These last few releases were tiny, itty-bitty things, truly. But this one? We've got a few new features in store. Buckle in, we'll go over it

Source code: https://gitlab.com/guncad-index/index
Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#guncad-index:matrix.org
Donate on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/theshittinator

Lemmy Integration

The first, biggest thing I'm happy to show off is that we now show discussions below each release. This is a huge thing that was facilitated by our move to Lemmy -- I can now search via a proper API and display the results right there under the listing. Effectively, this is a search result for the name of the release along with any links to it on Odysee, LBRY, or the GunCAD Index. Link to things as you're talking about them and people will find your post and chime in!

Clicking a post will take you to lemmyverse.link, which is a service that allows you to set your home instance. That way you can make all links go to the one you have an account on.

Additionally, there's a new 4th stat under each card in the search results showcasing how many discussions (posts, comments, etc.) we know about, so you can tell at a glance what's topical (or what has a name like "glock magazine").

(Note: After I deploy the code, this'll take a sec to populate search results. Give it an hour or two)

Markdown in Descriptions

We now mark up Odysee descriptions with Markdown (the Reddit/Lemmy/GitHub formatter), allowing for rich presentation. Use this to embed headings, lists, links, tables, and more.

Consider using this feature to add important information to your description, like warnings, proper changelogs, emphasis, accreditation, a BOM, whatever. Hell, if you write your README in Markdown, you can just copy-paste it into the description field and get it listed on the Index with little effort.

Miscellanea

Here are some of the other things in this update:

• SASS and CSS now have more consistencies between each other, allowing for easier theming (you'll see come tomorrow)
• Some of the background jobs are a bit lighter on CPU
• Documentation's had some polish and pruning
• The share buttons have been removed in favor of this direct Lemmy integration

Full changelog is available on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/guncad-index/index/-/releases/1.2.0

@gsgmfg@fosscad.io did it, the madman. In conjunction with a kind user from the Index's Lemmy instance, he was able to restore almost all of the data from /r/fosscad. There's a bit of a loss in images, but the text -- the oh-so-valuable advice and discourse -- is all there.

And the best part: it's federated between both of our instances. There are now not one but two copies of the data: one local to his instance and one local to mine.

Find it here: !ark@fosscad.io

Apparently we can have any number of custom emojis added to the server. Gimme some suggestions.

Hello... lemmitors...? Lemmings? FOSSCAD enthusiasts by another name.

If you're interested in an instance to call home that's guncad top-to-bottom, come check out https://forum.guncadindex.com/ !

(EDIT: If this is out-of-place, I apologize. I needed another relevant forum with which to confirm we had working federation. If this is out of line for your instance, please let me know)

Well it wouldn't be a software launch if it didn't have problems. I think we've eliminated almost all issues, but for completeness, here's what we had to endure:

The ones that are mostly user error:

• I only see one post - Make sure you're viewing the Local instance, not just your Subscriptions

• Invalid Passwords when Creating Accounts - Your password must contain a special character and be a reasonable length -- make sure you're not doing "hunter2" or something

Here are the ones I think I've resolved. Chime in if you see these again:

• Image uploading failures - Sporadic failures stopped once I bumped the rate limit for image uploads. If it comes back, I'll try a solve at nginx
• Email validation links not working - This one happened because the Photon frontend (the "Modern" one) can sometimes verify your email twice. The first one succeeds, then the second one fails because you've already verified. If you get this one, you're good, just log in. By switching the main UI back over to lemmy-ui, I think I've mitigated this one.