#userbasic accounting software

[sutekh94]

Hoooh boy do I have some thoughts about Cohost shutting down.

I've been working on this post for a few days, letting thoughts simmer enough to be presentable enough, so… here goes something!

Yeah, I'm sad about that. Not surprised that it happened, but still sad. Cohost had a good philosophy behind it, wanting to build a social media platform without much of the usual trappings, and I appreciate all the work its creators, Anti-Software Software Club, put in to make that philosophy real. And it was real, if only for a couple of years. I'm so glad my art found an audience there, even getting a few lovely comments. I feel bad for everyone who set up shop there who now has to scramble towards other platforms to host their stuff on. I can understand why some people decided they were finished with social media after the site announced they were gonna shut down at the end of 2024.

I really wish Cohost succeeded as a social media platform.

And I will miss it.

All that said… (here come the controversial takes)

I don't hold much sympathy for its staff and ASSC. It really felt like they had no business sense nor did they want to have any business sense. That showed especially in how unprofessional some of their financial updates - and lack thereof on occasion - were. Casually saying "oops I forgot to do the update for X month" despite further funding for the site hinging on regular posting of said updates, acting all "we're your friends!!!" at times, and so on. Then there were things like the eggbux debacle, ASSC thinking they were gonna turn Cohost into a Patreon competitor without having the knowledge or resources to do that, Stripe policies aside. I'm aware that was one of ASSC's original goals for the platform, but still. I gotta factor in some of the monumental moderation fails the platform's had, including the Nazi incident. Their policies regarding generative "AI" - seriously, not blanket banning generative "AI" was asking for trouble. Oh, and an aura of negativity and toxic positivity that pervaded the place partially because of that inadequate moderation, and partially because that's what Cohost's culture was like to an extent. Still, my Discord server has more moderators than Cohost ever had - three, myself included, compared to one. That's comparing a platform with about 130 users (I'd say 12-15 of them are active and posting on the server) as of the time I'm writing this against a platform with over 25,000 users at the time of the shutdown announcement.

This might seem harsh considering Cohost's staff were known users and public faces there. I don't know any of them personally. I don't wanna pretend like I do. But I also don't wanna pretend like ASSC could do no wrong and Cohost was some heavenly paradise. One of the most popular posts on the site in its final months, at least regarding the number of comments and responses to it, was "Cohost So White", a lengthy timeline detailing some of the most notable moderation fails and racist incidents that've occurred on the site over its history. Much of that negativity I mentioned earlier stemmed from how bigoted and racist chunks of the userbase could be - and the times that was left unchecked until staff was bullied into removing offending posts and banning the people behind them. Remember the Nazi incident I mentioned earlier?

In short, a Nazi made a Cohost account to stalk and harass a Jewish person there. The Jewish person tried reporting the account, posting evidence of the Nazi's behavior off-site, and Cohost staff… did nothing about it initially because "they've done nothing wrong on Cohost so far" or words to that effect, causing the Jewish person (among others) to almost leave Cohost. Staff was then bullied into banning the Nazi and afterwards said things like "we're bound to screw up on moderation decisions every now and again". There's more to the Nazi incident than that, but I don't want this post to be entirely about that. Still, I get it. Moderation is tricky. People make mistakes. But that was an egregious moderation failure that should never have happened.

Disregarding all that, Cohost had this feeling of a group of friends creating a social media platform for themselves, their friends, and friends of friends, but it never grew out of that hobbyist mindset. Cohost felt like a very anti-social place more often than not. Discoverability was always spotty. Tag shotgunning was common especially for artists like me wanting to have as much reach as possible. The only major attempt to make discoverability better IMO, tag synonyms, came in too late to be relevant. Needed and welcomed, but still. Same for certain changes to moderation policies - the "missing stair" policy and so on, even if I feared they could've been weaponized against fair and civil criticism of the platform.

This is a personal thing, but I never gelled with the site's culture. I was mainly there to post my art; the site being NSFW/18+ friendly was a huge reason why I joined, and to its credit, Cohost never lost that particular quality throughout its existence. I didn't interact with people much there, and venturing outside of my carefully-curated feeds, both main and bookmarked, could feel as draining as doomscrolling on Twitter. Almost like Twitter's negativity sort of migrated over to Cohost and became integrated into Cohost's culture. Again, I'm not saying the entire platform was like that, just that the negativity sometimes drowned out all the shitposts and CSS crimes and whatnot.

Don't get me wrong. Cohost shutting down is a loss for the Internet as a whole for reasons I explained up top. I'll always appreciate it for what it tried to do and all the good it managed to do over the time it existed. I don't wanna walk away feeling like I'm blindly bashing on it with a sledgehammer or, worse, celebrating its downfall with a bag of popcorn in hand. It's just… Things could've and should've been so much better. There were more than enough misgivings on ASSC's behalf that didn't help matters. That's really why I'm sad yet not surprised about Cohost shutting down. Cohost deserved better. Much better.

The reason why I've been so critical about Cohost is… I give a shit. It's clear I'm passionate enough about Cohost to say what I said here. I genuinely wanted things to be better there. If I truly didn't care, this post wouldn't exist, and it's possible I never would've given Cohost a chance in the first place. Regardless, the fact that so, so, SO many people are sad about it shutting down speaks volumes. I enjoyed my time there despite all its faults, but that doesn't mean I could act as if those faults didn't exist. My personal experiences with Cohost weren't everyone's personal experiences.

I'm aware that places like Pillowfort have some of the same problems Cohost had, namely an uncertain financial and long-term future. It's why Pillowfort and other small platforms need support now more than ever, and I'm glad to see that some of Cohost's userbase has migrated over to Pillowfort. Unless you're gonna bail on social media entirely after Cohost shuts down (again, I don't blame you for wanting to do that at this point), you're best off diversifying where you post, especially if you're an artist and/or a writer. If you can spare the money, you should send a few bucks towards these smaller platforms to help keep them afloat. At any moment, that smaller platform you've made a home on can just… shut down one day, planned or not.

[xannador]

Please don't delete your blog. I love your work.

Sorry, I shouldn't have said that so rashly. I realized shortly after saying it that deleting my account wouldn't stop my stuff from being scraped by the AI sludge machines anyway. Because my drawings and animations continue to exist in the reblogs of other people.

This honestly feels like DeviantArt 2.0. I also left that site forever when the staff scraped their userbase's art for AI and only pretended to let people opt out after they had already stolen everything.

It's one thing thing when your landlord doesn't secure the house against burglars. It's another when the landlord himself comes into your apartment with a spare key to steal your shit. These people spit in your mouth and are expecting you to swallow it.

And using software like nightshade and glaze feels like putting a band aid on a grease fire...

But we're running out of places to hide. I need to collect my thoughts on this more.

[lawrenceofbessarabia]

the way that millenial-ish office people interact with computers for work is WILD to me. you have very intelligent and capable people spending their precious time constructing elaborate Excel spreadsheet dashboards with GUIs and saving things in bugfuck insane locations because learning another tool or mapping network drives "takes too much time".

instead of updating an outdated mailing list for an Excel macro-generated email that goes out every day they'll create a reply to the previous day's email to get an updated list of recipients, copy the fucking attachment over, delete the macro-generated email, and then send out the reply instead of editing the macro OR the mailing list. and they do this every day.

these people are so used to building hacky bullshit bridges over Microsoft's expected workflows that they don't even realize they're living in ramshackle bullshit palaces of their own creation. if most of MS Office Suite's userbase is used to operating like this then i sort of understand why all microsoft software is so simultaneously bloated and locked down: it's to prevent steve from accounting from breaking everything in his quest to save five seconds while navigating his tomb of spreadsheet horrors.

[tussive]

Some thoughts on various other social media/microblogging websites.

"Pillowfort.social is a new blogging platform where fans and creators alike can share their work, create a community of their own, and do so in a positive and safe environment. Pillowfort aims to be a sort of hybrid of your favorite blogging websites-- keeping the strengths of these platforms while compensating for their shortcomings." Dumb. Terrible name, hate it. Also it just looks like Tumblr so it seems like just another Tumblr clone, but they allow porn.

"We are a free and open-source platform to launch your digital brand, social network and mobile app. We are also a social network ourselves. It is a global social network of social networks. Available in either decentralized or centralized options."

So it's a social media network where you start your own social media network? Shut the fuck up.

"Image enthusiasts united. Discover, repost, contribute and share images stupid simple. Looking for an Tumblr & Reddit alternative, maybe for NSFW content , Thumbtable has you covered."

So like, okay I get that like if you sell NWS content, the Tumblr ban affected you financially and that's not very cool. My issue with the dozens of Tumblr-esque sites, but they allow porn, is that none of them have any users. So who are you selling your content to? Wouldn't it be better to just go on Twitter, where there are more users than Tumblr anyway?

"monocles social is based on mastodon. A privacy friendly social network."

I want every person registered for this site to die.

"Authpad is a frictionless approach to blogging."

Are people like, having issues with blogging that I'm not? Because I feel like this is pretty easy.

"The Dayum is first all in one website on the internet. See the most viral videos, read breaking news, and connect with friends and people around the world!"

So it's like Facebook but for people who are even less connected with the world? That's cool I guess. Stupid name though.

"Known is a simple platform for publishing words, pictures, podcasts and more to a site that you control. Choose to share it on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, or extend it to integrate with the software you already use."

Why does every site act like Facebook or Twitter integration is this desirable feature? If I want to post something to Facebook or Twitter, I'll just post it there. I do in fact post a lot of my text posts to Twitter and Bluesky and sometimes post images to Instagram. It's just easier to do it manually, I don't need every website to be attached to every other account I own. It's fine.

"Squabbles is a new social platform which combines elements of Reddit and Twitter. It takes the best of both worlds where you can both follow the people you love, and have great, in-depth conversations with them and others."

This one made me laugh because like, Reddit and Twitter are pretty much the two worst websites on the planet. And this one is the best of BOTH worlds? Holy shit. Even the name sounds like bickering with people you hate on the internet. "We're Squabbling!"

