The new Post-editor is here and you can use it directly from the Explore page (it's right above the list of posts)!

When you're logged in, you'll see a compose bar at the top of the explore page — click it to open the full editor without leaving your feed.

The new composer supports drag-and-drop for images and videos. Just drag files from your computer directly into the editor. You can upload multiple media files at once and they'll display as previews instantly, so you can keep writing while uploads finish in the background.

When writing text, highlight any text to see formatting options: bold, italic, links, headings, and code blocks.

Note that it's only on the Explore page for now but this will soon be on your own site as well and eventually replace the current standalone post page (after it gets additional features like optional titles, tags, post visibility, etc).

Give it a try and let us know what you think (bugs, improvements, etc).

I mentioned the new cluster-based/autoscaling setup we were moving to previously and the initial work deployed correctly but there were a few bottlenecks found which caused serious performance issues.

The issues are now resolved on both Loforo and our image/video host (Thumbsnap) so responses should be much faster.

For the technical folks who want specifics:

• NFS file-shares over the private network didn't perform as expected leading to slow transfers that was using a tiny portion of our full bandwidth. This was fixed with NFS caching (via cachefilesd)

• The database was getting hammered by background-jobs when containers were scaled up and down (media encoding, feed generation, caching). Jobs were rewritten to wait longer before starting instead of at-startup.

• High rates of media access was causing a race condition where the same image/videos were being repeatedly fetched from the storage servers (code changes)

• The new clustered setup gives us a massive amount of bandwidth (multiple gigabits) and also makes the service able to self-heal and scale automatically as traffic increases

Let us know if you notice anything still broken.

We recently started moving both Loforo and the media host to a setup that should allow us to scale up dynamically (instead of manually provisioning new servers as needed).

This cluster based setup, when complete, should be faster and more resilient that it was before (but right now, there are still slowdowns/latency issues that we're investigating).

We expect this to take another few days to find/fix the various issues.

It's finally here. Drag and drop support for image and video uploads on the Create Post page!

You can still select the media manually by clicking the button but you can now also just drag a photo/video from your computer into the dotted box to have it upload.

The Post List layout has been changed to show the likes/repost/comment count per post. Clicking it will take you to the published post:

Happy holidays!

There was a power outage at our datacenter which restarted all servers and caused downtime.

We're now checking on and restoring the various services.

You can now manually tag a post as NSFW by including the #nsfw tag in your post (there seems to be some instances where the automatic NSFW image detection is failing which we're looking to fix but the manual tagging is a workaround).

We've also made some tweaks to speed up the database so write actions (like creating/liking/repost) should be faster.

Issue resolved. Video + Photo uploads should work without issue now

We will be moving the Loforo server to a higher capacity one later today.

The service will be unavailable for a few hours during the migration (probably 3-4 hours).

Edit: Migration is now complete and the site should be faster now. Let us know if you notice any issues.

Edit 2: We're aware of some stability issues and are working on fixes. Thanks for your patience. (Edit 2.5: Fixed now)

A Notification type filter option that allows you to filter the Notifications by the type of notification has now been added (Comments/replies, Reposts/likes, Follows, or the default unfiltered).

Just a quick update -- there is now a post filter option that allows you to filter the post list by the "status" (Published, Draft, Queued).

Loforo went live a little over a year ago and we've had some pretty explosive growth thanks to you all.

Some Numbers

• Over 2 million posts in the past year
• ~800K posts imported from Soup users
• Thousands of sites created
• 940,000+ unique photos & videos uploaded
• 600+ GB of media hosted

We've rolled out a bunch of features over the past year based on your input and have many others in the works (archive view, mobile app, etc).

If you have any features/improvements you would like please let us know in the comments or through the Contact link at the bottom of every page. We read all comments/emails!

There had apparently been an issue with the way we were activating push notifications that was preventing users from getting the notifications.

The bug has now been fixed (we've also fixed it for the 90+ people who already subscribed to the browser-notifications in the past month).

You can now get push notifications of new notifications you get on your site.

If your browser supports push notifications, you'll see a blue "Subscribe" button on the notifications page.

It's very non-spammy even for high traffic sites and will only send at most 1 notification per 20 minutes (if you've been on the site or have checked the notifications page in the past 30 minutes, you will not receive notifications).

This has currently been tested on Firefox and Chrome browsers. It should also work on the newest version of Microsoft Edge as well as Firefox for Android (it won't work on iOS at this time as Apple hasn't added support for push notifications via the browser).

We've implemented a rate-limit on the number of posts a new user/site can make to groups to limit new users spamming groups with irrelevant posts.

The limit is currently set to 3 times the number of weeks since the site was created (for example: if your site was created less than 7 days ago, the total number of posts to any group that you can make per day will be 3; if you joined 8 weeks ago, you can post 24 posts to groups per day).

Posts to your own site/group are unrestricted regardless of the age of your account.

Group owners can now block users -- this will prevent the blocked user from posting (or reposting) to your group.

To block a user from posting to a group, switch to the group account (with the drop down at the top right) then go to the profile of the person to block and hit the crossed-out circle icon (next to the follow button).

Another highly requested feature, hashtags, have arrived!

You can tag your posts with any keywords to help you and others find posts about a subject or theme.

Adding a hashtag is easy -- goto the "Create post" page and at the bottom, you'll find a place to add 1 or more tags for your posts. You can just tap the pre-set tags we've added or type in your own tags separated by commas.

You and your site's visitors can see the tags for a post below the post and click a tag to see other posts sharing the same tag.

You can also edit your existing posts to add tags to them. Here's a sample tag page for #cats.

A tag listing/tag-cloud page will be added in the near future.

Loforo has released our first API (Application Programming Interface) and you can use it to create posts programmatically.

The Loforo API can be used to interact with Loforo from your own application (mobile apps, web apps, server-based app/scripts, etc).

Currently you can create posts via the API (both text posts and image/video posts are supported). More APIs will be added to fetch existing posts, edit posts and more in the future.

API documentation can be found here: https://loforo.com/api

We've had a few requests for this API from the developer/programmer types here so we look forward to seeing what you do with it. If you need any assistance integrating our API into your app/script, let us know -- we'd love to help!

The WYSIWYG post creation page has been updated to inherit the styles of the site so it should be more accurate to what is actually shown on your site.

This is the first part of the rollout of a new inline post editor (so you can post content directly from your site instead of going to a dedicated create-post page as you do now).

The Notifications page now shows a thumbnail-preview if the post mentioned contains an image which should help identify your posts more easily. We've also improved the image preview on the post list for posts that contain text and image content.