After some recent issues I've made a decision - drafts will no longer be automatically saved. Instead, much like a drawing program, there is a save and load button. The save button will flash when you're able to save (to stop people from just spam saving the same thing), and this will save a draft like before.

If you were wondering why the site was slow before, the auto saving drafts accounted for most of it as some bots/rogue individuals decided to exploit it to almost crash the entire site. This solves many issues (such as drafts not saving correctly/at the right time) and lightens the load on the site quite a bit.

I've added a poll system to journals, meaning you can now hold polls alongside them :3 it's not fully tested, so things may go wrong.

To help test, what is the best?

If you click the marks count in the top right (the lil' heart) there's a new page for gifting marks to other users. You can also see a new transaction history with marks - ones coming in and going out, with a new option in the privacy section of your settings page to make them all anonymous in others transaction histories.

In addition: marks are now permanent. You cannot unmark a pawprint once it is marked, to stop any issues occurring where you give away all your marks and then someone unmarks and leaves you in the negatives.

I rewrote how badges work almost entirely - now each one has a level (and I can set different icons for each level), meaning instead of having several badges that are related to eachother, for example 'Draw 10 Pawprints' and 'Draw 20 Pawprints', they're now all levels of the same badge. You will get a notification when a badge upgrades and the XP as well, giving you some extra XP in return for losing the now deleted badges.

It's a lot easier for me to work with this way, and means you can always keep progressing the badges even if there aren't any more to get :3

Tags
- Added a new merge tags feature to tag suggestions, allowing one tag to be merged into another easily.
- Tags now have their own individual ratings (all have been set to general/sfw by default) - for tags that would be exclusively used in NSFW art (for example, "male penetrated"), this rating can be set on the tag directly. Any pawprint that's given this tag but has a rating lower than the tag's rating will automatically get a higher rating, to help stop accidents from occurring. Tags that are often used in NSFW art but COULD be used in SFW art should remain as the general rating, its only for tags that would only ever be used for that rating.

Drawing Tools
- Colour replacer now has an erase mode, to erase all of a specific colour.
- Spray tool now has an erase mode.

Pawprints
- You're now able to set the parent of a group, so if you want to make a single child pawprint the 'main' one, you can go into its settings and promote it to parent, making all the others children of it.
- Draft and Hidden pawprints have been combined into one 'Private' setting, as it makes more sense to have just one.
- When remixing a pawprint, a rating now needs to be set, just in case you forget to change it.
- You can now send anonymous pawprints to yourself and block receiving them in settings.
- Added a few more redirects so you get sent to the correct page after updating pawprints.
- Pawprints now show their current rating in the stats section.

Pawception
- You now have to claim a turn before being able to draw, to stop people sniping turns.
- Deleted pawception games now also delete the notifications for the game.

Furdle
- The correct word is shown even if you lose now.

Requests
- Request tab now shows up for yourself even if requests are closed.

Other
- Renamed 'content' to 'art' in a lot of places.
- Staff can now temporarily disable their role to test things as a regular user.
- Formatting in places like journals, profiles and requests should be fixed now.

Raffles
- You can now set a journal to be an entry method for your raffle - users will have to make a new (non draft) journal that includes the link to the raffle to enter.
- You can set any number of entry methods to be required, meaning they cannot enter the raffle unless that specific method has been completed.
- You can now set the maximum amount of entries users can get in the raffle.
- The raffle index now has pages, to help speed up loading.
- Entry pawprints (the ones you have to paws up/mark to enter) now get the 'Raffle Entry' tag automatically, and will become hidden when the raffle ends.
- You can now see ALL entries in a completed raffle (as the creator) by clicking a switch. By default it will only show the winners.

Journals
- You can now set a journal as a draft, if you don't want it public yet or have your followers notified about it.

Requests
- Requesters can now set a maximum content rating for what they'd like to receive.
- Requesters can now add a reference link to their requests.
- You can now set an active request limit (per user) in your settings.
- You can now set a character limit (from 100-1000 characters) for requests.
- Requests can now be accepted/considered/rejected, much like how the postbox works.
- Artists can send a note back to the requester to explain whatever decision they made with their request.

Other Changes
- Fixed templates not loading correctly.
- Added a search bar to the postbox.
- You can now set a country flag to be displayed on your profile.
- Fixed flipbook playback speed when previewing them.
- You can now set commission status in your profile along with a URL to find out more information about commissions.
- Profile has been updated to look nicer and be more responsive overall.
- Allowed 'closing' the drawing timer by clicking on it.
- Added a toggle to the move layer tool that allows you to move ALL layers at once.
- You can now send pawprints with 'allow remixing' to other users, they're still able to manually turn it off if they'd like however.

There is now a second rating selection in the content section of your settings. This is for what rating pawprints can be sent/drawn for you, separate from which one you can see.

There's also privacy settings for hiding your level/XP and badges, either from everyone, or just others.

