Glade Art Updates Change-log 13/04/2026: Video Thumbnails, Comment Likes, and more!

Hello everyone, so today we had a really big update drop on Glade Art that I've been working on for some time, so let me let me tell you the details. NOTE: As per usual, there were a ton of small updates which aren't worth noting, and I don't remember them all. Also there were a few security upgrades of course, but those will not be stated. > Comments now have likes and dislikes. Both of these numbers are visible because that is the correct way to do it. Also you can sort through comments by newest (default for now), oldest, most liked, and most disliked. Many old comments will have 0 likes and 0 dislikes because the feature didn't exist when they were posted, but in the future it should buff right out. > Custom video thumbnails. I've been wanting to add this for a long time, and I finally did it now. So basically it used to show a 10 second preview of the video before in the feed/profile/search, but now it just shows an image thumbnail. This significantly decreases loading time as it doesn't need to preview the video at all. You can also of course upload custom thumbnails, but that is optional; the fallback is whatever frame is in the middle of the video. Since custom thumbnails didn't exist yesterday, old videos have had default thumbnails generated for them. > New anti-bot measures. These are a bit more of a "trick tactic" compared to the good old rate-limits and delays. Since these are surprise traps, I won't talk about them in detail here, but they are pretty cool. > More caching. Commonly hit HTML pages like post_detail, feed, profile, blog, etc have been minified (sigh). CSS/JS has been too. There is also more caching Nginx-side for static assets. This extra client-side caching and minifying of HTMLs should make the site feel snappier to you. > Bloat removal. Some "bloat" has been removed from the site. This includes old JavaScript disabled messages, SEO in non-public pages from when the login walls were open a long time ago, and other stuff. Of course there were some server-side optimizations too. > Removal of Font Awesome by Cloudflare. The spinners in the feed which showed up when loading posts have been removed. This is because of 'bloat removal', and it wasn't really necessary anyways. No more spinners. Also, to be very innovative in modern times, the text "Loading Posts..." has been changed to "Thinking..." on the feed. Such innovation while simultaneously optimizing the site is a whole new league of pioneering technology. Now with Cloudflare fonts removed, Glade Art is completely self-hosted on all pages which extend layout.html, with the exception being hCaptcha. The CSP (content security policy) has been hardened down with these new changes, and has been added server-side. > New quarantined page. I made a new page called "Quarantined" which is what shows to accounts that triggered automatic anti-bot measures. The quarantine state is a temporary restriction of all account abilities until human review, without any of their data being removed. Then the reviewer decides whether it will escalate to a ban or be released. Before it just showed the banned page for automatically arrested accounts, but now it shows this. You can visit it at /quarantined and you can visit banned at /banned. > Some updates to the blog. Images posted in the GA blog now have their own compression algorithm which compresses much harder than normal art images. This is because the blog is visible without any login wall or even Anubis, so popular posts can use up some server bandwidth. (See the debut post which now has over 35,000 views). Also some UX enhancements were made to fix "squashed" images. > Some minor 'fixes'. An authenticated user can no longer access the /login or /register pages; they get redirected to the /feed. The server-side delay for images in the blog has been decreased from a randomized 1-7 seconds to a randomized 1-2 seconds. The green ring around profile pictures in /profile has been decreased from 3px to 2px. 1px didn't look right. Performance of the GA search has been increased. The likes on comments use AJAX, so I made liking a post to also uses this new mechanism as well. Comments still use the old system, but they will probably be changed to AJAX in the future too. As decided by a user vote in the Discord Server, the "MOD STATUS" text in the lower right corner of the site, in yellow letters, has been removed. > As per usual, there have been a ton of other upgrades in the backend which will not impact you at all > Terms of service statement. From now on any changes in the Glade Art terms of service or privacy policy will be logged in the GA blog. These logs will have their own posts dedicated to them. So keep an eye on the blog if you want. <> And so we come to a conclusion in the Glade Art changelog of the updates deployed on April 13th, 2026. These bring the biggest pack of enhancements that we've seen in a while, and they should positively impact your experience on the platform. Thanks for reading and stay safe! <>