So Patreon did an "update" (Patreon)

So if you haven't noticed, Patreon did an "update" within the last couple days and basically made some massive changes around here. They're pretty proud of themselves and the CEO was so excited to tell us that he didn't even have time to change his shirt. But there's some pretty big backlash over it so I wanted to give you a heads up on some things that could affect your ability to presently see content here or from other Creators that you support.

Normally, Patreon has been very good about giving Creators a heads-up on changes. In many cases, they will notify me a month or two in advance and allow us to make draft changes that will automatically take effect on a certain date. That's been super helpful and it helps make things seamless around here or I can give you a warning and prep.

That wasn't the case this time. The only thing they gave us a heads-up on was that they were going to implement some "chat" feature in the future that I was pretty meh about since we already have a Discord. I literally found out about the rest of this stuff from users on the Discord and it derailed half of a work day trying to comb through it.

So let's run through a couple of the changes that are the most pressing:

Icon: So first up is the new Patreon icon, which looks like a thumped prostate. They're trying to make an argument that the icon is sorta amorphic and thus because it has no defined shape it is more representative of the construct of creativity. However, the idea is so abstract that I think it gets lost and there's nothing recognizable or memorable about the new icon so it may be very easy to overlook in your notifications or email. I've missed things already because it's so uninteresting and blends in with almost anything including dark phone backgrounds. Thus, check your phone or email and try and retrain your eye to look for this new ink bot stain thing otherwise you're gonna miss stuff. 

Phone App: A lot of you use the phone app and if you haven't recently updated your Patreon app, things have changed significantly (It's entirely possible that things will work normally if you haven't updated the app and still are using the old one but that's unconfirmed). They've redone the entire app from top to bottom and it also uses the new poopy P icon. I guess I'll say aesthetically the appearance of the app looks a little better but it's weird to navigate. The biggest issue people are reporting is the "feed." Feeds are basically your timeline so your feed will show all the new posts that everyone you're following or supporting have posted. Theoretically, it should pull all your creator content into one place so you can just scroll through it and see everybody's shit. However, rather than having a mixed feed that groups everything together in chronological order, the feed is broken down by Creator and is NOT always in any type of order. Some reports by Creators are indicating that the feed is not showing all their posts so it's apparently super glitchy to the point that some are calling it "useless." I'm not sure how accurate this is but it's something to be aware of. Thus, it's suggested that you manually go to your favorite Creator's pages on the app to view their activity. Please don't depend on the feed to determine whether your favorite Creator is being active or not. As a secondary, you can also use your email notifications for posts from Creators then just click on the direct link in the email.

Collections and Tags: So there's some problems with tags not working chronologically and many have stated they are useless at this time. I can only speak for how I'm slowly moving away from using tags here. I've mentioned the Collections tab before as a recent addition to the site that I actually really liked. However, some have complained about the order to that tab. While the order seems glitchy and is not always chronological, I am able to control the order of the posts there so I will be using the Collections feature here as a quick way to organize content rather than using tags. That could change and if that system sucks for y'all, please let me know any concerns you have and we can revisit that.

Chats: So they added this new feature called "chats" in here, too. To be honest, I haven't had a change to look at it much yet but I will. My priority was to work on the game content and not have to restructure the website here but they sorta dropped this in our laps so I'm bouncing back and forth and trying to adjust. So I will continue to prioritize the game update stuff because that's what I assume most people would support and then during downtime, I will slowly start to go through some of these new features.

Thus, things may be weird around here during this transition (but probably not as weird as the icon).

If you see things not working, please let me know in this post or on Discord or send me a message. If it's broken, it needs fixed and sometimes the best people to find that are all of you that are living your own lives and clicking on random things that seem important or interesting to you.