"a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform sea-slang for gossip - a scuttlebutt is basically a watercooler on a ship." This just makes me miss Yik Yak. I mean, I know they brought it back, but it's not fun anymore. I used to troll Yik Yak so hard. Everyone on there was just a fucking idiot, it was awesome.

Y'know, the other thing about Tumblr clones is somehow they all are worse than Tumblr. Tumblr is the most broken website I've ever used and somehow every clone of it has less features and works worse. How is that even possible? Maybe you just can't make a functional webslte like Tumblr. It's just not possible.

"A stream server that does most of what people really want from a social network."

Whoa.

"We like to think Plurk as a social network for weirdos - the cool, uncompromising and loving community for misfits we all long to have." Lamest userbase on this list, for sure.

"Social sharing blogging friends network - Whaleshares offer its users the opportunity to earn cryptocurrency rewards for posting and sharing content that interests them and that others find value in."

I'm pretty sure nothing I've ever said in my life has any monetary value. So I guess earning cryptocurrency for saying it is actually pretty fitting.

"Whispurr is a new interactive way to stay in touch with people. We all have something to say to those that matter."

Unrelated really, but this reminds me of the app Whisper. Apparently like in cities people use Whisper to meet up and have sex and buy drugs? I mean, I guess people use every app for that so it's not that odd, but Whisper? I don't know. I never got into Whisper tbh. Probably because I live in the middle of nowhere so there's no local posts.

"The new generation social networking client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise. Requires Adobe Air."

Okay I'm sorry but

This is the most cluttered UI I've ever seen on a social network website. Fuck off.

"Member.cash is a micro-blogging platform that uses the BCH blockchain for storing posts. Posts are impossible to delete and since member.cash uses an open protocol (memo), other websites can show the same posts."

Interesting. Posts you can't delete. That seems like a feature people would want.

I don't know dude. A lot of the newer social media sites seem like they're probably based on interesting technology, I just. It's all like decentralized and self-hosted and it's not actually a website it just saves your blog to your Dropbox and everyone is their own social media site and like it all just sounds fucking retarded to me.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure that this post was entertaining or funny to begin with, but it's certainly not after it's gone on for this long. My bad.

[nostalgebraist]

more on metaculus' badness

@dubreus replied to your post “IDK who needs to hear this, but Metaculus is...”:

yes, but because the rewards are fairly immaterial, it selects for a community who wants to forecast for its own sake. the randos on metaculus are not your usual randos

I don't get what you mean by "because the rewards are fairly immaterial."

Isn't that also true of twitter polls? Yet they attract randos.

It wouldn't be true of a real prediction market, but if anything, I'd expect fewer "randos" on account of it.

That aside, I don't find this kind of defense reassuring w/r/t the trustworthiness of Metaculus.

A lot of my beef with Metaculus is, in fact, precisely this -- that if you ask "why would I trust it?", the answer is some contingent fact about the demographics of the userbase at some point in time, rather than any structural feature of the platform itself.

Making good forecasts is hard. If you want to say you can make good forecasts, you should be able to tell me what mechanism you're using to make the forecasts good. You should have a hypothesis: "if I do X, I'll get good forecasts," and then when I ask, you point to how you're doing X.

Real prediction markets have such a hypothesis. Their X mechanism may have flaws, but it's perfectly clear what it is and why someone might expect it to help.

But what is Metaculus' hypothesis? Its "X"? Based on what the platform actually does as a piece of software, one might guess:

"We will put polls about the future on the internet. The polls are opt-in and anyone can vote on whichever ones they feel like at any time. This will produce good forecasts."

But this is obvious nonsense -- consider the case of twitter polls -- so that can't be it.

We can then observe that "the randos on metaculus are not your usual randos," which gets us something like

"We will put polls about the future on the internet. The polls are opt-in and anyone can vote on whichever ones they feel like at any time. We will advertise these polls to the kind of people we think are smart. This will produce good forecasts."

But this still isn't a trustworthy mechanism! Even if the users on Metaculus right now happen to be smart on average, or good at forecasting on average, that's a historical accident -- there is no feature of the Metaculus platform that guarantees this, or even makes it more likely.

I am asked to take it on faith that the savviness of the userbase has not gotten worse this year than it was last year -- or that the users voting on some particular question are about as savvy as those voting on a typical question. If one of these things weren't true, I would have no way to tell until after I've used the forecast and gotten burned.

Among other things, this means Metaculus is exactly the kind of thing that the original formulation of Goodhart's Law was about:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The "good demographics" of Metaculus are reliable only so long as no one cares too much about the answers. Once the answers start to have an effect on anything, there is an incentive to vote so as to steer that effect in a desired direction.

And Metaculus has no immune system against this. If a bunch of newbies come in and vote on one question in a politically motivated manner, this is the system working as intended. The "Metaculus community" is just whoever shows up. The people who, in actual fact, show up -- savvy or not, politically motivated or not -- are the Metaculus community, by definition.

----

The opt-in nature of the individual polls exacerbates this problem.

Things would be very different if being a "Metaculus forecaster" were a sort of membership with conditions, where you had to vote on every question to stay in the group. That would impose a kind of coherence across questions: if many users feel unqualified to voice opinions on a particular question, that will show up as an unusually broad forecast, and the fact that it is broader than the others will mean the thing it appears to mean. You would be comparing fractions with the same denominator.

But as it is, people can vote on just whatever. Sometimes 1000 people have voted on one question, and only 100 on a very similar question (or a question conditional on the other). These are not two opinions voiced by one "community," and nothing forces them to cohere. So it is very hard to generalize from facts about one question (or the aggregate over questions) to some other question. Knowing that "Metaculus" got one thing right, or got things right on average, tells me little about any other one of its opinions, because "Metaculus" is a different person every time they say something.

----

One particular form of this pathology involves changes in the forecasts over time.

Not only is there a different "community" for every question, there is a different "community" for each question at each point in time.

Changes in a forecast can reflect the same forecasters registering new predictions, but they can also reflect new people coming in and registering first-time predictions with different statistics.

It's tempting to look at those graphs and think "Metaculus changed its mind, it must have done so on the basis of new evidence" (and I see people do this all the time). But it also changes the graph if different people respond to the same evidence.

So these moves have no useful interpretation whatsoever: all they tell you is that that there was a change in the average over whoever showed up. If the change happened because the question got on Hacker News and that drove first-time votes from a bunch of relatively low-information users . . . then, again, this is the intended behavior of the system. The Metaculus "community" is whoever showed up, at each place and time, and never anything besides.

----

@dubreus also said:

i also think you're underselling the part where there's a commitment to *checking* whether the question ended up happening, a 6-year 1,000 question track record of doing so, and the part where even the top ranked forecasters have similar accuracy to the "dumb community median of randos"

Again, the "anything goes" methodology really limits my willingness to draw any conclusions from this.

Metaculus does have a page where you can review how well it did, in aggregate, over . . . the questions it decided to ask itself.

​But "the questions Metaculus decides to ask itself" is not a natural category, and the questions are chosen so whimsically and unsystematically that an average over them is not very informative.

Compare this to, say, 538. When people talk about 538's Senate forecasts and ask how good they are, this discussion is grounded in the fact that, if 538 predicts the Senate in a given year, they predict the whole Senate. It's not like Nate Silver can just pick his favorite subset of the races happening in 2020, and only predict on those, and then pick some other subset in 2022.

This means that aggregates over 538 Senate forecasts are aggregates over the category of Senate races, which is a natural category. Whereas if Nate Silver got to pick which states to predict, then you'd have aggregates over "Senate races conditional on Nate Silver deciding he wanted to predict them."

In some sense, this is an appropriate category to use when you want to evaluate a current 538 prediction, since it is (by hypothesis) a case where they decided to predict . . . except that you have to take on faith that older 538 selections are representative of newer ones.

Suppose 538 used to only select states where they thought their model would work well (whatever that means). Then, later, they relax this rule and predict on some states where they don't expect this. The calibration properties (etc) of their earlier forecasts would not transfer to the new round of predictions -- but nothing in their "numerical track record" would give you a hint that this is true.

I'm not going to say this kind of error is unquantifiable, but it is not something people typically quantify (certainly Metaculus doesn't). Usually people avoid the issue entirely by using transparent and systematic selection rules. (But Metaculus doesn't.)

----

In concrete terms, well, people are talking about Metaculus AI forecasts a lot. So I ask, "how good is their track record on AI?"

I go onto that track record page, and . . . hmm, yes, I can drill down to specific categories, that's good . . . so I put in a few AI-related ones and see something like:

Okay, cool! So . . . what does that Brier score actually mean? Like, what is this an average over?

One thing that quickly becomes clear is that these categories are noisy. I'm largely getting stuff about the future of AI, but there are some weird ones mixed in:

Will Trump finish the year without mentioning the phrase "Artificial Intelligence"? [Short-Fuse] Will AbstractSpyTreeBot win the Darwin Game on Lesswrong?

Okay, fine, I add some more filters to weed those out. Now what am I averaging over?

Well, something akin to "Nate Silver's favorite 17 states" . . . except here it's more like "Nate Silver's favorite 1-2 states, and also 538 only predicted the U.S. Senate once in a single year, and they also predicted the House but only once in some other year, and this year they're predicting the Israeli parliament."

Here's a question that caught my interest:

The "community" kinda thought this would happen in 2018, but it didn't. Did they think it was going to happen in 2019, then? In 2020 (I think that's when it really happened)? We don't know, because they only asked themselves this question once, in 2016-17.

I have no way to assess Metaculus' quality systematically on any topic area, because it never asks itself questions in a systematic way. Someone could look at the above and think, "maybe Metaculus is overly bullish on self-driving cars." Are they? I have no idea, because they just ask themselves whichever random self-driving car questions they feel like, with no natural group like "Senate races" over which it would be informative to take an average.

This issue, together with the fluid nature of "the community," mean I don't trust any summary statistic about Metaculus to tell me much of anything.

There's no glue holding this together, giving one of its parts predictive value for the properties of the others. It's just whatever. Whatever questions people felt like putting on the site, whatever people felt like voting on them at any point in time.

Computing a Brier score over "just whatever" does not give me information about some other "just whatever," both of them totally whimsical and arbitrary. These statistical tools were made for doing statistics. This is not statistics.

