs

• r/RWBYgifs

• r/Design

• r/TagPro

• r/wallpapers

• r/whatisthisthing

• r/Watches

• r/oakcliff

• r/TMobile

• r/woodworking

• r/hitmanimals

• r/wonderwomen

• r/celebrityarmpits

• r/4chan

• r/me_irl

• r/suomi

• r/SandersForPresident

• r/concrete

• r/Cordcutters

• r/DFWdiscgolf

• r/monstermakersclub

• r/mod_irl

• r/nostalgia

• r/argentina

• r/roguelikes

• r/NationalPhotoSubs

• r/badpolitics

• r/DiceMasters

• r/nonononoyes

• r/Steam

• r/MysteryDungeon

• r/darksoulsbeingmean

• r/4Runner

• r/4Runner_1stGen

• r/comiccon

• r/juggling

• r/doggos

• r/OttawaSenators

• r/android

• r/nameneko

• r/thevillager

• r/Katamari

• r/analog

• r/TeraOnline

• r/Librarianknights

• r/projectmurphy

• r/progresspics

• r/CCW

• r/SupremeStreamMemeTeam

• r/PrintedCircuitBoard

• r/headphones

• r/FULLCOMMUNISM

• r/hookah

• r/CFB

• r/geese

• r/CaptainPlanet

• r/UndertaleCringe

• r/canada

• r/codegeass

• r/guitarporn

• r/religion

• r/NYYankees

• r/SplitDepthGifs

• r/BeachCity

• r/stevenuniverse

• r/ldBabies

• r/rain

• r/ENTP

• r/wow

• r/Cinemagraphs

• r/PictureGame

• r/vexillology

• r/kpopgfys

• r/MinnesotaUnited

• r/Israel

• r/lonestar

• r/linuxmemes

• r/wrongpiece

• r/tampabaylightning

• r/bobdylan

• r/texans

• r/fakealbumcovers

• r/thingsforants

• r/ClashRoyale

• r/oklahoma

• r/cookieclicker

• r/WireWrapping

• r/custommagic

• r/facepalm

• r/CompeteLeague

• r/316cats

• r/chimichangas

• r/PrettyLittleLiars

• r/lebowski

• r/publicfreakout

• r/deadpool

• r/PokemonGO

• r/240sx

• r/photoclass_2016

• r/KristinChenoweth

• r/rabbits

• r/beerporn

• r/amazingdesign

• r/bombing

• r/ibs

• r/mlbtheshow

• r/calligraphy

• r/PCMasterRac

• r/Bundesliga

• r/Minecraft

• r/MinecraftInventions

• r/teenagers

• r/Bacon

• r/shittyaskscience

• r/wicked_edge

• r/technology

• r/charlotte

• r/polandball

• r/spongebob

• r/trees

• r/KIC8462852

• r/cameljerk

• r/moderationseverywhere

• r/screens

• r/TsundereSharks

• r/asiangirlsbeingcute

• r/earthporngonecuddly

• r/totallylookslike

• r/harrypotter

• r/justfuckmyshitup

• r/shittybattlestations

• r/fashionsouls

• r/whatisthisthing

• r/postprocessing

• r/GFD

• r/terrainbuilding

• r/edc

• r/GrandTheftAutoV

• r/lolwat

• r/amiibo

• r/MyNintendo

• r/NintendoNX

• r/gifrecipesketo

• r/boburnham

• r/disneypinswap

• r/PenmanshipPorn

• r/Winnipeg

• r/bellhunt

• r/RoastMe

• r/WarshipPorn

• r/WarplanePorn

• r/TankPorn

• r/h1z1

• r/montreal

• r/GiraffeGifs

• r/prematurecelebration

• r/KoreanFood

• r/DinosaurDrawings

• r/DirtySionMains

• r/animalsbeinggeniuses

• r/ArtFundamentals

• r/shrimptank

• r/anxiety

• r/sewing

• r/cricket

• r/ECEProfessionals

• r/Bearing

• r/Frankenserial

• r/blep

• r/graphic_design

• r/bristol

• r/rainbow6

• r/belgium

• r/Mandalorian

• r/indianfood

• r/whatsthisplant

• r/freebuilders

• r/formula1

• r/rollenspiele

• r/StarWarsBattlefront

• r/colorblind

• r/bloomington

• r/DrMundoMains

• r/battlestations

• r/unexpected

• r/OaklandRaiders

• r/mtguns

• r/daddit

• r/iphone

• r/KerbalSpaceProgram

• r/gameswap

• r/gamesale

• r/retailporn

• r/notfoolinganybody

• r/FairyTail

• r/fatlogic

• r/PolyBridge

• r/bluesguitarist

• r/BetterEveryLoop

• r/Overwatch

• r/TsumTsum

Edit: this change has been rolled back at about 03:30 UTC on August 27, 2015, due to unintended effects (causing less turnover of popular posts).

