It's official, Project Blank is live. We launched on Monday and honestly, it's been one of the longest weeks so far, ever.
There is much, much work to be done. We've been rolling out daily updates since the new UI went live. A mixture of bug fixes and new features.
Our focus throughout May will be adding missing features from the old UI onto the new UI (obviously with a new and improved flavor on them) and primarily on Bug Patching.
We were in Alpha for so long. 84 years, it felt like.
It was time to move to Beta. Beta is still Beta. Bugs are going to be present. Things are not going to be 100% smooth.
We made the final decision to say "f*ck it, we'll do it live". We know that the UI/UX is far from perfect, but That is OKAY.
We will gladly sacrifice the Month of May as our month to go live and squash bugs. This is an important time for LeoFinance. Our goal is to break things quickly and fix them even faster.
IF you are seeing bugs on the UI, please report them. That's how they get fixed. I've seen so many people complain in various places (especially discord) about things not working.
- Open a Bug Ticket
- OR post a Thread with #feedback hashtag in it
Regardless of which of those 2 options you do, the more info you provide, the better. If you provide us with ample information, you'll be amazed at how quickly we can squash bugs.
What doesn't really work well is just complaining in Discord general chat. We have a team and we have a process for collecting bugs, triaging and then fixing them in a prioritized and organized manner.
Please report and we will fix. I have spoken.
Dev Updates
We've been releasing bug patches on a daily basis. Working around the clock since Monday. It's been 3 days but it's felt like 3 weeks.
Today, we released a major bug patch which fixed some big issues in core places:
- Fixed a bug on the publishing UI (should crash less)
- Added Native Ad code
- Fixes for notifications page (duplicate notifications)
- Fixed broken follow button on user's
Publishing UI
We've been polishing the Publishing UI. Evidently, people were using the old UI and not the Alpha UI for the past 2 months. This didn't give us the feedback we needed to have a fully polished experience.
Now you see one of the major goals of moving out of Alpha and into Live Beta. This forces the community to discover all of the edge cases that our Alpha testing missed.
One big bug we found was if you used a $ in front of any ticker symbol. This caused the whole page to crash in your browser.
The reason for this was because we added Coingecko support to Threads but NOT to posts. Now you can call things like $LEO in your post and get them to work properly.
We've found a few other random edge cases and formatting issues. Most have been resolved and some are still being worked on. You should notice a much better experience overall.
Next up is fixing some stuff with the Schedule Publishing interface. It's not working as intended and we'll have an update for that shortly.
Added Native Ad Code
Okay this is pretty freaking cool.. It took a lot more work than you would anticipate but we've managed to get native ads working. You may notice that every 10 or so Threads, you see an ad.
The Ad looks like a regular Thread. It even shows "comments" beneath it.
The idea here is that we pulled inspiration from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. When they show ads, they look in-line with regular content.
This greatly improves views and engagement with ads. Users are far more likely to actually read an ad (and potentially click it) when it doesn't disrupt their scrolling experience.
We have a few more ideas to polish this feature and optimize placement to get it into more places like:
- Reply windows
- Blogs
- Comment sections
- Profile pages
We want ads to be a non-intrusive experience. We also believe - after talking with our ad partners about our traffic - that we are only getting 1/10th of the ad efficiency that is possible. If we can better optimize placement, we could 10x our ad revenue with the current Userbase on LeoFinance.
As you all know, Ad Revenue -> LEO smart contract -> LEO POWER APY.
Gonna be yuge.
Notifications Page & Follows
We deployed some updates to the notifications page. This is one of my favorite features on the UI as it allows you to quickly reply and manage all of the inbound on your Threads.
There were sometimes duplicate replies shown and a few other bugs related to infinite scrolling. We deployed a bug patch.
Next Up
Like I said, this is largely a bug patching month. We also know that long-form needs a big update in terms of features on the UI. Yes, long-form is still there (hit the "Explore" button) but it definitely needs some work.
We're working on that and we also have a list of about 25 bugs that are currently being worked on.
If you guys keep providing feedback and bug reports with ample detail, we can keep squashing bugs. Keep that rolling in and come June, the UI will be polished AF and ready to onboard the masses.
About LeoFinance
LeoFinance is a blockchain-based Web3 community that builds innovative applications on the Hive, BSC, ETH and Polygon blockchains. Our flagship application: LeoFinance.io allows users and creators to engage & share micro and long-form content on the blockchain while earning cryptocurrency rewards.
Our mission is to democratize financial knowledge and access with Web3.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FinanceLeo
Discord: https://discord.gg/E4jePHe
Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.leofinance.io
Our Hive Applications
Join Web3: https://leofinance.io/
Microblog on Hive: https://leofinance.io/threads
LeoMobile (IOS): https://testflight.apple.com/join/cskYPK1a
LeoMobile (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.leofi.mobile
Delegate HIVE POWER: Earn 16% APR, Paid Daily. Currently @ 2.8M HP
Hivestats: https://hivestats.io
LeoDex: https://leodex.io
LeoFi: https://leofi.io
BSC HBD (bHBD): https://wleo.io/hbd-bsc/
BSC HIVE (bHIVE): https://wleo.io/hive-bsc/
Earn 50%+ APR on HIVE/HBD: https://cubdefi.com/farms
Web3 & DeFi
Web3 is about more than social media. It encompasses a personal revolution in financial awareness and data ownership. We've merged the two with our Social Apps and our DeFi Apps:
CubFinance (BSC): https://cubdefi.com
PolyCUB (Polygon): https://polycub.com
Multi-Token Bridge (Bridge HIVE, HBD, LEO): https://wleo.io