Welcome to the v1.57.0 release. This release is focused on addressing the rest of the user requests.
There’s a lot in this release so read through the changelog to see everything that has been added. Some highlights include adding auto-loading posts when “swipe between posts” is enabled, a new setting that allows you to change the app locale from within the app on any version of Android and some changes to make it easier to identify if an user is new to Lemmy.
This release also marks the start of some major changes to the app that I’ve been considering almost a full year ago.
One of Summit’s strength is the insane number of customizations available to a user. However this also poses a downside as new users may not want to spend hours checking and tweaking every setting. While Summit tries to make sure the default settings are pretty good, it’s obvious that the out-of-the-box settings are not for everyone.
The ideal middle ground is to offer a list of sane defaults, not just one. That way new users can setup the app to their liking while taking only seconds. This is what the next big feature will be aiming to solve.
I’ll provide more details regarding what these specific changes are over the next few releases. As always if you have any questions or suggestions please let me know in the comments.
Full changelog
- Add a setting to choose the direction of swipe gestures. By default this is left-to-right.
- Add a setting to change the default volume of the inline video player
- Add an option to share a community/instance in the community/instance screen.
- Add a setting to choose default app to open URLs with. By default Summit will open URLs within the app however setting a default browser will override this behavior.
- Add a setting to change the locale of the app.
- Add a setting to control whether community suggestions are shown in the community selector bottom sheet.
- Add a setting to enable/disable full bleed images in the full post view.
- Add an option to the “Take screenshot” screen to share the screenshot instead of saving it.
- Change the formatter for post titles. If a post’s title starts with the character ‘#’, it will be escaped. This fixes some edge cases where a post starts with a “hashtag”. Eg. “#summitforlemmy is an ok app for lemmy”.
- Fix a bug on the create post screen. If the webpage (based on the URL field) of a post does not have a valid title, the title will not be suggested.
- Update the design of the user info screen.
- Fix a bug where the settings page will not respect the app language if one is selected.
- Change the app behavior when handling posts with invalid thumnails. In rare cases the thumnail url and the url of the post are the same but the thumbnail url does not link to an image. Previously this would cause the app to not show the image or the link. This release changes the behavior so that the link will be shown in this case.
- Automatically load more posts when the end of the post feed is reached when “swipe between posts” is enabled.
- Change the default of the setting “Show new user tag” to true. New users (accounts that are less than 30 days of age) will display a yellow tag next to their account name.
- Fix a bug where sharing an image would not show a preview of the image being shared.
Update
Noticed some bugs in the app. One major bug is the inability to change the app base theme. Will push a fix out as v1.57.1.
- Fix a bug where the base theme setting is ignored.
- Fix a bug where some shadows are being clipped.
- Adjust default screenshot width from 500 -> 360 since 500 seemed too wide which produced smaller text when fit on screen.
Update 2
Found a crash so will update the release and release as v1.57.2.
- Fix a crash in rare cases when viewing the default apps settings screen.
Update 3
Rollout complete.
I figured out the issue. There’s actually 2 issues combining together most likely.
The way “mark as read on scroll” currently works is it makes 1 api call everytime you scroll past a post. If you scroll a lot or very fast it will cause a rate limit error. This is probably why hide read seems to work so flakely for you.
The second issue is that the client does handle rate limit errors originally however it seems that somewhere in the past 2 years the way these errors present themselves has changed. This is why you see unknown error instead of a clearer error message.
Unfortunately there doesnt appear to be a great way to do mark on read on scroll at the moment. It looks like the dev of Lemmy has added an aggregate endpoint for mark as read however its planned to release as part of v1.0.0 which js not out yet.
As a temporary workaround you can disable mark as read on scroll while I look for other solutions.
Thank you for your research!
Why this started in the latest version though?
I have been using Summit exclusively for my mobile Lemmy browsing for months now and haven’t found any issues (despite the numerous updates and fixes that you have deployed) until this very version.
That is odd. I can look into if there is something that is causing the client to make more API requests than usual.
Hello, I have the same problem using lemm.ee instance. Seems they had downtime and it might have something to do with bot checks? I cannot seem to connect to my instance using your app and even using the different front ends for the web page.
Post here - https://lemm.ee/post/58524674
Yeah definitely something odd is going between lemm.ee and the Summit client, if you can check out the version 1.54.2 it has been working for me without any issues (aside when lemm.ee was down ofc).
Hey, sorry for the issues, please see my comment here for explanation: https://lemm.ee/post/57870550/18964440
Hello, yeah I think this all has been just bad timing altogether, although from my personal experience, I still feel the older version of this all snappier.
Thank you for showing up to clarify this whole situation though.
I’ve been trying to reproduce this issue on my lemm.ee test account but I haven’t had any luck so far. Can you clarify if nothing loads at all or if you just need to retry a lot?
Nothing loads at all for me. Edit - tried to remove my account to add it back, after inputting username and password, I just see a pop up for client error: code 403. Might be because when I access lemm.ee on the web I now have to clear the cloudflare check
I think a Cloudflare 403 means the server is blocking you on purpose. I’m going to add some features to the app to see if there is some eay around this issue. I’ll update here once they are available so you can test them.