As quite a few observant people have noticed (there's an /r/OutOfTheLoop thread, and another one in /r/self, among others), the scores of the highest-ranked posts on the site have been somewhat higher over the last day than usual. This is because we are starting to experiment with raising the "soft cap" on scores, to allow them to more accurately represent how many people are actually voting on the posts.

The "soft-capping" or "score normalization" system is something I've talked about a few times in the past, but its existence still isn't overall very well-known in general. Basically, if any posts get a score above a certain threshold, this system will start "pushing them down" so that their score stays within a certain range. Many users have noticed and been confused by this whenever we have an especially popular post, since the way it manifests is seeing the score go way up at first (sometimes to 10,000+), but then suddenly being "chopped down" by thousands of points. This can even happen multiple times until it eventually settles.

There are many things wrong with this system, but it's always been something we've been really nervous to adjust, since it has the potential to cause major behavior changes in very significant places like reddit's default front page and /r/all. It was a solution that was originally implemented long ago to try to solve a different problem, but has ended up having a number of undesirable side effects as the site's grown and it's stayed untouched. So now we've decided to start trying to raise the threshold (with the goal of eventually completely removing it), and just keep a close eye on it to see what actually happens. Even with a relatively small change to it, scores jumped a fair amount. Here's a graph that our data team generated showing the average scores for the top 25 posts in /r/all, with each line representing a different day from the past week.

Our overall goal in removing this system is primarily to make the scores more accurately represent how many people are actually voting on things on reddit. For example, I remember looking at the /r/science post about the Stephen Hawking AMA last week and seeing it show a score of about 6000, but if there was no capping system at all it should have actually been over 72,000. Having scores increase by that much is going to come with a number of other challenges (some of which I listed in that same /r/TheoryOfReddit discussion linked above), but we're going to try taking this slowly (the next increases will be less drastic than that first one) and monitoring the effects. There will most likely be work required on various other things to resolve issues that come up as we raise it, but hopefully we'll be able to get to the point of completely removing this strange system before too long.

Let me know if you have any questions or if anything isn't clear.

We're rolling out some changes to the default styling of user-entered text. These updates are designed to improve readability, increase layout consistency, and provide better formatting options. The changes include:

• Better visibility of code elements. Inline code and code blocks now stand out more from normal text. Tables and quoted text have also been improved in this regard.

• More font sizes and weights to headers. Headers now have a visual hierarchy, making them actually useful for structuring text.

• Improved readability. Font size and line height have been increased, making text easier to read.

• More consistent layout. Elements are aligned to a more consistent vertical grid.

subreddits will still be able to customize their stylesheets. You might notice some minor CSS issues in some subreddits as a result of this. We've tried to keep conflicts to a minimum, but some were inevitable. I'm working with mods to correct these ASAP. If you're a mod and are having trouble fixing some CSS bug that this change introduced, shoot me a message and I'll try to help fix it. See this post on the modnews subreddit for more info.

edit

I've just pushed out a few changes based on some of the feedback we've been receiving:

• contrast on blockquotes has been increased, and the small left margin has been restored. strikethrough text has also been darkened.

• fixed some alignment issues in modmail, and fixed the broken green text

• fixed inconsistency in font size with code blocks in some browsers

• altered the background color of code blocks when against a background color (e.g. when the comment is highlighted from viewing the permalink)

• fixed inconsistency of font size in the reply input box

• increased the indent on lists to fix numbered lists getting truncated

On the afternoon of August 6, we started experimenting with raising the "soft cap" on post scores, as a potential first step towards continuing to increase that cap or remove it entirely. The intentions of reducing/removing the capping are explained a little more in the original post, but to reiterate them briefly it's primarily because the way the system behaves is confusing ("Why did that AMA just lose 3000 points? It was at 8000 a minute ago!"), and misleading about how many people are actually voting on things (if someone sees a score of 4000 they assume about 4000 people voted on the post, when it's often over 10 times that many).

