It's been a busy year without much in the way of updates. Things are starting to slow down a bit again, which should allow more time for improvements and functionality.
We have started on the steps needed to refactor the code base to prepare for Android and iOS apps, as well as a front end refresh.

The site was also down temporarily this morning to facilitate a database upgrade that should be much more performant than the old configuration.

As usual a lot has been going on behind the scenes to improve performance or monitor and notify the team if something is amiss.
We have spent some time updating various parts of the front end to ensure a solid, consistent experience across pages.
We rebuilt the component that loads posts to display and use the same component to view the front page, user pages, and search results.
We also built new components and revamped the profile pages so that they have more features, information, and load much better as well.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have ideas for new features, ways to improve existing features, or find a bug. We appreciate you all!

We have been working on the back end code quite a bit working on optimizations and ensuring solid maintainable code. As a result deletion URL's have changed slightly. Instead of looking like this:

https://imgchest.com/p/delete/post_string

We have changed to the following to maintain consistency with the rest of our post routes:

 https://imgchest.com/p/post_string/delete 

Please adjust accordingly, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

We are aware of an issue causing a degradation of service when loading images and are actively working to resolve it.
We believe we have narrowed down the cause and it should be resolved for all users shortly.

Today we rolled out code to convert GIFs to MP4 after uploading your post.
You won't be slowed down by this, as it will happen in the background and update once completed.

Converted GIFs are tremendously smaller than their original file size, which allows them to load at a much faster speed while also cutting down the bandwidth costs of the site. Mobile devices especially seem to have a much better go at loading the videos as opposed to a large GIF.
Both files will be available to you still, and the image links option will still provide a GIF.
I will continue to monitor and enhance this code over the coming weeks and months. I wanted to roll it out a bit at a time to help find and sort any issues.
By the end of this implementation we should be accepting all videos as an upload type as well.

I also added links to Patreon as we have had some users ask about donating to the site. I'd like to make a go at Patreon as I'd prefer to keep the site ad free.
Users at the $5 level and higher will receive merchandise after 3 months subscribed, from a sticker, to a mug or t-shirt.
Subscribers also get a name/message on a forthcoming contributor page.

I am working out more perks for being a patron, and all of that will come in time.

I appreciate everyone's support and if you have any questions or concerns, or find an issue with the latest update, don't hesitate to reach out.