Hey, for the past few weeks, we have been tuning different rate limits and other bot prevention mechanisms on lemm.ee. We have had a huge increase in traffic lately, as well as a couple of instances of what was effectively a DDoS.
In other words, the problems likely have nothing to do with your app or different versions, and everything to do with our own measures.
For the mark post as read endpoint, I recently made the rate limit a bit more relaxed, so hopefully users won’t see issues there anymore. OTOH, we are also presenting a Cloudflare challenge for some IP ranges currently, which may inadvertently affect legit users. This was necessary to mitigate a recent DDoS, but we will continue tuning and hopefully restore things to normal for legit users soon.
Oh I see, it seems to be blocking my access here in Singapore (both my mobile data and my home fiber network). I can only use the app right now if I use a VPN to switch to another country.
@idunnololz@lemmy.world Unfortunately the user agents do not help in my case :-( but as mentioned by @sunaurus@lemm.ee it is not an app problem.
For now, I am just accessing lemm.ee via webpage in my browser since I have to clear the cloudflare check.
Thank for the information. One change which should still help is that the latest release fixed a bug with error identification. Old clients did not identify rate limit errors correctly and just treated them like regular errors. The new release identifies rate limit errors correctly and will retry after a delay. Moreover the latest release has unique error messages for a lot more network errrors. This might help with identifying what is happening. Eg. Whether its rate limiting or cloudflare blocking.
@kratoz29@lemm.ee maybe the issues you observed and went away are related to the changes in rate limits. In any case please give the new release a try.
A new release is now live as v1.58.2. This release has a special tool to help with the cloudflare issue. You can find it as Settings > Misc > Client user-agent. This setting allows you to change how Summit appears to the Lemmy server. You can try any of the settings but the one I would try first is “Use test user-agent 2”. Let me know if it resolves the cloudflare issues.
Hey, sorry for the issues, please see my comment here for explanation: https://lemm.ee/post/57870550/18964440
Thank you I’d really appreciate, likewise, if you need more info I am here.
I didn’t find any other issues.
In my test you had to scroll really fast to hit the API limit. When you experience these issues are you scrolling pretty fast or do you get them even when you are going down the list slowly?
Hmm, I tried to do another test, in this case I didn’t even scroll at all, I just opened the app for the 1st time since I sent you the settings/log file, hid the read posts (I always do this as my main feed is subscribed and I have subscribed to many similar communities since I created my account, thus I get duplicates posts here and there), it “hid” the posts (not sure as the firsts two post were unread by me, so I didn’t appreciate anything), opened the 1st post and no comments popped out :/
Ok, I have been doing some research on my own, probably something changed between my instance and .world, as I see lemm.ee has a higher version than the former… But I am unsure since when we are running on the latest version.
Anyway, since I am rooted I could downgrade the apk without data loss fairly easily, and I was trying diverse apks until I went my way back to 1.54.2, even if I am still affected by those rate limits, it is way more manageable than higher versions to me.
I can update my home feed and hide the read posts easily numerous times (when you hit the home button it takes you at the top with the read posts there… Would this maybe be an improvement area? It would be better that it just put you in the top but kept the read posts hidden, if I want to bring them back I could always reload the feed I guess) and enter to the comment section, sometimes with the retry button, but most of the time not, and the retry button do actually brings the comments back after a while.
I don’t know if something significantly changed from this “old” version to the most recent ones, regardless, my anecdotal experience still remains, I didn’t experience these issues until I updated to the latest version… Maybe I wasn’t in the previous version at that time, but I know I wasn’t quite “outdated” as I am right now, I hope that makes sense.
I am gonna stick with this version a little longer just to rule out more anecdotal experiences lol.
EDIT:
Well, I just hope everything was a bad time on my end.
EDIT 2: Ok, I can safely say that version 1.54.2 does not fail as the newer version does!
I’ve been testing with a lemm.ee account for the past several days but I have still not gotten into a state as you’ve described where things refuse to load.
I also reviewed network code within the project however not must has changed there between the latest version and v1.54.x.
I am continuing with the release of v1.58.x which has some performance improvements and some specific changes to how rate limit issues are handled. I’m not sure if it will fix the issue. I will update this thread once that release is fully rolled out.
Thank you, I’ll test the newer version and report, if something odd happen I can always fallback to 1.54…
I also don’t think much has changed between that version and 1.57… but I can confidently say that just after updating the app from the Playstore (I forgot to say I got it from there I guess) it will start failing, and going to this previous version I can scroll and mark as read and hide a lot of posts without any issues.
What I can tell is that this odd behavior must be because of what you say in your previous message (scroll a lot thus marking them as read) or hiding said read posts and then keep scrolling/opening posts.
A new release is now live as v1.58.2. This release has some special logic for rate limit issues. It also comes with some new tools to try to troubleshoot the issues reported on lemm.ee. Could you please give this release a try when you have a chance?
If you are still encountering network-like issues you can try the new tool in v1.58.2. You can find it as Settings > Misc > Client user-agent. This setting allows you to change how Summit appears to the Lemmy server. You can try any of the settings but the one I would try first is “Use test user-agent 2”.
Let me know if the release works better for you or if certain user-agent settings work.