We reverted this change last night due to concerns that it was causing other unintended side-effects. We intend to keep experimenting, and thanks for your patience.

Users now must specify a reason when reporting a link or comment. The reason can be one of the sitewide rules or a custom reason of their choice.

Now when a user clicks the report button on a link or comment they'll see this: http://imgur.com/1KdcI6H

Moderators can click on the reports button to see the list of reasons: http://imgur.com/GCk0O1s (the "reports: 2" thing is the reports button)

see the changes on github

Hi folks,

A long time ago, to solve some performance problems we were facing, we made a change to the way the list of posts on your Home Page were generated. When we generate the list, we randomly select 50 subreddits from your subscription list, and choose the top post from each subreddit to generate the listing. This means that if you increased the amount of links displayed on your Home Page using the preference: display 100 links at once, you would still only see content from 50 subreddits, displaying a total of 2 links from each subreddit. That meant that users with more than 50 subscriptions weren’t getting a full experience each time they loaded their Home Page.

As Reddit has improved its infrastructure, we are now increasing the subscription cap on the Home Page from 50 to 100. Gold users currently see posts from 100 subreddits they are subscribed to, and we are now making this feature available to everyone.

We hope you enjoy this update.

Thanks,

Reddit

Hi everyone,

I wanted to provide an update on the abuse of our follow feature. We want to first apologize that this system has been misused by bad actors. Our Safety, Security, Product, and Community teams have been working in the background to get in front of and action the people behind this harassment.

As many of you know, around two months ago, we shared that we’d be introducing the ability to opt out of being followed. While that work had been in planning, in light of recent events, we’ve decided to begin work right away to address the issue. We’ll provide another update as soon as it’s ready — this will be in the magnitude of weeks, not months.

In the meantime, we wanted to make sure you are all aware of how you can take action to protect yourself immediately:

• Block the abusive users, which removes them from your follower list completely

• Opt out of push notifications and emails via account settings (manage notifications and manage emails)

We’ve also placed new restrictions on username creation, and are looking into other types of restrictions on the backend. The Safety team is also improving the existing block feature which will come to fruition closer to the end of the year. In the meantime, we will continue actioning accounts for this behavior as they are detected. We hope all of these efforts and capabilities combined will help you take more control of your experience on Reddit.

Thank you for your patience.

Greetings,

We’ve shipped a feature that will allow you to receive any messages that you receive on Reddit as emails. This includes:

• PMs (private messages)

• Comment replies

• Post replies

• Username mentions

You currently receive notifications of events like these through the mail icon. If you enable this feature you will receive an email in addition to the notification. The emails look like this: desktop, mobile

This feature is not enabled by default for existing users, and we’re rolling it out slowly (you may not be eligible for a few weeks). If you want to try it out, keep reading!

How often will I receive an email?

We try to be smart about how often we send you these emails. We batch messages sent close together and don't send emails for messages you've already viewed. To be more precise, it will batch all your notifications together until you go 10 minutes without one. That way, if you have a popular post or comment, the replies all come together instead of as individual emails. We won’t delay an email for longer than an hour.

Who can use this feature?

Any user with a verified email address. If you don't have an email address associated with your account click here to add one.

Sounds great! How do I enable this?

By clicking here or going to https://www.reddit.com/prefs/ and checking the "send messages as emails" box. If this box is grayed out you need to verify your email. You can resend the verification email here: https://www.reddit.com/prefs/update/

I'm busy right now - can you send me something about this later?

Yes! If you have an email address associated with your account the next time you get a notification we'll follow up with an additional notification asking if you want to enable this feature. We don’t want to be spammy, you should only ever get this reminder once.

Can I pick what type of notifications I receive in my inbox?

Currently, no. However, this has been highly requested, and has been added to the backlog.

Can I pick how often I get emailed?

Currently, no. However, this has been highly requested, and has been added to the backlog. Please note that the emails will be batched to avoid spamming your inbox!

Edit: This feature is temporarily unavailable due to maintenance.

Update: We are still fine-tuning this, but have turned it back on for 50% of those who have opted in! Full rollout to come shortly!