[pan-matsuri]

The first thing that strikes me is the phrase "Tumblr is not easy to use". That is a wholly subjective statement. Any software engineer worth their salt knows that "unintuitive" is not a valid descriptor for an application because every user has their own knowledge base and skill set that they are bringing to their user experience. So what is intuitive for one person may not be so for another. This should be 101 stuff.

Anyway, here's my survey responses to your points that you didn't ask for.

On point 1, what inspired me to create my own account was being able to see other accounts. It was not the dashboard experience that drew me in, it was being able to create my own space of all my favorite things.

On point 2, I disagree with the premise that it is the platform's fault if there is nothing interesting to show. It was not Facebook's fault that none of my friends ever posted anything interesting to me. What kept me from returning to the platform, however, was how they tried to convince me that there would be something interesting every time I logged in. Their use of data was unethical, and if you are going to be responsible with your userbase, then you have to be prepared to take the L here and accept that users will go elsewhere until new interesting content shows up.

On point 3, I agree with the assesment on replies. Some of this, tho, reads like "somebody replied-all to the email thread before I could finish my reply and now I'm mad I have to rewrite my reply".

On point 4, I disagree with chronological feeds being "outdated". This is a feature beloved by end users, and every social media site that has done away with it has been despised by its users. This suggests a disconnect between leadership and users, and that leadership sees users only as data points and dollar signs and intends to treat them as such.

On point 5, what brings me back to tumblr is that the people I like are here. If they post infrequently, that means less screen time for me. If the artists I follow are discouraged from using tumblr, then I will also no longer have a reason to continue using the platform.

On point 6, I have no feedback.

tl;dr - It sounds like you are planning to fuck things up, because you are scared and not listening to the right people, and you should reconsider doing that.

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we��ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[queen-zigzag]

Oh boy, you missed the Post+ fiasco!

If you haven't already gotten caught up:

Tumblr announced Post+, which is basically the same old Tumblr/Twitter/GameFAQs/whatever Gold Account joke everyone's been saying for the past ten years.

The concept is basically that you can have a regular free Tumblr account, you can have a Post+ account where free content is divided between paywalled posts, or you could just run a fully paywalled blog. My go-to analogy is that it's like if paywalled Patreon posts were sandwiched between free Tumblr posts.

People get pissed and riot because as you know, software pirating masterposts are common here and a recent meme has been "I can't believe this website's free". People don't want to be browbeat into paying subscription fees to people's blogs.

People saw the first Post+ blog out in the wild: kaijuno. They proceeded to get clusterbombed with harassment.

It turns out Tumblr approached her to be a Post+ ambassador, and (to my knowledge) made her the only Post+ blog on the entire website. They basically hung her out to dry and take all the heat for being a Post+ blog while they played the "oopsy woopsie we're just staff!" card. She recanted her support the next day and spoke with a couple of news websites about it.

Post+ edits began popping up for other blogs, with some blogs (like biggest-gaudiest-patronuses) receiving hatemail and/or revived vitriol about their existence on the platform. It basically refreshed the wider Tumblr community to the fact that they existed, and through the lens of a significant backlash at that, which led to a renewed wave of harassment due to people being duped by these memes.

People combed the TOS and found that A) Tumblr was partnering with a billing service called Stripe, meaning that Tumblr users would be beholden to their TOS as well as Tumblr's which most people don't know, B) Tumblr can basically wash their hands of any activity that breaks either TOS and leave the user hanging out to dry (which is standard, but still caused a panic), and C) since early Post+ functionality has been baked into the app and the TOS has been changed, Tumblr's almost certainly going full steam ahead whether the userbase wants it to or not.

Tumblr released a feedback form for Post+ and everybody trolled it

Someone planned a 24 hour Tumblr strike in the same vein as the (failed) 2018 Tumblr strike in protest of the NSFW ban. It's set for the 5th/6th of August.

I've heard this once or twice but idk if it's true or classic Tumblr misinformation. Allegedly, for desktop users, Tumblr would take a 5% cut of any income you made through Post+. For mobile users, they would take 30%.

So basically, Tumblr wants to get a slice of what Patreon has by rubbing the monetisation in people's faces on the main platform here, and it's alienated a huge chunk of Tumblr's userbases.

thanks, this is actually really helpful in understanding whats going on! its really funny how every paragraph somehow makes it worse. or at least it would be funny if it werent so sad

[jurassicraptor]

I'll be honest. I haven't been on this site for probably five, six years? Ever since the great purge that drove off almost everyone and almost collapsed Tumblr's userbase I haven't had much of a reason to be on here.

Pretty much everyone moved on to the equally bad for you Twitter, including myself. I really don't know if this will generate any traction on here... but, posting on a site that -- at least at one time -- was a hub of diversity and very important for my own discovery of who I am and my own bisexuality, might be a successful and good idea.

I occasionally still get emails and notifications saying that someone (ironically almost always a bot posting the very things Tumblr banned -- not sure if I can even say the word without getting blocked) has followed this account. So, I don't think that this will get a massive amount of traction... I think the majority of people who followed me went the way I did and just abandoned their accounts, letting them get covered with dust. But, it'd be foolish for me not to bother just in case this can get traction.

So, with that out of the way, I've started posting a novel onto Wattpad and Goodreads. The Wattpad one is linked on this post, the Goodreads one is linked on my profile.

I would be extremely grateful if you could check it out and let me know what you think. I know there was a lot of fandom activity on this site before the purge, so I hope some of that excitement is still here and still willing to try some new things.

And now, a description of the novel:

In 2024, the Deva Software Corporation releases the Samsara Virtual Reality Headset alongside their flagship title: The Pure Lands, a Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (VRMMORPG for short). This single release promises to revolutionize gaming and the way we interact with others online.

By October of that same year, Leon Cris is College graduate with no plan, no career, and overall no prospects outside of his mysterious "uncle Rick" who's bankrolled his life so far. For his twenty-second birthday, this unknown "uncle" gifts him the Samsara Headset with a note telling Leon to "Come Find Him" in a specific server on the game, a role-playing only server.

Now Leon has to navigate the player-created world of the game, dozens of new influences on his life in the forms of friends, inspirations, and allies, forge connections, and meet the father he never knew, all while figuring out what he wants to do in life outside of this new game.

Inspired by hit works of fiction like Hunter X Hunter, Sword Art Online, She-Ra: Princesses of Power, Black Clover, One Piece, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, the works of Studio Ghibli and more, while also taking thematic inspiration from religions such as Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, "Come Find Me" is a story about living your life to the fullest and finding a family that will help you do that.

Please take a look and enjoy. There are 40 chapters so far, and more to come every week.

[in-spatele-cuvintelor]

PUBG Mobile

It is possible to use these controllers as they are, or you are able to change them. Now it is time to configure your mouse and keyboard controllers.

You may simply be paired with players using emulators." After the launch of the game. This is only because Tencent (the game's writer ) created an upgrade to match players utilizing emulators against each other for equity to mobile players. When some emulators, permit the consumer to team the game with anybody who connected up the PUBG mobile on the PC or notebook computer. The PC version of PUBG has distinct features and pictures. Some emulator finds and has attached to the player who's using exactly the identical emulator. Read More Top 3 Ways To Play Pubg Mobile On Pc

Articles About Pubg Mobile

Personal info input into this instrument is shielded with its privacy policy. The steps below will instruct you how you can play PUBG Mobile on the personal computer in any situation that you wish to attempt it.

There are two ways that you may buy PUBG on your own PC.

Finally, should you would like to share another effective approach to put in PUBG to discuss it.

Consequently, you will not have the ability to play with people on Apple or even Android phones.

Additionally, you have to know about the truth that while PUBG Mobile lets you use emulators, you may simply have the ability to play with players who are employing the identical procedure to play the game.

But if you do not have Android right now, you might download some of those 2 emulators.

Then click Publish a Product On Steam, then enter your code to get PUBG. This will add the item to your own library and start the download procedure.

Gameskinny

That was somewhat jaded by India's current ban of this name. While PUBG garnered worldwide fame, it fought to compete in the United States, as Epic Games' Fortnite overshadowed it. As it started on iOS and Android in 2018, PUBG Mobile was able to transcend Fortnite in downloads, through its substantial userbase in China and India, but it still lagged behind Fortnite in earnings. At different thresholds, you unlock a complimentary loot crate. EXP is got the exact same style, and it unlocks permanent account features, such as particular avatar icons, which go toward upping your account level. PUBG Mobile now lacks any kind of monetization, and that means that you can not purchase BP with actual cash, but this must change in the long run as the game becomes much more broadly available across the world. We'd love to highlight that from time to time we might miss a possibly malicious software application. Read Also Pubg Mobile Settings

Mirrored is an Android phone mirroring PC software that permits users to play with any mobile games and software on PC. Click here and you will now begin playing PUBG mobile on your own PC. Agree with the majority of the response, however, who told you that emulator players aren't matched with mobile players. It is merely specified by this emulator, nevertheless actually it functions as some players connect with mobile and also a few with the emulator in every team. Well, that rounds up the way to play PUBG Mobile on your PC.

Click the Download button highlighted previously, which will begin downloading Tencent's Emulator. It is so simple for reasons like hardware advantage particularly aiming with the mouse in contrast to thumbs actually my very first game I have this.

Open the Win + X menu by pressing the Windows key + X keyboard shortcut. Therefore, turning an antivirus utility off by right-clicking its system tray icon and choosing a disable or turn-off alternative might repair the PUBG emulator. The Tencent Gaming Buddy PUGB emulator not functioning could be due to anti-virus software. Some anti-virus software might determine the TGB emulator as malware, which is a false positive.

Version

That said if you've got some performance problems to follow the aforementioned steps. You can easily download PUBG Lite on your own PC by following our comprehensive guide on the Best Way Best to Download And Install PUBG Lite To PC. Before, buying the game make sure your PC meets the below-mentioned requirements. Nowadays you need to double-click the PUBG Mobile game to begin the game in your as shown previously. After setup and setup are complete that the Emulator will begin the PUBG Mobile mechanically as shown previously. Now, wait till your Setup of this emulator is finish.

