Hey DEV Community!

Along with updating our platform to improve your DEV experience with new features, efficiency improvements, and design updates, we're committed to giving our community a smooth, bug-free experience.

Due to the complexity of the DEV platform (which is open-source, by the way), we're only sometimes able to get to these bugs as fast as we would like. But when we fix them, it's good to speak loudly about them to see our progress in these areas.

Did you come across a bug on DEV? You can log the issue directly on GitHub for us or reach out at yo@dev.to. We appreciate you letting us know when there's something not right about your experience on DEV. Fancy fixing an issue for the community? You can see a list of open, unassigned bugs for community contribution here.

That said, I'd like to recap the recent bugs that have been fixed.

Image Rotation Metadata

When you upload an image to DEV, we strip out all the metadata that could leak sensitive personal information about who took the photograph, where they were, and what kind of device they used. However, this metadata is sometimes required to tell us how to show the image, and one crucial attribute is the image's rotation, for example, when taken from a phone.

We've recently pushed a fix that ensures uploaded images retain the rotation metadata, ensuring they're always the right way up.

Special thanks to GitHub user jerinkc for submitting a successful PR for this fix!

Accessible Buttons in Notifications

Ensuring DEV is accessible for all users is essential, and we pride ourselves on our a11y setup here at DEV. Occasionally things slip through our testing and recently, we noticed that some of our buttons on the notifications page weren't accessible via the keyboard.

This issue has been fixed, and now all major elements and buttons on the /notifications page and a few other buttons on the site can be accessed via the keyboard.

Thanks to team member @ridhwana who fixed this issue!

Exiting Fullscreen Mode

GitHub user iamhoonjeong reported an issue that opening up full-screen mode within our code snippets/embeds was causing a problem when navigating back in their browser when trying to navigate through the site.

This issue was fixed through a PR submitted by a community member, and now pressing "back" when in full-screen mode will exit the full-screen view.

A big thank you to GitHub user zhangted who submitted a successful PR and also thankyou to iamhoonjeong for reporting the issue!

Homefeed Scroll Issue

Navigating through the homefeed is a great way to find great posts from community members based on your interests. It was frustrating; however, when navigating back to the homefeed, your existing position in the feed scroll was lost.

This issue was reported by Twitter user XenCodes, and we've recently fixed this to ensure you always go back to your previous position when hitting the back button.

A big thank you to team member @jaw6, who fixed this issue, and thanks to XenCodes for reporting the bug to us!

Disappearing Reaction Images

It's always interesting when a bug has been challenging to reproduce, and the solution has been eluding you for a while, and this happened to @peter, who kept returning to the homefeed to find the reactions images had disappeared. Peter then discovered this could be reliably reproduced using keyboard shortcuts, making the issue more curious!

A big thank you to team member @filleduchaos, who persisted with this issue and delivered a stellar fix that increases the stability and maintainability of our post reactions!

Suppressing Notifications for Blocked Users

User safety is another essential value here at DEV, and you should only want to see content and comments from users you want to see.

You can block users whose published posts and comments you no longer want to see on the platform. You can block a user by going to their profile, clicking on the three dots by the "Follow" button, and clicking on the "Block @username" option.

We recently fixed an issue where some thread replies from blocked users were still triggering notifications. We acted quickly on this issue as user safety is paramount to our community at DEV.

A big thank you to team member @dukegreene, who jumped on this issue and worked hard to get an initial version deployed ASAP!

And that's it! Thank you for reading this edition of the bug roundup. Please do let us know any bugs or issues you encounter on DEV!