Update 07/19/2016: This has been rolled out to all users

Hey Android redditors,

For the past few months, we’ve been working on improving your native mobile experience. Today, this comes together in a feature-packed version 2.22 of the Reddit app for Android. We’re excited to introduce a new set of features and mod tools:

For all users:

• A “speed read” button that’ll allow you to jump to parent comments within a thread.

• More post flair functionality, including updated post flair selection, the ability to edit the text of a flair, and ability to change the flair for a post that you’ve already created.

• A trophy case in your profile so you can see your hard-earned, shiny trophies in the app (check out the new trophy illustrations, now live in your profile!).

• A cake icon beside your username on your cake day.

• You can now see OP usernames in-feed (card mode), so you know who actually created the post.

• You now have a card or compact view switcher in your feeds.

For mods:

• A r/mod listing in the subscriptions tab so you can see posts from all the communities you mod in one place.

• Mod mode, a new toggle within your communities and r/mod that will allow you to take quick mod actions on posts and comments.

• Mod queue (with bulk actions!) so you can moderate your communities in one place. One thing that’s missing is a post AND comments aggregate listing. We’re working on this!

  • You’ll notice one annoying navigation thing on mod queue for Android specifically. If you switch between multiple subreddits within the mod queue view, it’ll take you a few presses before you’re able to get back to the mod tools menu. It’s a little hairier than we thought, but we are working to fix this and will release an update as soon as we can!

• Modmail

  • You’ll notice that your communities that have opted into the modmail beta loads messages in a native view, but original modmail will open to the existing listing in the modmail tab. We wanted you to still be able to access original modmail while we continue working on the modmail beta. We know there are still many improvements to be done before we bring new modmail out of beta and release it to all communities. This is something we have slated to work on in 2018. We appreciate your patience as we work to bring you the best possible version of modmail (search, anyone?).

• Access management, including banning, muting, moderators, and approved submitters.

• A new report flow for posts and comments that reflects a community’s custom report reasons (same flow as desktop). You’ll notice one thing that’s missing is the open ‘Other’ text fields, which will come in a later iteration.

You'll also notice some minor UI updates, like a new Alien Blue theme, as well as font and icon changes.

We hope you enjoy this update — check it out and let us know what you think! We’re working on a lot more to continue improving your native mobile experience, so stay tuned. As always, thanks for being a part of the Reddit community. Happy holidays!

Edit: This was launched for everybody on 2017-01-18: See the r/announcements post.

Hey all, today we’ve launched a much requested feature to beta -- spoiler tags.

Spoiler tags allow users to tag posts that contain content that other folks may not want, well, [spoiled](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_(media)).

Here’s how it works:

• Mods and OP can tag posts as spoilers like this

• When a post is tagged as a spoiler:

  • It is labelled with a tag

  • Its thumbnail is replaced with an icon

  • Its preview (if available) is hidden and requires a click to reveal

• Media post spoilers look like this: gif | live example

• Text post spoilers look like this: screenshot | live example

Of note:

• The beta is just for desktop. We want to make sure things are working well before launching elsewhere. That said, we anticipate mobile support will follow along shortly.

• For now, this is just for posts. You cannot mark comments as spoilers.

Subreddits in the beta

The subreddits that have kindly agreed to take part in the beta are:

• r/AmericanHorrorStory

• r/angel

• r/asoiaf

• r/betterCallSaul

• r/breakingbad

• r/buffy

• r/DestinyTheGame

• r/dragonage

• r/FlashTV

• r/GameOfThrones

• r/HouseOfCards

• r/leagueoflegends

• r/MMA

• r/movies

• r/MrRobot

• r/narcos

• r/orangeisthenewblack

• r/RickAndMorty

• r/Shield

• r/SiliconValleyHBO

• r/startrek

• r/StarWars

• r/strangerthings

• r/television

• r/TheWalkingDead

• r/westworld

We’ll proceed with the general release after we’ve had time to gather feedback from the above communities.

Edit: Updated January 6 - cleanup is finally complete

As I announced in /r/modnews a couple of weeks ago, we've recently implemented a new cleanup process for deleted accounts, which happens 90 days after the account is deleted to clear out a bunch of data that's no longer necessary to keep around. And to answer the question a lot of people seem to jump to immediately: no, this does not mean that deleted account usernames are going to become available again.