Other Fixes/Changes:
- All confirmations have been replaced with fancy popups instead of relying on the browser to do it
- Sped up the pawception index as it was incredibly slow to load

As a way to possibly patch issues where raffle prizes are forgotten about, I've updated raffles to require the creator to set the prizes after they're drawn before they can make a new raffle. Along with this is the alerts system, which are notifications that cannot be removed and stay at the top of the list until whatever they're alerting you about is done - some examples include claiming a pawception turn, a pawzzle tile, or having a raffle with no set prizes. They won't show a count though, as that would even annoy me -w-

I know this might be annoying for people who have had several raffles, and to make it up each submitted prize gives you +20 XP, which is actually a decent chunk compared to what other things on the site gives you. It should work the same way as setting the parent while drawing - except it will only show you valid pawprints (ones drawn after the raffle started, by you, for the winner). You can also put in the pawprint ID directly if it's not in the most recent list.

Once set, the pawprint's page will show that it was a raffle prize and link to the raffle it came from.

This still needs to be tested fully, so please let me know if anything breaks. Hopefully the raffle alerts all group together, but if not, some of you might have a ton of them until they're finished!

Several users have reported not participating in pawception due to how specific they've been getting. I'd like to reiterate that pawception is meant to be vague and not specifically name characters or media that you'd like art from. To combat this, I expanded on the pawception rules slightly and added little one-time popups that'll appear the first time you visit pawception, furdle or pawzzles.

The important change is describe, don't name. If you see someone's character, describe them, do not directly name them (this excludes maple as he's the site mascot). For example - if someone draws my raccoon Kalen, don't prompt 'kalen eating beans', write 'a raccoon eating beans'. Especially do not make prompts like 'draw X character doing Y action from Z obscure tv series', that is not what pawception is about!

From now on staff will be checking pawceptions and either deleting games or changing prompts entirely (instead of adding a second prompt) if they break these rules. Existing games are fine, but this will affect new games from now on. Let's keep it fun for everyone.

Backups

If you are the artist of a pawprint, you can now go to the settings to download a ZIP file of the pawprint image as well as every layer separately. This allows you to put it into another program later and keep all layers intact. It does not preserve layer filters however, so you will have to re-apply any blur or blending modes. In your user settings under the security tab, you will find a full backup download - this will download into a single zip file every pawprint you've drawn along with all of their layers. Please use this sparingly as it's kinda CPU intensive, especially if you have thousands of pawprints.

Hotkeys

There's a new section in the drawing tab of user settings for customising your drawing hotkeys. You can add hotkeys to tools that never had them before, or change existing ones. Some hotkeys may not work if windows/the browser overrides it, but most do (F5 can even work, it will stop the browser from reloading if you set it as a hotkey!)

Other Changes:

- The Allow Guests option now properly hides your content from guests if you aren't the pawprint owner.
- Advanced Search now has options for minimum paws ups, minimum marks, and allows you to sort by highest paws ups and marks.
- Finished raffles now only show the winners in the entry list to make it easier for the creator.
- Characters can now be highlighted on your profile, the same way pawprints can.
- You can now hide from friends lists in your privacy settings.
- Ironpaw pawprints are now automatically tagged with 'Ironpaw Mode' - and non-ironpaw pawprints will have that tag removed automatically.
- A max of 5 pawprints per hour has been implemented on top of the 10 a day, to try to stop spam.
- Users can now select their gender to show in their profile, if they'd like to.
- Sending pawprints to someone instead of drawing for them directly now correctly awards marks.
- Added titles to postbox entries.
- Replaced the friend request icon with a heart to match the unfriend icon.
- Replaced the baraag link with mastodon so it covers more areas.

When drawing a new pawprint (or nuking any existing draft), you will get an option of which canvas you'd like to draw on - 500x300 (normal), 300x500 (vertical), or 500x500 (square). These are the biggest pawprints you can currently draw, and gives you extra space needed for some more advanced poses. I'm interested to see what people do with this!

You are also able to zoom out slightly further than you could before.

New Stuff
- You can now set optional pride flags (both identity/sexuality) and pronouns in your user settings.
- You can now select how visible you'd like your birthdate to be.
- Blacklists should no longer hide your own art.
- Tag update suggestions should no longer stack 'Notes:' every time they're edited.
- Added a searchable help system (see the question mark button on the top right)
- Advanced search, allowing you to search by content rating, artist, specific timeframes and more.
- Staff can now send out site-wide notifications for important things that people need to see.

Other Changes
- Added a bot trap for those trying to find vulnerabilities in the site (hint, don't try to go to a page with .php at the end of it...)
- Some URLs have been handled so you go to a correct place instead of seeing a 404 error - for example, /user now goes to /user/xen instead of erroring.
- Added the ability for users to be banned from specific parts of the site if necessary.
- Fixed placeholder/default avatars in the messages list not showing up correctly.

