Building a Community

A post revealing some of the new social updates being worked on for the future.

Building a Community
With the next generation of our platform falling into place, Brick Hill is revolutionizing the ability for users to communicate and interact with one another.

The new dashboard has already rolled out (you'll see the pages incrementally upgrade as these updates are released), and we'd like to introduce you to the biggest changes coming to the site with our social overhaul.



A Social Revolution


Our goal is to provide fast and seamless tools for you to communicate and interact with one another, while introducing advanced safety features both for you to tailor to your preference, and working away in the background so you won't even notice us protecting your experience.

This starts with the day you register on Brick Hill; new users must verify themselves before even creating their account and we'll keep much tighter tabs on users to ensure banned users stay banned, which will dramatically reduce the misdemeanors we often see on the site.





Brick Hill

3 hrs ago


Group chats, direct messages, and quick-joins are replacing our outdated messaging system.

Live communication offers obvious advantages for our users, and with added advantages to moderation and your privacy.

Brick Hill

3 hrs ago


An array of new security settings allow you to decide exactly who can and can't interact with you and the limits they each have. We've opted to split people you have added into friends and followers so you'll have even more freedom to tweak your settings around what they can do, or even just the comfort of blocking users who might be too eager to get your attention.

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sent you a message

OPEN MESSAGE

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Having unlimited followers and limited friends might not sound ideal to you, but this is necessary as we continue to grow. From a technical standpoint, friending is a two-way connection and multiple queries have to run to find everyone who you have friended, and who have friended you. We could fix this by checking who has friended you and then checking if this has been accepted, but this creates a lot of extra storage for us and we'd still need to limit it. Followers on the other hand aren't bound by a two-way connection and so the data is extremely easy to store and load.


A fortuitous advantage of friends and followers lets us set more restrictive permissions by default, so you're much less likely to experience harassment when your friends are only your actual friends. This change also ties in beautifully with changes to user feed; soon statuses will thrive with replies, likes, and boosts (reposting the status to your own feed). Now you have legitimate reasons to follow users instead of simply friending them!

Easier Interactions

Brick Hill

3 hrs ago


The forum is a staple of our platform, and considering it has remained largely the same since its introduction with the site in 2017, it is long overdue for a revamp.


Along with snazzy upgrades to moderation and content filters to make your experience cleaner, we've discarded our nested subforums with just a few main sections, each sprawling with their own categories that you can filter out if you desire. This'll make it so much easier for users to access content, and you won't have to worry about your thread getting buried in an inactive subforum.

Take a peek at the biggest changes above. Your user tile is now decorated with a lot more information, both for bragging rights and so you know exactly who you're talking to (most of this is optional, but you'll probably want to add it to save on introducing yourself every five minutes!) To encourage quality posting, you can now like posts and even give them specific reactions which come with additional benefits to the poster.


Another big improvement is the ability to add markdown to all of your posts, which is a huge step-up from our basic and primarily text-based forum as it currently stands. Now you can really show off your creativity and passion without any limits!




Expanding our Influence

Our social media team is full of talented individuals who are helping us promote the platform beyond our doors. With all the updates coming to Brick Hill, we're super excited to show off what we can offer through our social media presence!


Following us is dead easy - all of our social medias go by the same handle, "hillofbricks," and soon you'll be awarded with exclusive items for following each of our handles!