Merchandise, better performance, pinned blog posts & more!

Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing well!

I'm super excited to announce a few SpaceHey updates today! Let's get started!

First of all, the biggest one:

SpaceHey Merchandise!

Starting today, you can visit shop.spacehey.com (or use the new "Shop" tab on the top right of SpaceHey) to shop high-quality SpaceHey T-shirts, Hoodies, Sweaters and Cups!

By buying one of the items, you can massively support me with covering the (Server-)costs to keep SpaceHey running.

When you're ordering one of the Merchandise products, you'll not only support SpaceHey and get a super-comfy Shirt/Hoodie/Sweater or Cup, but you'll also get a cool Supporter badge on your profile!

Thank you in advance to every single one of you who orders something - it helps my pay for the servers, the CDN, and everything else that is needed to keep SpaceHey running. With more and more people joining - which is really cool! - the costs are increasing. So, if you buy something from the SpaceHey Shop: THANK YOU!

New WYSIWYG Editor

I've completely re-made the Text Editor you see when writing a blog entry or a forum post. In fact, I'm already using it to write this very blog post!

The new Editor is much more responsive than the old one, has more features (like text and background colors!) and is easier to use on mobile devices. But don't worry, it still feels very retro and fits perfectly into SpaceHey!

Pinned Blog Entries

As some of you have suggested on Twitter and in the SpaceHey SpaceHey Group (how cool does that sound?!), it's now possible to pin up to 3 of your blog entries to the top of your SpaceHey Blog!

You can pin a blog entry by opening it and clicking on [pin to blog] - enjoy!

Better performance!

In the past weeks, I spent countless hours optimizing a lot of different things across SpaceHey - from the backend code, to the database servers and rewriting the client-side code to use less libraries for better performance. It's pretty thankless to work hours on stuff like that without seeing any visual improvements or new features on SpaceHey at the end of the day, but I'm doing the best I can to make SpaceHey as fast and joyful to use as I can. So I hope you appreciate that all pages across SpaceHey are a bit faster now :)

Moderation & what's next

I have some pretty major personal news to share: I'm starting university (computer science) next month! I'm really excited how it will be and what new people I'll meet! But don't be afraid: I'll still be working on SpaceHey as much as I can, add new features, improve existing ones and hang out on SpaceHey myself.

But there's one task that dictated my daily life in the past 1.5 years since starting SpaceHey which will be challenging to incorporate into my university schedule: Moderation.

I'm lucky to say that SpaceHey has no big problem with spam and the majority of the community is incredibly kind and helpful between each other, but there is still moderation-work I have to do every day to ensure it stays that way. And since I'll be starting university pretty soon, I'll need help with it. I want to make Moderation on SpaceHey a community effort - and I want to be as transparent as possible about it.

The existing "Report" feature is already a huge help by allowing everyone to report spam and bad behavior if they come across it on SpaceHey - no matter if it's an entire profile, a forum topic or a comment someone made. In addition to actively looking for users who break the rules myself on SpaceHey, I'm already relying a lot on reports from people like you to find (and ban) users who violate the SpaceHey Rules.

So, the easiest and best way to help keep SpaceHey a safe space for everyone is by using the "Report" feature - this helps a lot with moderation!

But additionally, I'm now looking for a handful of volunteer moderators, who are willing to help me look for spam, go through reports and ban users who violate the rules. If you've read this far (hii!), you're probably a SpaceHey enthusiast who is on SpaceHey often anyway, so you may be an ideal moderator! This also applies to people who already report content on SpaceHey often and want to help keep SpaceHey a safe place. If this sounds like you, fill out this form to apply! To apply, you'll need to be a registered SpaceHey user for more than 60 days, be able to speak English and be 18 years or older. For now, I'll only choose a few people I think are best suited to help me moderate SpaceHey - maybe I'll extend it to more moderators in the future.

Moderators will have access to all reported content and will be able to react accordingly. I'll also create a private group-chat where all moderators (including me) can chat and discuss special cases. All volunteer moderators will be easily identifiable by a green badge  next to their name and will be listed on the About page.

That's it for now!

If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas, bug-reports or anything else, please post them in the comments below. I'll try to reply to as many of you as I can!
You can also email me at support@spacehey.com or send me an IM (however, you may have to wait awhile for a response to your IM - I currently have over 1900 unread IMs, so it may take a while 😬).