[gizmotron]

#GitChallenge - Github vs Gitlab comprehensive comparison

Recenty, Github announced that they were slashing prices for their premium plans and making a number of other features free due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. Gitlab have also made a similar announcement  and, as I’ve used both Github & Gitlab in the past, I’d like to talk about the differences between the two powerhouses when it comes to version control. 

What I currently use

Right now, I have accounts (as well as organisations for AC0/RD Software) with both Github & Gitlab, however I primarily use Github today. 

(My Github dashboard)

I use Github, because while Gitlab has more features, right now I don’t currently need to use CI/CD pipelines, and I get by fine with Github. Also, while Gitlab has made some great leaps and bounds with its UI over the past few years, for me Github is still better looking and that is the main reason that I use Github right now. 

I only started using Github properly in 2019, but one of the old arguments against Gitlab was that no-one used it. After Microsoft shelled out $7.5 BILLION in 2018 for Github, developers jumped ship to Gitlab amid fears that Microsoft would “kill” the open-source community - however, both Github & Gitlab are thriving today. 

(My Gitlab dashboard)

Right now, I use Github for

Hosting my personal website through Github pages

Hosting the AC0/RD Software network

Learning & logging my progress with coding languages like C++, Java, and Lua

Sharing my simple Python & Unity projects

Occasionally using pipelines for my projects

I almost never need to use pipelines (Gitlab) or packages (Github), and while I’d like to in the future (in fact, once AC0/RD launches my usage of Git services will definitely be shifting to more “dev-oriented” usage), right now I have no need to. I still use Gitlab to host some repositories, but sparingly - usually for either a backup, or when I do need to use CI/CD tools. 

Some simple differences

Now that we’ve got my reasons for using Github out of the way, let’s look at the differences between Gitlab & Github. There’s a few simple ones that confused me at first when I started using Gitlab after a few months on Github, but after a few days they confused me no more.

Repositories (on Github) are called Projects on Gitlab

Organisations are called Groups on Gitlab (and you can have subgroups, something I’ll talk about later)

Pull requests are called Merge requests on Gitlab

Comments on issues are counted as commits on Gitlab, but not on Github

Early history of the Fox & the Cat

After being founded in 2008 by  Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner, and Scott Chacon, grew fast - reaching over 100,000 users in 2009 and a valuation of $750 billion in 2012.

Gitlab was founded 3 years after Github, in 2011, however the domain name had first been registered in 2004, and in 2010 the domain name was registered again and parked by GoDaddy. Unlike Github, from the start Gitlab understood the importance of CI/CD tools, and from the start it had a CI/CD applet - Github wouldn’t get one until 2019.

300 people signed up for the first beta of Gitlab, in 2012, and by 2016 it had over 100,000 organisations, or groups, and many millions of users - the fox was starting to gain on the cat’s momentum. 

Repository membership

It wasn’t until April 14 this year that Github allowed teams, or organisations, to create unlimited private repostories. Gitlab had offered this to organisations from the start. While users on Github could host private repositories for free, Gitlab’s more versatile starter plan paved the way for less restrictions when it came to privacy. 

The repository for AC0/RD’s website

The layout across the Github website is horizontal, while Gitlab moved from that traditional layout (which I preferred) to a vertical sidebar:

CI/CD Frameworks

This was one of the main reasons that developers jumped ship from Github to Gitlab, even before Microsoft’s big (and controversial) purchase of the Cat. Companies like CircleCI, Shippable & Jenkins are all examples of companies that grew big by accomodating the users who still used Github who required continuous integration. While last year Github introduced CI/CD for the first time, many people still use those services, for the main reason that since the Github team dragged their feet for so long, companies like Gitlab & CircleCI had made their platforms really, really good - so even a behemoth like Microsoft couldn’t recuperate all those customers from the start (give it time, however, and I believe that Github users will start to trust in the platform more, which in turn will give Github - and Microsoft - an incentive to improve the system). 

Development & DevOps

One of the key problems with Github is that there is no webIDE - unlike on Gitlab (however, Gitlab does have its own problems with online usage - like only being able to upload a single file on the website at a time, but if you use a git client like GitKraken there’s no problem). 

Here’s a comparison of DevOps between Github and Gitlab, from Gitlab’s website:

However, while Gitlab does release frequent updates each month, it’s not uncommon for users to complain about the new features that are added being rushed and only half-completed. Similarly, the common consensus around the UI/UX of the two platforms is that Github “features a super-simple interface and infrastructure.”

Community & Education

It’s a common argument amongst Github fans (and I’m one of them) that Github is a better platform because of its larger userbase, and that is true. Github has over 40 million users, making it the world’s largest website for open-source developers. While Gitlab certainly has a large number of developers & enthusiasts, too, it lacks the sheer number of well-built, official integrations that Github posesses - Trello, Slack & Monday.com are good examples of this.

But this is not to say that there are no external tools/integrations that work with Gitlab. Integromat & Zapier both support Gitlab, and there are slack & trello apps both available as well. If there’s an app that isn’t available on Gitlab, you can either build it yourself or get someone else to build it for you - chances are, there’s more people that feel the same way.

Or you can do what I did, and use both Github & Gitlab, but use something called “repository mirroring”. What this does is it allows you to connect a Github & Gitlab repository together, so if you need a specific feature from Github tbut your main repo is on Gitlab, it’s all good. The commits, pull/merge requests & issues can all be synced as well, either through the official interface of through third-party tools like Integromat.

The biggest downside for me with Gitlab is the lack of an education plan. While Gitlab does offer free premium plans to students, a school itself has to apply for one, and where I live - Australia - very few governments or schools see the importance or value in teaching coding or computer science, and they’re unlikely to put much time into investing in improving the experience of the few students who take computer science (which is still not yet a compulsory course!).

On the other hand, with Github I just input my education email addres and not only did I get access to Github premium, I also got access to premium plans for dozens of other websites and apps, like Canva & Name.com. 

Choose what works best for you. Both solutions are great.

Liam

[onestopuserbasicaccountsoftware]

Free Training Course from User Basic Software

Free Training Course from User Basic Software

User Basic Software offers training for accounting software and inventory software and last but not least payroll software to all our users as well.

Get knowledge of basic accounting software application and inventory software to improve your own knowledge and at the end of the course, you’ll be able to get

Basic understanding of accounting theory

Basic skills of using computerize accounting…

[quicksilversquared]

Keeping Up With the Ladyblog

A reporter has to adapt and improvise. It's an important skill to learn, especially when one is a reporter who is still in school and can't skip out to film all of the akuma battles without getting grounded. So Alya gets creative and starts using old security camera footage of akuma attacks. It keeps the Ladyblog active and maybe, just maybe, she'll finally get her scoop of a lifetime.

links in the reblog

Initially, setting up the Ladyblog and getting a devoted userbase had been a bit of an uphill battle. Even though Alya had gotten noticed right away with her footage from the first fight, that didn't guarantee her a permanent position as the best-known blog on Paris's superheroes. Not covering a few fights would mean that someone else could sneak in and steal her spot, so that meant that even if she missed a little school here and there (or had to drag her sisters along during a fight), it was worth it. She had to stay on top of all things Ladybug and right then, that meant getting the best coverage of as many fights as she could physically manage and writing up good, thought-provoking articles for when there was a slow day or two.

(Of course, there were other problems that she had to deal with as well. Alya had to put together a functioning site that was user-friendly, could handle the traffic that she was getting, and offered everything that anyone could possibly want from an official superhero blog, because there was no. way. Alya was going to lose traffic just because some other blog had one option or another that she didn't have or because her blog went down from traffic overload at a critical moment. There were some places that she drew the line- she didn't accept fanfiction of the superheroes, because they were real people and therefore it would be weird, and only appropriate art was allowed- but she had to add all sorts of options so that people who visited the Ladyblog would come back over and over again. It was a lot of work and all had to be done fairly quickly, which meant that her homework sometimes got pushed off until later than it should have.)

Alya didn't consider setting up the blog itself to be that big of a problem, though. Software could usually be battered into submission if she worked on it for long enough, and as long as she didn't try any system updates to the Ladyblog when a lot of people were using it, short outages were usually not a big deal. It was the content that was more of a problem, especially now that her parents (and teachers) were on her back about not skipping school just to film attacks.

She just had to get creative.

Originally, Alya had considered trying to use her fame from being the sole moderator of the Ladyblog to see if she could get a get-out-of-class-free card during the attacks. Her teachers could just check her blog to make sure that she wasn't abusing the pass, she figured, and it wasn't as though most of her classes would be that hard to make up. But it didn't take long before Alya realized that that was just a pipe dream. No teacher would just let her go whenever just so she could keep up a blog when there were professional reporters out there as well that could film the attacks just as well (though Alya would argue with that). Besides, she sometimes had to bike across town to try to get footage, and there were times when it took so long that Ladybug and Chat Noir were already done when she got there. Without any footage, it was a waste of her time.

She had to play it smart. She couldn't just take footage from news channels, but what if there was other footage out there, unseen by most of the public? The Ladyblog already used fan submissions. People took pictures and videos of the superheroes all the time, and most didn't have any interest in starting their own superhero blog but were willing enough to share their superhero content online. Alya always spent a chunk of time every day sorting through the submissions and organizing them by akuma for easy reference.

Still, that wasn't quite enough. Alya had to go above and beyond if she didn't want to be replaceable.

Asking Mr. Kubdel about getting security camera footage from the Louvre partway through the year was a stroke of pure genius on her part. Getting it was a combination of luck, her fame as the Ladyblogger, and the fact that she knew Alix.

"They don't have the best angles in the world," Alya told Nino three days after Mr. Kubdel agreed to her request. She had just gotten the footage from all of the security cameras for the time frames of the last few akuma attacks that had gone through the museum, and digging through the video to find clips of the actual fight was taking a while. Some parts she could just fast-forward through, since the superheroes didn't go into that particular room, but she couldn't go too fast or she could miss the superheroes flashing by. "But I can't really complain. No one has any video of any of these fights yet, so this is incredible."

"It was super-nice of Mr. Kubdel to agree to it," Nino said as he watched the video over her shoulder. "Are you- whoop, there goes Chat Noir."

