🎩 FOR MY FIRST TRICK…

Last month, we mentioned that a staged rollout of disappearing messages v2

had begun. Well…now it’s complete! It rolled out to rounds of applause – make sure you and your friends have updated Session to get the new and improved experience. 

The new version of disappearing messages gives you more control over your messages, letting both users in a conversation choose their own settings for how and when their messages disappear.

There are now two settings: disappear after read, and disappear after send.

For those of you who are long-time Session users, this will also resolve a known bug where previously disappeared messages would restore from the network even after they had been deleted from a device.

We had to make quite a lot of changes under the hood to bring you this enhanced version of disappearing messages. If you’re interested to learn more, check out the full article on the Session website.

🤝 DAPPRADAR X SESSION

We have collaborated with the friendly folks over at DappRadar to run Session Token’s first ever community campaign.

We’ve launched a campaign using DappRadar’s Quest platform! You can check it out and participate here.

In this quest, you can go in the running to win one of thirty prizes by completing some simple actions and exploring the Session Token ecosystem. This is designed to bring some fresh faces into the community – so if you see any newcomers in our Discord, make sure to smile and wave! 👋

This is the first of many community-oriented campaigns that we will be running in the lead-up to the launch of Session Token. Alongside the quest, we will also be appearing in an article and official newsletter from the DappRadar team.

👓 SMART CONTRACT AUDIT (NUMERO UNO)

We published the first version of the Session Token Rewards Contract back in January; at the same time we organised the first audit for our rewards contract. This audit has now been completed, with the results published!

No major issues were found, so kudos to our core devs for some very solid upfront work.

We published a complete review of the audit here. Many thanks to the team at Cipher Seluths or their work on this.

Now the core team is resolving those issues and finalising the suite of smart contracts we are developing as we prepare to engage a larger auditing firm for a follow-up audit.

Speaking of core team, we’re also expanding the core team by hiring more team members to accelerate the token migration process and assist with future C++ work (which will still be used on the appchain side of things).

🌹 IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

The disappearing messages release was an absolute monster, and we didn’t want to add any superfluous changes that may introduce complications or delays. Now that disappearing messages are out in the world, the devs are hard at work on a point release with some cushy quality of life upgrades.

There’s a laundry list of changes, but here are some examples of the fixes being worked on for desktop adding the ability to delete messages which failed to send, adding unread message updates when scrolling in a conversation, new keyboard shortcuts for in-app actions;

and hella bug fixes for Android (received messages hidden under keyboard in a conversation, group messages stuck at ‘sending’, message requests not providing push notifications.

Phew, sorry for the link spam.

This work is happening in parallel with some more major changes, including unifying the strings across platforms (which will make localisation and translations faster and easier), Groups v2 (can’t wait for this one), and an overhaul of Session’s in-app onboarding experience (get in loser, we’re getting onboarded).

🩺 WHAT’S UP, DOCS?

We’ve been cooking up some official Session Token documentation for y’all – and it’s neaaaaarly ready to share. This documentation will serve as a single source of truth for the latest Session Token info, it conveniently contains all the info currently spread across multiple articles, websites, and platforms, as well as a few fresh goodies for the avid reader.

Much like previous docs we’ve created, these are put together using GitBook.

Fair warning to the more technical folks out there, these aren’t the most docs-y docs. At the moment, the docs contain mostly descriptive, high-level information. Don’t worry – we’ll keep adding more technical information along the way.

🏠 MAKIN’ THE HOUSE A HOME

The long-anticipated official Discord launched about a month ago now, but we still have a few improvements that we want to make. This will probably be an ongoing process as we gather community feedback and discover new tools.

We’ve re-jigged the experience system to be simpler and more rewarding. This comes packaged with new roles: Guide, Expert, Leader, and Basically on the Team. These aren’t just vanity plates, either – the roles will come with future perks for our committed and loyal community members.

We also toned down Session Bot a lil’ bit. We all love Session Bot’s…dedication to privacy, but the bot was starting to feel a bit needy with all the ‘You’ve levelled up’ and ‘You unlocked an achievement!’ messages. From now on, Session Bot will DM you personally to celebrate your in-server success.

On top of that, we’ve been working on an FAQ bot that will respond to simple questions about Session and Session Token. Our helpful new bot will live in the (hidden, for now) #FAQ channel. It has been trained using the text from the aforementioned docs, and it should be ready for release in the near future – so keep an eye out.

🧹FOUNDATION HOUSEKEEPING

Last month we got the OPTF’s Annual Report for 2021/22 was completed, signed, and published. It’s pretty dry reading, but a few of you had been hanging out for this report – so here it is!

A special shout out to Wes for his tireless work diving to the depths of InDesign hell to put this document together. We’re super happy to have this ticked off, and we are immediately getting started on the next period.

🎥 IT MOVES!

We’re continuing to build out the Session Token website, and the dev + design team are going above and beyond to make sure it feels smooth, sleek, and stylish. We’ve been tinkering with some understated, yet impactful animations that’ll make the website feel ✨special✨.

Here’s a sneak peak of one of the WIP animations from the website.

…and that’s all, folks! See you next time.