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Changelog

What's new

This page is the public changelog for EchoThread — a chronological, human-readable log of every user-visible release. Each entry lists the features, fixes, and polish that shipped on a specific date, ordered newest first. We follow the Keep a Changelog convention so you can scan ship cadence at a glance or jump to a specific date for context on what changed.

Got an idea or a bug? Email hi@echothread.io.

Last updated

  1. EchoThread 1.0 — out of beta

    • EchoThread is now generally available. The beta label is gone: hosted comments with a first-party ML spam filter, no-account commenting, threaded replies, reactions, and a full moderation dashboard are all production-ready.
    • The Hobby tier is a permanent free plan for your first site — 10,000 page views and 1,000 comments per month, no credit card, not a trial.
    • Lifetime-free guarantee for early adopters: anyone who joined before launch keeps the Hobby tier free for life on every site they had at launch, even if Hobby limits change later. No rug-pulls.
    • Paid plans (Starter $5/mo, Pro $19/mo, Business $79/mo) are available when you outgrow Hobby, billed through Stripe with soft usage limits and warning emails before anything is enforced.

  2. Spoiler tags + clearer formatting in the comment composer

    • Spoilers: type `||your spoiler||` in any comment — readers see a masked block they can click (or focus and press Enter or Space) to reveal, Escape to re-mask. Keyboard-focusable with `aria-label` state announcements; aligned with WCAG 2.1 AA.
    • Composer toolbar reordered to make formatting obvious: Bold · Italic · Spoiler · divider · Emoji · Image. Each format button shows its keyboard shortcut and the matching markdown in the tooltip.
    • New empty-state hint inside the composer (`Format: **bold** · _italic_ · ||spoiler||`) that disappears once you start typing — zero noise, full discoverability.
    • Existing **bold** and _italic_ syntax keeps working unchanged; this ships only as additions and a visual refresh of the toolbar.

  3. Accessibility, keyboard speed, and zero-CLS loading

    • Embed widget now ships visible focus rings on buttons, inputs, and the compose editor, ARIA labels on the compose toolbar, image-remove, and lightbox-close buttons, a focus-trapped image lightbox, and broad prefers-reduced-motion coverage across animated affordances — moving the widget closer to WCAG 2.1 AA.
    • Moderation queue: keyboard shortcut hints (A approve, R reject, D delete, I open profile) now appear on the focused row, so power-user moves are discoverable without leaving the page.
    • Moderation queue: recent searches stay one click away (session-scoped), bulk actions report live progress, and a fresh-load timestamp tells you exactly how stale the view is.
    • Comment list now loads with skeleton placeholders instead of a spinner — eliminates the layout shift readers used to see on slow networks.
    • "Be the first to comment" empty state on fresh threads invites readers in instead of showing a silent gap.
    • Faster notification cleanup: "Mark all read" and "Clear all" run with bounded async concurrency against DynamoDB instead of sequential per-item updates.

  4. SEO internal links across docs and blog

    • Added "Further reading" links from /docs into related blog posts.
    • New per-post SEO update script for bulk-tuning blog meta titles and descriptions.
    • Tightened blog post fallback titles to match the H1 (no more drift between rendered H1 and meta).

  5. AI spam-prevention spotlight on the homepage

    • New "Spam doesn't stand a chance" section showing a live moderation queue mockup.
    • Surfaced inline scoring and the Siftfy classifier brand in the moderation mockup.

  6. Siftfy ML spam classifier replaces heuristic filter

    • New comments are scored by a trained ML classifier instead of keyword heuristics when spam filtering is enabled.
    • Borderline scores route to the moderation queue; high-confidence spam is filtered out of the public thread.
    • Spam filtering can be toggled per site from the Site Settings panel.

  7. Admin recent-activity panel

    • Dashboard home now shows a unified recent-activity feed across all sites you own.
    • Notification bell with unread count.

  8. Bulk moderation actions in the queue

    • Multi-select comments in the moderation queue and approve / reject / mark-spam in one click.
    • Keyboard shortcuts (a / r / s / d) for power moderators.

  9. Blog launched

    • /blog goes live with launch announcement, competitor breakdown, and a "drop-in comments anywhere" guide.
    • Blog runs on a separate S3+CloudFront pipeline so it can ship independently of the dashboard.