New features and minor home redesign

Hello all,

Most updates are small and usually go unnoticed as they don't go out with an announcement. Here's a quick one today.

To thank people who decided to make a donation to help with our project, we're adding the following features: ability to see when messages are read, and ability to see the date of last activity on all accounts. This is in addition to the existing perks that get unlocked after earning the donor badge. As a reminder, all financial support goes towards paying for servers and maintenance.

We also made conversation scrolling more usable for everyone, and you can now see how many people have visited your profile from your homepage dashboard. This is on top of a few graphical improvements, along with various technical upgrades.

As usual, if you notice anything wrong or have suggestions, we'd love to hear from you.

Thanks!

Hello! Thanks for your updates, as always.

As a donator myself, I think it would be nice to see who visited your profile as well.
Who knows? Perhaps someone has visited your profile, they actually wanted to contact you however they were perhaps excessively shy to do that, and you’ll never know this way. That’s why adding that feature in addition to the total amount of members that have visited your profile - which you’ve just added indeed - would let us view it and eventually contact that user! 🙂

As a donator myself, I think it would be nice to see who visited your profile as well.

This is actually something that was considered but didn't make it to this update, because we felt it might negatively impact browsing behaviour as some people may stop freely checking out just about any profile, knowing their every step is potentially being monitored. It isn't permanently ruled out, but this is our current stance on it since this is somewhat of a privacy related matter. 🙂

As a donator myself, I think it would be nice to see who visited your profile as well.

This is actually something that was considered but didn't make it to this update, because we felt it might negatively impact browsing behaviour as some people may stop freely checking out just about any profile, knowing their every step is potentially being monitored. It isn't permanently ruled out, but this is our current stance on it since this is somewhat of a privacy related matter. 🙂

Yes, that’d unfortunately be its only negative side. There would certainly be several users who would keep visiting every single profile in order to be noticed, however it’d certainly create more connections throughout the website.

I’ve got a question: is it ever going to be a PenPal Gate app for iOS?

Thank you, as always.

I’ve got a question: is it ever going to be a PenPal Gate app for iOS?

Better mobile support is definitely a priority. Much has already been done for Android but still not all devices are compatible, and much less when it comes to iOS. Without getting into technical details Apple has purposefully made it very difficult for websites to do the same things as traditional apps - unlike Android - that said I will still try my best to address this soon because I'm very aware it sucks to miss on real mobile notifications etc.

Unfortunately that has always been an Apple’s disadvantage. As an Apple user myself, I am perfectly aware of that.