Anyway, yesterday morning (yeah, I didn't quite make the "next week" prediction) I started retroactively running every account that was deleted more than 90 days ago through this new process. I expected this to take a few hours to complete. This morning, after running for over 24 hours, it had finished processing a whopping 8% of the accounts. That is, it looks like "a few hours" is actually going to be more like 250.

So this really didn't end up manifesting as a sudden drop like I was assuming it would. I've seen various posts around the site last night and today noticing the subscribers dropping and wondering what's going on, and I just wanted to make a post here so people have something to link/refer to. It's likely that the number is going to continue gradually going down for the next 10 days or so, and most subreddits should probably expect to see their subscriber count drop by about 3-5% over this period.

Note that even though the total subscriber number in the subreddit's sidebar is decreasing, the statistics in the subreddit's traffic page showing the number of new subscribers each day is not affected, so moderators can still use that data to see the actual number of subscribers they've gained each day.

I'm also keeping track of the number of subscribers being removed from each subreddit, so I should be able to provide that info to any mods that want to know exactly how much they were affected, once it finishes.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Here's the code (and a full description) for the new cleanup process, if anyone is curious what it's doing

Edit: Updated January 6 - cleanup is finally complete

As I'm sure a lot of you have seen, there's been quite a bit of discussion lately about "the algorithm", with opinions on it ranging from thinking it's suddenly completely and utterly broken, to not noticing anything different at all.

Although we haven't made any code changes since the single adjustment that we've since reverted, we know that many of you still believe the front page is more stale than it used to be, which very well could be the case due to natural effects such as an increase in users, changes in voting patterns, etc. We don't want Reddit to feel stale, so we've made a change that should help with that.

First, a (somewhat) quick explanation of a couple of aspects of how front pages are built so you know how this fits in:

1. When creating your front page, we only use up to 50 of your subscribed subreddits (or 100 if you have reddit gold) at a time. If you subscribe to more subreddits than that, we choose a random selection, and will replace this with a new set every half hour. If you're interested in knowing more about why we do this, there's some explanation in this comment I wrote the other day.

2. Posts will only show up on your front page if they're less than 24 hours old (so by the way, if you see anyone claiming that their front page is the same for days, that's not possible).

Between these two things, if you're subscribed to subreddits that aren't very active, you can end up effectively having some of your front page slots "wasted" by subreddits that don't have any posts new enough to be shown.

So the actual change today is that we're no longer going to consider a subreddit as a valid candidate for your front page if it hasn't had a post in the last 24 hours. If your set of subscriptions is above the 50/100 limit, when we select a new set of subscriptions to build your front page from, we'll first filter out the inactive subreddits and then take the random selection from the remaining ones, which should all be able to contribute posts.

We've also made one other minor change to address something that's apparently been giving some users a false impression about how old the posts they're seeing are: the auto-updating timestamps that are on all posts/comments/messages will now calculate their age based on server-side time, not the local time on the viewer's device. Since local time was being used before, some users with their device time zone and clock set incorrectly would see posts as much older than they actually are. By using server-side time this problem should no longer occur.

Hopefully these changes will help improve the staleness feeling for some users. We know that it's a very common feeling right now (even our own CEO has said so), and we're definitely going to keep looking into things we can do to address it more.

TL:DR; We're no longer going to consider a subreddit as a valid candidate for your front page if it hasn't had a post in the last 24 hours, which should help shake up some front pages.

See the code behind the inactive-subreddit filtering on github

See the code behind the server-side live timestamps on github

Hey Reddit -

As we started talking about in a series of recent r/changelog posts, we’ve been working to make the Reddit home feed more personal by surfacing posts from communities you’ve shown interest in recently and by filtering posts you’ve already seen so there is always fresh content. We started by doing tests that showed that these changes made Reddit better: users spent more time on Reddit, and they interacted more with the content they saw. So we were ready (and excited!) to roll them out … but!

Even though these changes worked better for many users, some of our users had legitimate feedback about how their Reddit experience might be affected. Mods wanted a neutral view that reflected what their communities were seeing. Other users had already built up a set of habits around how the home feed worked and wanted to keep their experience consistent. While I know all our answers on these fronts weren’t always perfectly satisfying, we genuinely were listening. So we put these launches on pause to regroup and figure out the right way to move forward for everyone.