"Am I what?" Alya asked as she marked down the time Chat Noir entered and when he exited. "Ooh, look, that's a cool akuma!"

"It is a pretty cool design," Nino agreed. "Are you going to ask other places if you can get security camera videos from them, too? Like, there's some places that seem to have a lot of akuma fights go through them. School, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Paris-"

Alya's eyes lit up at the mention of the last place. "Ooh! D'you think I could wrangle some footage of Chloe as Antibug? I kind of want to see some footage of her getting her ass handed to her by Ladybug and Chat Noir."

Nino cringed slightly. "...yeah, I wouldn't phrase it like that when you ask Mr. Bourgeois about it if I were you. He might say no just because of it." He considered that for a second, then added, "Actually, come to think of it, a lot of the akuma that pop up at his hotel tend to be after Chloe, right? So maybe he would say no if most of the footage you get is of Chloe being tormented, no matter how funny you find it. And he's not going to have anything from inside of the guest rooms, just the hallways and dining areas and whatnot."

Alya sniffed. "I'd be professional and include as much of the fight as I could find. Any compilations of Chloe being pursued by angry akumas would be completely unofficial and only posted to an anonymous YouTube account. Which I would then share with you guys, of course."

Nino laughed.

"I think I could persuade him to help, though," Alya decided, going back to the Louvre videos. "He's nice enough when Chloe isn't pushing him around. I'd just have to ask when Chloe isn't there. Maybe I could ask Sabrina's father for help to get footage from other places." She squinted at the screen, then stopped the video for a moment. Nino looked over and saw that it had gone all blurry and pixilated.

He frowned. "Uh, what happened to it? Is the file corrupted?"

"I don't know. It's happened a couple times before on other files, once near the start of this fight and twice again near the end of the first fight I looked at. I don't know what causes it." Alya rewound a little so she could get the last good frame of the superheroes and record the time so she could cut it there. "And... I know I kind of gave up on exposing Ladybug and Chat Noir's identities on the Ladyblog, but I kind of thought that I might catch them detransforming on the security cams. I wasn't going to post that part online, of course, but still..."

"Maybe they're just really good at moving out of the area first," Nino suggested. "That's gotta be tough, actually. I never thought about it. But there's so many cameras in buildings like that nowadays that they have to be super-careful so they don't get seen by others or by cameras!"

"They're bound to slip up sometime," Alya grumbled, opening another file and starting to fast-forward through it. "I really hope I don't miss an attack when I'm working on this. Like, it's gonna be great for my blog to have this footage and all, but it's the live stuff that people like the most."

  The first of the spliced-together security camera footage hit the Ladyblog almost a week after Alya got the first batch of raw video. There was an immediate spike of interest, though, as Alya complained to Nino as they waited for Adrien and Marinette to arrive to work on their group project, some people were whining about favoritism getting her the tapes.

"It was just because I asked first," Alya grumbled, scrolling through the comments. "Because I thought of it first. And- oh! I forgot to tell you! Mr. Bourgeois said yes, I just have to figure out the dates and times of old attacks myself and give them to his security people. And I talked to the principal too, and to Sabrina's father. Mr. Damocles said yes, and Sabrina's father said that he would ask his supervisor and also people at Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower about the security cameras at their individual sites." She was grinning now, momentary irritation gone. "It's gonna be a beast going through everything and getting my homework done, but it'll be worth it."

Nino frowned. "Are all of them gonna give you footage from past attacks? Some might discard video once a certain amount of time passes, or they might think that it's too much work to go back that far to get you the files."

Alya shrugged, face dropping slightly. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Still, going through the past stuff I do get plus new stuff is gonna be hard. At least spring break is coming up soon. Ish. Kinda. And then I can really plow through stuff once it's summer."

"You're gonna vanish into your room and never come out again," Nino joked. "You'll get all pale from lack of sun."

"I still gotta go out for livestreaming attacks," Alya reminded him. "And once I don't have homework to do, I don't think it'll take that long to mark and edit stuff. I can get through one per day for sure, maybe more. I can do it while I babysit my sisters, as long as they don't want to go anywhere."

Nino snorted. "Right, and the chances that they won't want to go out to the park or on a walk?" He shook his head at her. "But I can help with the timing stuff, so you can just focus on the splicing things together."

Alya grinned and leaned forward to press a kiss to his lips. "That would be great, Nino! Thank you so much!"

"You'll have to tell me how you want it done sometime before I start, but it really shouldn't be a problem," Nino assured her, grinning as he returned the kiss. "Though maybe we'll have time for you to show me before Adrien and Marinette arrive. Where are they, anyway?"

Alya just shrugged. "Who knows. I texted Marinette ten minutes ago to remind her we would be meeting, but no response yet. She might be in the middle of a project, and if she is, I don't wanna startle her. Last time I called her when she was busy sewing, she got started by her phone ringing and stabbed herself with a pin."

Nino cringed. "Ow. Yeah, I texted Adrien too, but no dice. No idea what he might be doing- oh, wait, here they come. Finally."

"And from the same direction too, hmm? Interesting!" Alya slid her laptop back into her bag and stood up, grinning as she watched Adrien and Marinette approach. "And neither of their houses are in that direction, either."

"We're here to study, not interrogate them," Nino reminded her. "Midterms, remember?"

"Oh, but come on-"

"You can interrogate them after, once we've gotten our studying done," Nino pointed out, grinning. "But I actually want to pass my classes, thank you very much."

  There were times when Alya almost regretted starting to post the security camera footage. It was a lot to handle and process, and it ended up cutting into her article-writing time, which, well, she really liked writing those articles. It was one of the things that set the Ladyblog apart. But the old footage was popular, particularly when there was no good news coverage of the fight, and she could always prioritize which fights to edit together and which could maybe be set aside until she had more time.

It was after Alya was first tapped to become Rena Rouge when she realized how great of an idea it had been to start including the security footage from attacks on the Ladyblog. She couldn't cover her own fights- well, not that she was called for many of the akuma attacks, really- but she could still provide that footage, and it wasn't as though she had only started with that kind of footage after she became a superhero, so it wasn't going to raise any suspicion.

Well. Much suspicion, at least. There might be a few people who wondered why she could never cover Rena Rouge's fights, but there had been few enough of them so far that the pattern wouldn't be apparent. And if it continued- which, well, she hoped that it would- then she could always use her much improved video editing skills to "interview" Rena Rouge in person.

She was sure that Ladybug would let her borrow the Miraculous for a little extra time if she mentioned the need to throw people off of her trail. After all, Ladybug was very big on secrecy.

Most of the time, though, Alya loved her stroke of brilliance. It had been worth the security checks to make sure that she could be trusted with the security footage, and she had managed to shore up her views again. Future employers would see that she was focused and willing to put in the work, and well, she had gotten herself a fabulous reputation at the Louvre after she had spotted a shoplifter on the footage and let them know about it right away. It made her feel like a detective of sorts, discovering things that she wouldn't have otherwise.

And, well, summer was coming. Soon, she could get all caught up, and then Alya was sure that it wouldn't be quite so overwhelming.

  "I figured it out!"

Nino glanced up at Alya as she slid into the empty spot at the table he was sitting at. From the other side of the table, Adrien and Marinette looked over at the reporter as well.

"What did you figure out?" Marinette asked, gaze immediately going to the tablet Alya was holding. She looked interested and inched closer. "Is it something to do with the Ladyblog?"

"It is!" Alya held up her tablet. "So you know how I've been putting together footage of the akuma fights from security cameras?"

Nino nodded. Both Adrien and Marinette looked puzzled. Alya groaned at them.

"Seriously? Have neither of you looked at the Ladyblog in weeks?! It's my big new thing!"

"I've been busy," they both claimed at once, before shooting each other startled looks. Alya narrowed her eyes at them both.

"Too busy to even glance at the Ladyblog once in a while, even now that school is almost out? Really?"

"I've glanced, but not looked into the archives at all," Marinette corrected herself. Then she frowned. "Wait, what do you mean, security camera footage?"

"Huh, I guess I must not have mentioned it to you before, either," Alya said, looking thoughtful. "Hm. Anyway, I've been contacting people at the Louvre and at the Eiffel Tower and Chloe's dad and Sabrina's dad and the principal to ask if I can get the raw security camera footage from the akuma fights that go through there, and they all said yes! So I've been going through that and splicing together stuff from different cameras to try to get as much of the fight covered as possible."

Now Adrien was frowning, too. "Really? They just happen to know which cameras Ladybug and Chat Noir have gone past?"

Now Nino snorted. "Of course not. They just basically give Alya all the footage from the cameras for the duration of the fight and she- well, we, I've been helping- have to go through and find which cameras Ladybug and Chat Noir went past and when."

For some reason, both Adrien and Marinette now looked deeply alarmed.

"Anyway, we've been noticing some weirdness on some of the clips," Alya told them. "It get corrupted for a bit, mostly near the start of the fight before the superheroes show up or after the akuma's been defeated but sometimes in the middle, too. I've been puzzling over it for the longest time, and I think I've finally figured it out!"

"Really?" Nino asked, interested and finally distracted from his strangely pale friends. "How?"

Alya grinned. "It was some comments on the Ladyblog that finally got me to notice the pattern. The corruption is either before Ladybug and Chat Noir show up or right after they vanish- or, in the middle of the fight, if one of them has to go recharge, then it happens then, too."

Nino blinked, then caught on. "So you're saying that somehow their magic is interfering with the cameras and protecting their secret identities?"

Alya pointed at him. "Exactly! I thought when I started all this that I might accidentally catch them transforming or see someone where they weren't meant to be, but their magic just means that they can't be caught on camera. It kind of makes me wonder if they always have that effect on cameras when they aren't transformed, or if it only pops up when they're about to transform or just detransformed."

Nino was so caught up in thinking about it that he completely missed Adrien and Marinette's identical sighs of relief as they both slumped in their seats. "It's gotta be the latter. Otherwise how would you explain people never getting a good picture of you, if it happened all the time?"

"Maybe Juleka is Ladybug, then," Marinette offered, giggling a little. "Remember, she was convinced that she had some sort of photo curse?"