You can now select up to 4 (or none) stats to display on your profile! Check your profile now to see the defaults. Use this if you wanna show off any specific stats to others. The settings are located in the profile info section, so the very first one you see, at the bottom.

Other Changes

- Fixed an issue where editing a raffle caused the date to reset.
- Fixed an issue where event pawprints weren't counting towards the daily streak.
- Added bonus XP gains - first pawprint, first pawception etc. give a little more XP than usual, to get new users started.

XP System Overhaul
This has been done as the system was not made for this many users, so I never expected people to reach higher levels so quickly. It also kinda broke recently so I had an excuse to change it. Your levels will have changed, this is not a bug. The levels just require more XP to get to now.

- XP is now calculated immediately and given/removed when you perform an action, instead of being calculated every hour.
- XP required for the next level has been increased, its now quadratic instead of linear (it will keep getting bigger - lower levels are faster, higher levels are slower).
- Pawprints no longer give any XP if they are made in less than 5 minutes.
- Interaction-based XP has been increased (referral signups, marks, receiving pawprints) as well as placing top 3 in events.
- Furdles now give XP for completion based on difficulty (85 a day for completing all 3).
- Every badge gives a flat 100 XP, some were not giving XP at all.
- Suggestions/reports being actioned/accepted now gives XP.

The benefits of this are that it's a lot less hardware intensive on the site. Looking through every single user, every hour, all of their pawprints, all marks.. it was a lot. I'm also now able to give/remove XP directly, if needed. Having your XP update immediately is also nice to see.

Other Changes
- Fixed dark mode making the request guidelines invisible.
- Changed to gevent from eventlet, saving a ton of memory and processing power (this is nerd stuff you don't need to worry about it).
- Huge site performance overhaul, everything should be faster and there should be way less bad gateways.
- The Furdle keyboard now shows which letters you've tried in their correct colours, making it easier to see which ones you should try next.
- Fixed timezones showing in request bans.
- The marked folder now shows the correct pawprints again.
- Added 2 more difficulties to Furdle (4 letters and 6 letters).
- Fixed the old registration page not working.
- Added brush smoothing/anti-aliasing in the settings panel. This should make smooth brushes like the OG pawprinting.
- Fixed the staff page not showing the entire staff bio.
- Allowed tag suggestions to suggest removing parents.

It's about the time I futureproofed the site by replacing the old, slow tagging system that's been here since the site launched. How it worked previously is that every single tag was stored in a text line on each pawprint, which made searching for tags in pawprints and updating them very slow and processor intensive. If you can imagine, it had to look through each tag string to find a single tag every single time.

Now, tags on pawprints are stored separately. There's a simple link to which tag is being used and which pawprint it belongs to. Renaming a tag for every pawprint is a matter of just changing the name, as everything is done by IDs now.

Some stuff may have broken. I've done a lot of testing myself, but if anyone notices anything please comment here or submit a bug report.

Previously, tags were all stored as a single comma-separated line in each pawprint (tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, etc). This made modifying them/editing them/removing them very slow and is not good for the amount of tags and pawprints we have.

I'm currently rewriting it to a new system (yes stuff will probably break) that will be a lot faster, and super easy to change tags. I only have tags up to about an hour ago saved into the new system so anything until you see a new update will not be saved.

This is a little experimental so some stuff might not work, but I decided to make tags a bit more like e621 - you can see the full database and suggest changes (if it needs aliases, a parent etc), which staff can then approve or deny. It also shows all undefined tags that will need to be sorted at some point! https://pawprint.ing/tags

- Rewrote the zoom code, it should be a lot smoother now with less jarring jumps.
- Rewrote the panning code also so it's more future-proof.
- Fixed an issue where the brush cursor would disappear sometimes after panning.

- Expanded suggestion categories, pawprint cooldown, and fixed spacing on the profile bio.
- Updated the profile header to include whether or not the user is accepting art trades (adjustable in settings) and requests.
- Added a global and per-user cooldown to pawprints. 10 per day for now globally, but users can reduce the amount of pawprints from the same user per day in their settings.
- Added the ability for janitors to respond to user reports.
- Fixed an issue with your own requests not showing up.
- Fixed an issue where character avatars appeared as a broken image if the user couldn't see them.
- Fixed an issue where the old /pawprint link was being used instead of /view, causing issues.
- Fixed an issue with pawception drawings giving an error when trying to submit them.
- Updated profile navigation, it shows labels and condenses extra tabs into a 'more' dropdown if your window is too small for them all.
- Moved flipbooks, scrapbooks and drafts to special collections/folders in the gallery. Drafts are only visible to you, but flipbooks and scrapbooks are public by default (but can be disabled in user settings so only you can see them).
- Added a report button to pawprint and flipbook cards, that takes you to the postbox on the correct page with the link filled out already.
- Added more categories to each section of the postbox.
- You can now suggest event themes in the postbox.

There's a cloudflare outage, causing some images to not load. This is out of my hands and we'll have to wait for cloudflare to restore services. Please keep an eye on here to see: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/