Rather than changing the meaning of “Hot” we are introducing a new default sort type for the home feed: Best*. With its faster turnover and more responsive ranking “Best” is the right home feed experience for the majority of users. But anyone who prefers the original experience can switch their sort option to “Hot” and return to the original Reddit ranking at any time. At first “Best” and “Hot” aren’t going to be very different from each other, but once the new sort rolls out to all users we’ll be reactivating the freshness and personalization improvements for the “Best” sort. By next week the difference should be pretty evident, and we’ll continue refining it over time.

Next post we’ll be talking about how we help users discover new parts of Reddit, and later this quarter we’ll be doing a wrap-up post to summarize all these efforts at a higher level for r/announcements. As always please let us know your thoughts and feedback here, or let us know if you’d like to join the mobile beta testing group if you’d like to see and offer feedback on new features even earlier!

Cheers,

u/cryptolemur

* Note: This is actually a different algorithm from the ‘best’ comment sort, so we are still debating the name! Suggestions welcome. ^{Sorty McSortface has a nice ring to it ...}

Today we moved from the old Amazon CloudSearch domain to a new Amazon CloudSearch domain. The old search domain had significant performance issues: roughly 33% of queries took over 5 seconds to complete and would result in the search error page. When queries did succeed they took a long time to complete.

The new search domain is an attempt to improve performance and reliability while maintaining backwards compatibility. To improve performance and reliability a bunch of redundant or unused index fields (see here) have been removed, and unused sorts have been removed (you can still sort the search results by relevance, score, age, or number of comments).

I expected the new search domain to support all the queries that the old search domain did. It looks like there are some cases I didn't account for and you may need to rewrite some queries. Please let me know of anything that isn't working in the comments.

The new search domain is performing great so far: average response time has dropped from 2.5s to ~50ms and the error/failure rate is now 0.

This new search domain is a stop gap solution--a larger search overhaul is in progress.

A long asked-for moderating feature has been the ability to temporarily ban someone from a subreddit. Today I rolled out that ability!

On the 'ban users' page, the form now includes an entry for "how long". After that amount of time, the system will automatically un-ban the user (there will be a note in the modlog to that effect). Moderators can still manually remove bans, and at any time can click the 'make permanent' button to change from a tempban to a more permanent one.

See the code behind this change on Github

Hi r/changelog,

We’re back to give you all a heads-up that we’re rolling out an update to our Awards program (Silver, Gold, Platinum)—called “Community Awards”—to a few pre-selected pilot communities. Below are some details about how it works; our goal is to get feedback from users and mods on how this functionality is working for them, make fixes / improvements as necessary, and to roll it out to more communities.

What Are Community Awards?

Community Awards give mods the ability to customize and offer subreddit-specific Awards to users. Mods can select the icons, names, and Coin price of Awards to reflect their own communities.

Community Awards will be available to give in addition to Silver, Gold, and Platinum Awards.

In the above screenshot, you can see a new icon next to Gold and Platinum. This is a Community Award.

Community Awards can be given through the standard Awarding process, which appears when a user clicks on the “Give Award” button beneath posts and comments. The new customized Awards appear beneath the Silver, Gold and Platinum options. Community Awards are created by mods of individual communities, and are only available to give and receive in the originating community—for instance, the Trollo Award seen above can only be given away on r/lounge.

What’s Coming Next?

As we mentioned at the top of the post, our end goal is to roll this feature out to more communities, but to start, we’d love to collect ideas from all of you and feedback from mods and users in our pilot communities so we can make this the best experience possible. If you’re a mod who’s interested in trying Community Awards in your community next, please respond to the stickied comment below!

Please also note: Community Awards are only available on web at this moment; we will be rolling out updates to support iOS and Android very shortly (we will post again when those updates are available).

Just a small heads up on our previous outbound click events work: that should now all be rolled out and running, as we've finished our rampup. More details on outbound clicks and why they're useful are available in the original changelog post.

As before, you can opt out: go into your preferences under "privacy options" and uncheck "allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization". Screenshot: /img/6p12uqvw6v4x.png

One particular thing that would be helpful for us is if you notice that a URL you click does not go where you'd expect (specifically, if you click on an outbound link and it takes you to the comments page), we'd like to know about that, as it may be an issue with this work. If you see anything weird, that'd be helpful to know.

Thanks much for your help and feedback as usual.