April 2026 Release Notes

It seems like only about 30 days ago i wrote the last monthly update. So, err, here is this months update!

There’s lots of progress, and still more to do. Until it’s all switched back on, the best way to contact us is still Email, BlueSky or Mastodon.

Sign Up, Sign In, Get Comfortable

UK digital legislation has kept us on our toes - successive regulatory changes meant we had to pull features like comments offline until we could decipher what compliance actually meant. That work's nearly done; registration, profiles, following creators, commenting, and avatar management and your own homepage are all coming back. They will still be members only, privacy first and your content and browsing peccadilloes will never be sold to marketing companies.

You, But With a Better URL

Your profile now lives at a human-readable address /u/yourname instead of the Cthulhu-esque mad computer dribble (a UUID in machine speak). Now you can pick your name, own it, and all your content links update to match. Old links still work, because we're not barbarians. (Narrator: it doesn’t actually quite work with older content yet. fkn barbarians)

If you already have an account, sign in and save your profile - even if you don't change anything. This locks in your display name as your new URL. If you don't, someone else might claim it first, and explaining that you were "the original Dave" gets old quickly.

Boring Bug Bashing

A couple of dozen bugs squashed, caches behaving themselves, and the general fit and finish tightened across the board. Genre logos are back on the front page, image captions are where they should be, and a loop that was trapping people on old profile pages has been firmly told to stop that.

One More Thing

We're thrilled to announce that Angus Abranson has joined Tabletop Sentinel as News Editor. If the name rings a bell, it should - Angus co-founded Cubicle 7, ran Dragonmeet, wrote for Adventurer and Valkyrie magazines, received ENNIE's and Origins Awards and has worked on everything from The One Ring to Doctor Who. He's spent over thirty years shaping the tabletop industry as a designer, publisher, and retailer and hes' taking the reins of our daily news.
There are still no algorithms, no surveillance and no AI-generated fluff pretending to be journalism. Just intelligently written coverage of the tabletop scene, from someone who's been in the trenches since the late '80s.

We'll be writing more to introduce Angus soon, but if you see him at Salute 53 be sure to say hi!

Release Notes - 2 April 2026

SEO Metadata - Page-by-page metadata overhaul with UK positioning, Open Graph tags, dynamic year insertion for events, British English enforced, and partner customTitle support.

User Profile Slugs - Human-readable /u/yourname URLs replacing UUID paths. Slug uniqueness validation, owned slug management, display name change limits, content URL propagation, migration script for existing profiles, and legacy redirects.

Namespace Guards and Routing - Guards on global news, events, and partner redirects. Redirect loop prevention and authorSlug in content creation paths.

User Registration and Profiles - Simplified registration flow, redesigned login page, T&C acceptance modal, avatar management with caching, and duplicate profile prevention.

Follow System and Content Feeds - Follow button with profile enrichment, authenticated member and follower feeds, comments integration, and feed deduplication.

Content Editor - CRUD form improvements, event field reordering, and content entry updates for news and events.

UI Polish - Genre logos reinstated, image caption positioning, focal point editor improvements, dark mode fixes, event visibility scoping, and avatar loading corrections.

Bug Fixes - Profile stats pagination, old profile path loop fix, and cache invalidation on profile updates.