"And now she's figured out how to manipulate the magic so that she can get normal photos again," Alya joked, sounding serious for a moment before she laughed. "Nah, she can't be, she was akumatized and fought Ladybug and Chat Noir. Remember that?"

Nino shuddered. "How could I forget? I was stuck in a skirt and high heels for ages!"

"I rocked the platforms," Adrien bragged. He grinned at Nino's raised eyebrow. "What? Sure, they were hard at first, but with a little practice..."

Nino just shook his head and groaned. "You would, dude. You must have been hidden, though. I couldn't find you after Reflecta left."

"Yeah, the outfit and the makeup would do that, probably," Adrien pointed out with a laugh. "I mostly decided to stay out of the way. And that fight didn't last that long. Ladybug and Chat Noir defeated her within an hour."

"Okay, fair."

"What would you do if you found something that told you who Ladybug or Chat Noir are?" Marinette asked, pulling the conversation back on track. "I mean, you can't see them transforming or detransforming, but if..."

Alya waved a hand. "Oh, I would destroy the footage as fast as possible. Hopefully I wouldn't recognize them-" though she wasn't certain about the probability of that, considering that Nino had been picked as a temporary superhero, too. What were the chances of that happening if Ladybug at least didn't know them to some extent? Unless of course it was a coincidence since she was the well-known Ladyblogger and Nino had already been out in the middle of the fight before Ladybug grabbed him- "and so it wouldn't matter if I saw them for two seconds."

Adrien looked astonished. "Really? I thought that was your dream, to figure out who they are! Not that I don't support the deleting thing," he added quickly. "That's probably safer for them. But what made you decide to change your mind?"

Well, she had become a superhero herself, for one. She had realized that she didn't really want the city to know her identity, because what if the akumas targeted her family and friends? And then Nino was a superhero, too, and what if people knew that and she became a target? She had figured that if she didn't want the city knowing her secret identity, she should probably extend the same courtesy to Ladybug and Chat Noir. And Heroes Day had proved that even superheroes knowing the secret identity of other superheroes wasn't necessarily safe. But instead of saying any of that, Alya just said "Well, I realized that it wouldn't be safe for them. And I figured that we should probably respect our superheroes' wishes since they've done so much for the city."

Adrien grinned. "That's very mature of you, Alya."

Alya just shrugged. Really, there had been so much more to it than she had let on. He was probably giving her too much credit, considering it had taken her being in the superheroes' shoes to realize what she had. "Yeah, well. I'll get a big scoop someday. I just refuse to have it at the superheroes' expense."

  With the start of summer came more free time, and Alya attacked her backlog of footage with gusto. It was slowly shrinking as she and Nino dug into it with occasional help from Adrien or Marinette, deleting the superhero-less footage out and discarding it. It had become a bit of an obsession now that she had plenty of free time, and Alya had finally- finally!- figured out how to have several streams going at once on her screen and how to pause the others and switch to just one when there was footage that she wanted to watch more closely.

It made things go a lot faster, that was for sure. She was getting through a couple akuma attacks per day, and she finally had to start queuing things up so that the Ladyblog wouldn't get overwhelmed. One per day would be good, maybe two if they were short fights. Alya prioritized newer fights, too, knowing that the old ones were interesting but also old news. The newer fights generated more views and more interest, but it wouldn't be long before the next wave of akumas took over public interest.

Still, Alya loved having that old footage. She loved watching Ladybug and Chat Noir facing up against the akuma, and she loved seeing Ladybug's creativity when faced with a strange Lucky Charm. Their teamwork was so strong, and the way that they absorbed the occasional extra teammate and worked in those powers- yeah, it was pretty obvious why they had been chosen to be the city's main superheroes.

She was digging through her folders of akuma fight footage when she spotted a particularly large one. Alya frowned, puzzled- what, had the entire city been involved in the fight?- when she noticed the date. It was from Heroes Day.

"Oh yeah," Alya said eagerly, grinning as she clicked on the folder. This had been one of the battles that she really wanted footage for. All five superheroes at once in the boss battle? Yes please. All of the existing footage of the fight had been filled by possessed people, so it would be great to get literally anything else.

It was going to be difficult to piece together all of the bits of footage that were bound to be all over the city, but hey, it was summer and Alya could probably rope her friends into helping. And hey, if she could get Adrien roped in, he had several computer monitors. He could use all of them at once and have a ridiculous number of feeds going all at once. But Alya was impatient and wanted to get another look at the fight, so she flipped through the camera files until she found a set on the Eiffel Tower. They opened right before a fox-themed supervillain got there- and ugh, Alya immediately found herself annoyed. Another Volpina? Why were there so many people in Paris who seemed to have some sort of design on the Fox Miraculous?

Ugh. She was going to scour the footage to see if she could get a glance at this new Volpina's unakumatized identity. One Fox villain before Rena Rouge had showed up was one thing, but again? Nuh-uh.

Alya watched as once again, chaos descended on Paris. Volpina detransformed- uh, could Hawkmoth recall akumas? Then why had the baby akuma actually happened at all?- and revealed- uh, was that Lila? What was Lila doing in Paris? She had told the class that she was out of the country and wasn't going to be returning yet!

Okay, something was definitely up there. Maybe Marinette was on to something when she said that she didn't trust Lila. Especially when- they had talked to Lila on Heroes' Day, hadn't they? They had video chatted with her as a class. She had said that she was abroad, and it had looked like she was, too.

Strange. Alya was going to have to do some digging there for sure.

On-screen, the red butterflies descended on Paris. Alya winced as she remembered the terror that had reigned. They had been tricked by Volpina's illusions- and wait wait wait. Alya rewound the footage to when Lila detransformed and- oh, she looked disappointed when she was detransformed, as though she knew what she had been doing and had wanted to continue.

Even stranger. Also really, really concerning. Alya was going to put a hold on making any plans with Lila until she figured out what was going on there.

Alya continued watching. Red akumas found their mark, and Hawkmoth emerged, watching over the panic. Red bubbles bloomed into oversized akumas, and then... well, more chaos. There was screaming in the streets as people were turned into akumas and everyone else fled- well, there looked like there was screaming in the streets, at least. The cameras didn't pick up sound, which did take away from the experience, just a bit, but she could imagine what it would have sounded like.

The sheer amount of footage that Alya was getting from just the Eiffel Tower was astounding. She could only imagine how much she was going to get across the city, though the ice appearing now from the re-akumatized Frozer probably took at least a few of the feeds out. If she just played it all one camera at a time, it would be an insanely long video.

She might have to learn how to play several streams at once in a split screen. Hawkmoth would have to be shown at all times, Alya thought, and then she could do flashes of different akumas and also show the superheroes. They would fill the screen when they were doing an intense fight, maybe and-

Oh, Alya had so many ideas for the video already and she had only watched part of four streams so far. The number of akumas and the civilian resistance- which, by the way, amazing- meant that she could really play with angles and video cuts and oh, it was gonna be great.

It was also going to be a whole lot of work. Alya was probably going to spend the entire week picking out clips and then deciding which ones she wanted to use, and then it was going to be another few days of editing.

Hopefully her friends would be willing to help her out. They could blast through mostly-boring feeds in no time and get stuff trimmed down for her to review. Maybe she could even get Max to help her with the split-screen editing stuff, since he understood all of that technical talk.

Smiling widely, Alya turned back to her computer. Most of the footage at the moment was just Hawkmoth standing up on the Eiffel Tower with his two singers- and boy was Alya going to rake him over the coals for that, it was ridiculous- and so she had to wait for Ladybug and Chat Noir to head up like she knew they had. Thankfully the camera on that level wasn't iced over at all, like the ones on the lower levels were. This time, she had a front-row seat (abet at a bad angle) as she saw Lila get akumatized again (and boy was it interesting that Lila didn't look at all alarmed about the butterfly approaching her- she looked eager) and Volpina conjured up a second Hawkmoth while the real one hid.

And boy, was that ever an anxiety-inducing experience, watching Ladybug and Chat Noir approach the decoy while the real Hawkmoth hid down below, ready to surprise them from behind. Somehow Ladybug noticed him creeping up on them- and how, Alya had no idea how, she and Chat Noir seemed a bit distracted by trying to get Hawkmoth to do the right thing by turning over his Miraculous- and then they were fighting. Hawkmoth's cane-sword went down, but he didn't go down with it.

Alya sat up and watched as the three secondary users re-joined the fight just in time. She wondered where they had gone wrong, where they might have messed up and could have done better. The next bit was also the only example they had so far of the mysterious Peacock user's powers, and they needed to know what to expect in case they came into play again.

It wasn't that the Peacock's powers seemed that dangerous, at least not from what they had seen so far. Their team had just been taken off guard, and that gave Hawkmoth enough of a distraction to run off like the coward he was. Alya watched the giant moth vanish after Ladybug hit it, and she wondered if it would have vanished so easily if Ladybug had hit it when Hawkmoth was still there. Had the Peacock backed off as soon as Hawkmoth had retreated?

On one of the streams, the superheroes glanced around, trying to figure out where Hawkmoth had gone. Meanwhile, a Hawkmoth-shaped blob limped- had he been injured? They should have looked for him!- past one of the iced-over cameras, and then slumped down against a wall. Alya leaned forward, eager, as Hawkmoth sat there for a few seconds, likely shaken by the whole run-in.

Was he going to detransform? Had they really caught Hawkmoth on camera, after nearly a year of attacks? The ice on the camera would make it hard to see exactly who it was, but Ladybug's Miraculous Cure was bound to come zipping past any moment now. Was this her big scoop-?

"Ugh, and there's that distortion," Alya complained, flopping back in her chair as the already-fuzzy footage got even worse as a burst of purple lit up the screen. "C'mon, really? Can't his kwami not provide magical protection for him? The dude doesn't deserve it."

Alya sulked at the screen as a rush of red went by, clearing off the ice but doing nothing for the magical distortion. She could make out a bit of a shape on the screen, and colors- red and white- but no details, and static regularly cut across the already blurry picture. The static stayed there for longer than normal, and then the blurry, pixilated shape of civilian Hawkmoth finally got up, heading for the stairs. It was only once he had fully exited the frame that the picture finally snapped back into focus, one last bit of static cutting across the screen before the picture stabilized for good.

"Oh, come on," Alya groaned, flopping back on her bed. "That's so unfair that we were so close, and this freaking arse just- just waltzes out of there? Just walks away down the stairs and off of the tower and- and- ugh!" She slapped her fist down on the bed next to her- and then she froze. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. He walked off of the Eiffel Tower. There have to be more cameras on the staircase and at the bottom. If he didn't detransform in front of those, would they have gone out, too?"

She didn't know. She had never really tracked other cameras from the area after the fights ended, so she didn't know if they had caught the civilian Ladybug and Chat Noir or not and she wasn't going to go back and look, not now that she knew now how dangerous it could be to have other people knowing a superhero's secret identity.

But now? There was absolutely no downside to finding out Hawkmoth's secret identity. It would be the biggest break of Alya's journalistic career.

Re-energized and laser-focused, Alya clicked back to her files, looking for the other cameras. It took a few tries for her to find the footage from the stair cameras and then she fast-forwarded to close to the end. There was a minute of anxious waiting, where Alya scanned the entire screen in case Hawkmoth had tried climbing down the side of the stairs or something ridiculous like that, and then a pair of feet appeared, headed slowly and almost unsteadily down the stairs. Before the feet could go down any further, though, the footage came to an end.

Alya let out a frustrated snarl and rewound the video a few seconds, pausing it right before it came to an end. Only a pair of perfectly white shoes and the hem of bright red pants came into view.

Those... those pants looked really familiar. Alya frowned as she stared at them. She couldn't quite place them, but maybe Marinette could, if Alya brought the footage over the next time that she went to Marinette's house. But that was stupid, Alya decided after a moment of mulling it over. Maybe they knew someone with pants like that, but there were several million people living in Paris. There was no guarantee that there weren't other people making the same (awful) fashion choices.

"So close," Alya complained aloud, glaring at her screen. If only Mr. Raincomprix had sent footage that was a few seconds longer! Except- oh, that was it! All she had to do was email him and ask for the footage from the lower-level cameras running from maybe a minute before the end of the fight to several minutes after the current end time. That would be sure to get her lots of footage of Hawkmoth, and surely he would be recognizable in some of it.

She had to hope that the footage still existed and it hadn't been written over at all. It would be close- it had been over two months since that battle- but Alya knew that she had gotten older footage from the Eiffel Tower before.

Hopefully that stuff hadn't just been saved for longer because of the akuma attack.

Excited, Alya turned back to her computer. If she was going to file a request for more footage and hoped to get it in a reasonable amount of time, she needed to have all of the information possible- what the camera IDS were, the exact date and times that she wanted were, everything. Just to be sure, Alya checked her other files to see which cameras would be focused on either the place where Hawkmoth detransformed or the stairs that he had gone down, writing the code for every last one down. Once she had that, she folded up the list and stuffed it in her pocket as she raced for the door.

"Alya, remember that you're going to be babysitting the twins in two hours," he mom called out as Alya raced past. "You'll be back by then, right?"

Alya had to bite down the frustrated noise that nearly escaped because even though this was critical, this was huge, it wasn't as though she couldn't wait a little longer to review the footage. And she could review the footage while sitting out at the kitchen counter with her sisters watching a movie in the living room, it would just be harder. "Yeah, I'll be back!"

And hopefully, she would come back with the footage that would change everything.

  Officer Raincomprix was all too willing to bring Alya over to the Eiffel Tower to get more of the footage, all without her having to explain anything. He showed her to the people she needed to talk to and then trotted off to deal with a littering teenager while Alya was ushered inside of the office. The staff were all helpful, and soon Alya was leaving with everything she needed, with no questions asked.

She supposed that it was good that all of the adults were so busy, because she didn't exactly want to explain. Really, Ladybug and Chat Noir should be the first ones to know about Hawkmoth's identity.

Alya jogged back towards her family's apartment, memory stick clutched tightly in her hand. On it, she hoped, would be evidence that would show her Hawkmoth's identity. She was nearly back to her building when she ran smack-dab into a very familiar figure.

"Yo, I was just looking for you!" Nino exclaimed, pulling Alya up. He bent back over to grab the memory stick that she had dropped before the passing pedestrians could kick it away and handed it back to her. "I was trying to text you earlier, but I didn't get any response."

Alya winced. "I'm so sorry! I just got really distracted by my video editing. I opened up the folder for Heroes' Day and I got really distracted."

"Oh, that was a crazy fight. I bet there was a ton of footage. Well, until everything got all icy, at least." Nino glanced down at her as they continued down the sidewalk. "So can I ask why you were out? You look out of breath."

"Not out here," Alya warned immediately. She didn't want a passerby overhearing and trying to grab the memory stick to grab the discovery for themselves. "Come inside with me. I can tell you there, and at any rate I have to be back in-" she checked her phone- "fifteen minutes anyway to babysit my sisters."

Nino followed without question, looking interested.

"So did you find something interesting in the footage?" Nino asked curiously. "You must have. Or was there footage missing, was that why you were out?"

"Not quite," Alya told him, grinning. "I needed more footage, yeah, but it wasn't during the middle of the fight. It was at the end, because I almost had Hawkmoth's civilian self on tape."

"You- what?" Nino asked, freezing for a few seconds before jogging up the stairs alongside her again. "You think you have Hawkmoth on tape? I thought that the magic messed with the cameras!"

Alya grinned. "It does. But where he detransformed- he had to go down the stairs, and there's another camera there. Before, I could see his shoes and the hems of his pants, but now I have an extended clip of the video! It should show him coming down the stairs into sight."

Nino looked impressed. "Oh, that is amazing. But what if it's not someone you know? I mean, there's a lot of people in Paris."

"Well, I'll turn the video over to Ladybug and Chat Noir. They can decide if they want to get the police involved. They might recognize the guy, too." Alya was assuming that she wouldn't recognize Hawkmoth, but she supposed that it was a possibility. "Or we could help by asking Max if he can run some sort of face recognition thing, so that they don't have to go to the police. I'm worried that the police might try to take over themselves and end up getting really hurt by underestimating him."

"Yeah, they might try to do that. Freaking adults, thinking that they know better than the actual experts." Nino shook his head, disgusted. "But do you think Max can do that? I mean, I know he's good at computers, but face recognition- that sounds like he would have to tap into files from, like, ID cards or something."

Alya shrugged. She supposed that was true, but Max was crazy smart and also had Markov. She was sure that if she asked, he would try to see what he could do for her.

"So are you gonna look at the footage now?" Nino asked as they reached her floor. "I thought you said that you have babysitting to do."

"I do, but I wanna at least look at the footage first, if I can." Alya pulled out her keys to open the apartment door. "And I was planning on just putting on a movie and some snacks for my sisters so that they stay out of trouble while I work. They should stay out of trouble that way."

Nino gave her a supremely dubious look. "Your sisters, staying out of trouble?"

"I'd still be in the room! And it's not like I would have headphones in or anything."

"...would you like me to stay there while you do your video stuff?"

"That would be amazing," Alya told Nino, leading him into the apartment. She waved to her mom as they headed down the hallway. "But I still have time to get this done before my mom has to leave!"

Nino glanced at the clock on the wall. "Uh, babe, you only have ten minutes."

"Do you really think I can't get this done in ten minutes?" Alya led the way into her room and wriggled her mouse, waking her laptop up. "You know me better than that. I know exactly where to look in the footage."

"And you really think you'll be able to focus on looking after kids once you've seen Hawkmoth's face?"

...Alya had to admit that that was a very good point.

"I can show you the footage leading up to the end while the computer recognizes my memory stick," Alya told Nino as she plugged the new flash drive in. She rewound the footage. "See, here's Hawkmoth escaping- but he didn't go far!"

"That ice on the cameras is annoying," Nino commented as the footage played. "Is all of it like that?"

"A few cameras were spared, I think," Alya told him. "Including the one on the main level, thank goodness. I mean, there's a few blurry spots from where the ice extended onto the lens a little bit, but it's mostly clear."

"Oh, and now it's worse," Nino added. "He detransformed right in front of the camera, holy cow."

"Yeah, I was really hoping that the distortion would go away since he seemed to be hanging around, but no such luck." Alya watched as on-screen, the ice cleared away and Hawkmoth finally got up, heading for the stairs. "So watch here- there's no one besides him and the superheroes on the Tower, right? Well, them and Lila, but that's beside the point. It got evacuated pretty fast, and anyone who didn't get off got akumatized or hit by Dark Cupid. So he's headed for those stairs."

"So whoever comes down is Hawkmoth, right," Nino agreed. Then he paused. "Wait, you said Lila? But she was abroad!"

"Apparently she lied." Alya stopped the tapes right where Hawkmoth's feet appeared on the stairs. "Okay, so the stuff that I got should start about thirty seconds before the end of these, so there's some overlap."

A tension rose in the room as Alya got the new files set up to play. She kept glancing at the clock while things loaded, watching as the time for her to move into the living room ticked closer and closer.

She wouldn't be able to stand it if she had to stop at this point. Even if it was only for a short break while she said good-bye to her mom and got the twins set up with their movie and their snacks, she couldn't. She was so, so close.

This had to work.

"Loaded," Alya announced as soon as the program was ready. "And here we go!"

She and Nino leaned forward as they watched the feed from the stairs on the screen. There were thirty seconds of anxious waiting, and then Hawkmoth's shoes appeared on the stairs. They headed down unevenly, revealing the red pants cuffs once again.

"Oh, he's shaken," Nino murmured, a grin evident in his voice. "Super shaken. Serves the asshole right."

Another step, more of the pants were revealed. They watched in anxious silence as the red pants gave way to a very familiar ivory jacket, then a striped necktie, and then Hawkmoth took one more step down the stairs, head hanging down as he made his way down the Eiffel Tower.

And much to Alya's surprise, she recognized the face that went with those atrocious fashion choices, even at this angle. And from Nino's sharp inhale, she knew that he had, too.

"Well," Nino managed after a minute of trying to find his words. "This is bad."

And with that, Alya could only agree.

[igdbwljydukl-blog]

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Instagram is one of the most well-liked social network sites in the world, allowing you to herald photos and rapid videos to part them bearing in mind the combination word. Some grow old ago, the Stories section and the launch of albums were introduced into the application. Nowadays it is a leading brand advertising tool for many brands. Initially, it could on your own be used by users of iOS devices, but future the users of Android and Windows were adept to download it too. In 2012 it was purchased by Facebook. Today we will evaluation what are my options if I would bearing in mind to find out who stalks my Instagram profile in 2018.story-sharing app by can I see who viewed my InstagramWe sentient in the grow old of internet and social media networks are a big part of it. everyday more and more people get entry to the internet, mobile internet plans, smartphones are getting cheaper and now even the poorest can afford them. This means that social networks are forever expanding and achievement can you see who views your instagram videos new userbase and many of these addict flock to Instagram. Many of them arent aware of every the features offered by this network, many of them want to know whether it is doable to view private Instagram profiles without bearing in mind them, and even more ask themselves everyday if its viable to get a list of all addict who has viewed their Instagram profile. Today, we bring you the reply to the latter and its not a simple one. Officially no, you cant, but un-officially there are a few risky, and a few safe methods to see who viewed your Instagram who viewed my Instagram. Who is stalking my Instagram. Social media have led to a lawlessness in building social bonds and establishing associations when new people. on top of time, it turned out that their use has an impact on our amassed life. This is particularly felt today by young people, for whom social media is straightforwardly an integral part of their lives.Table of contents show. So, Yes, It Is possible to look who views your Instagram. But You Should approach Carefully.We have reviewed various every second applications who are always advertised as the isolated real solution that allows users to look who has visited their Instagram profile. But this is not the abandoned matter that they have in common the common denominator of these apps would be the fact that in most cases they understandably dont behave as advertised. You cannot really use them to in fact see who has viewed your Instagram profile. Our research suggests that every they complete is tug a list of all your followers, pick some of them, along bearing in mind some new can you see who views your instagram story random profiles and take effect that list to you. As you can look its every fake. We cannot state these applications for authentic reasons, but you probably already know which ones Im talking about. And there is hundreds, or thousands of them.So heres the real deal. We tested beyond hundreds of apps and without help five of them worked. below you can locate the best one according to our tests and the one I personally use to check who is stalking my Instagram:

Firstly,New One Briefing

Let me tell you something important. This is not an app for iOS, Android or Windows, but it works on every of these devices anyway. Thats because it is a forward looking multiplatform web application that is launched from your internet browser. This means that you dont need to download it. That is a big advantage and one of the main reasons we chose it as the winner. Thanks to this, we dont have to risk the safety of our device by downloading some shady software that could contain some virus, or even slope it into a crypto-currency miner, slowing it all along significantly as a result.You cannot essentially use them to in fact look who has viewed your Instagram profile. Our research suggests that every they get is pull a list of all your followers, pick some of them, along past some supplementary random profiles and law that list to you. As you can look its all fake. We cannot post these applications for authenticated reasons, but you probably already know which ones Im talking about. You might be thinking thatcan you see who views your Instagram video?? And there are hundreds, or thousands of them. the common denominator of these apps would be the fact that in most cases they simply dont play in as advertised. higher than time, it turned out that their use has an impact on our collect life. This is particularly felt today by pubescent people, for whom social media is comprehensibly an integral ration of their lives.Psychologists have long been wondering whether (and if so, how) the use of social media affects our mental health. From times to era there are studies that describe, in the middle of new things, how the use of new technologies can be joined when atmosphere disorders, whether it has a destructive effect on who views my instagram interaction gone peers, or it affects the character of liveliness and the level of happiness. One of the biggest threats we twist on social media platforms are stalkers which are sometimes categorically hard to identify and most platforms dont encourage us subsequent to this event past we cannot check who is viewing our profile, photos or videos.

Reference

This is particularly felt today by youngster people, for whom social media is helpfully an integral allowance of their lives.Psychologists have long been wondering whether. You cannot in reality use them to essentially look who has viewed your Instagram profilewho viewed my Instagram. Our research suggests that all they reach is tug a list of all your followers, prefer some of them, along behind some additional can you see who views your instagram story random profiles and appear in that list to you. As you can look its every fake. We cannot proclaim these applications for legal reasons, but you probably already know which ones Im talking more or less

[roll20]

Roll20 is Hiring Again!

We're looking to expand the party here at Roll20®! Our team is looking for additional support in the fields of Graphic Design, Community Management, and Account Administration. We're also searching for another developer experienced as a UI/UX Engineer.

If you would like to join our team, please read the job description below and follow the instructions to submit your application.

When this position is filled, it will be crossed out like this. If the job posting has not been crossed out, it is still open and we encourage you to apply!

Graphic Designer

Roll20 is looking for a remote-first graphic designer to create engaging and on-brand graphics for a variety of media.  The graphic designer will create concepts, artwork, and layouts for digital projects and potential merchandise based on creative briefs and communication with marketing and product owners. Designs will be utilized for a variety of platforms, including social media, Twitch, YouTube, kiosks, user communications, and wearables.

As a visual designer with Roll20, we interface with many outside brand standards in addition to maintaining our own visual style.  We value having a welcoming style that is professional-yet-winking in execution.

Skills we are looking for:

A strong portfolio of illustrations, graphics, logos, icons, and infographics

A solid foundation in typography, layout, and design

Familiarity with design software and technologies (such as the Adobe Creative Suite, particularly InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.)

Ability to create and maintain file templates for adoption and editing by other team members

Ability to capture and edit .gifs, or similar experience with transitions, animation, motion design, and dynamic interaction

Experience with establishing and maintaining brand guidelines

Ability to effectively take direction and work both collaboratively and autonomously

Excellent visual, written, and verbal communication skills, with particular attention to online presentation skills

A penchant for details and organization, including the ability to prioritize tasks, organize assets, communicate progress, and meet deadlines

We will also look at:

A degree in design, fine arts, or a related field

Experience collaborating with IT and business teams to address user-interactions and data visualization

Experience with social media image templates

Interest in tabletop role-playing games of various genres

Use of Roll20, including utilizing the Roll20 API, Character Sheet Creation, or Marketplace Submissions

This is a full-time exempt remote position.  Compensation includes a competitive salary, as well as employer-paid health insurance, group life and personal accident insurance, a 401k with employer-matching, and an employee assistance program.

To apply, submit a PDF resumé and a portfolio and a cover letter to jobs@roll20.net with the subject line “Graphic Designer Application”. Please also include a brief introduction of yourself telling us why you would be an asset to our growing team. 

Community Manager

Roll20 is a looking for a community manager role to work with our engaged account base rapidly approaching 5 million users.

Roll20’s community management team is compassionate and excited to guide and build our userbase.  A community manager with Roll20 will welcome and manage the influx of players utilizing the service via email, message boards, social media, blogs, and other online channels.  There will be opportunities to create original content to engage, educate, and entertain the community, as well as a need to set policy in accordance with brand standards and analytics-driven results.

Responsibilities may include:

Setting and implementing social media and communication campaigns to align with marketing strategies

Providing strategy and guidance for engaging & educative text, image and video content for social media accounts

Responding with compassion to comments and customer queries in a timely manner

Applying and evolving existing community Code of Conduct to maintain a productive environment for business and consumer interactions

Monitoring and reporting on feedback and online reviews; escalating recurring issues to improve customer experience and improve business processes

Organizing and participating in events to build community and brand awareness, both online and occasionally in-person

Coordinating with various departments to ensure brand consistency

Liaising with Development and Production departments to stay updated on new products and features

Building relationships with customers, potential customers, industry professionals and media to drive engagement and brand recognition

Staying up-to-date with digital technology and social media trends

Skills we are looking for:

Experience as a community manager

Experience creating or growing community initiatives (e.g. building an online forum, launching an ambassador/influence program, developing an event series, and writing an email newsletter)

Ability to identify and track relevant community metrics (e.g. repeat attendance at events)

Excellent interpersonal communication skills, both written and verbal

Demonstrated policy and procedure documentation/creation related to job responsibilities

Hands on experience with social media management for brands

Ability to interpret website traffic and online customer engagement metrics

Knowledge of online marketing and marketing channels

Attention to detail and ability to prioritize

Ability to collaborate, self-motivate, and work in response to various timelines

We will also look at:

Proficiency with Adobe Creative Suite applications, particularly Photoshop and Illustrator.

Experience with Wiki applications.

Familiarity with online community moderation, including drafting community rules and/or procedures for coordinating with outside organizations.

Interest in gaming communities.

Use of Roll20, including utilizing the Roll20 API, Character Sheet Creation, or Marketplace Submissions

This is a full-time exempt remote position.  Compensation includes a competitive salary, as well as employer-paid health insurance, group life and personal accident insurance, a 401k with employer-matching, and an employee assistance program.

To apply, submit a PDF resumé and a cover letter to jobs@roll20.net with the subject line “Community Manager Application.” Please also include a brief introduction of yourself telling us why you would be an asset to our growing team.

Account Associate

Roll20 is expanding our remote-first account services team.  Account Associates assist our growing community of tabletop players and aid the Community Management, Marketing, Production, and Operations teams with day-to-day tasks. They interact with the Roll20 community via email, forums, and social media.

The ideal Account Associate candidate will have excellent written and verbal communication skills, a strong history in high-volume customer support, and the ability to wear many hats in a fast-paced environment.

Skills we are looking for:

2 years experience in a customer service environment

Experience with social media platforms & scheduling tools

Ability to collaborate, self-motivate, meet deadlines, and work in a closely-knit collaborative environment

Experience proofreading/reviewing creative content

We will also look at:

At least a basic understanding of graphic design and/or proficient in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Experience with Wiki applications.

Familiarity with a multitude of tabletop gaming rulesets.

Use of Roll20, including utilizing the Roll20 API, Character Sheet Creation, or Marketplace Submissions

This is a full-time exempt remote position.  Compensation includes a competitive salary, as well as employer-paid health insurance, group life and personal accident insurance, a 401k with employer-matching, and an employee assistance program.

To apply, submit a PDF resumé and a cover letter to jobs@roll20.net with the subject line “Account Associate Application”. Please also include a brief introduction of yourself telling us why you would be an asset to our growing team.