Sign-in and sign-up became one product, and tablets got a navigation

Sign-in and sign-up had been built at different times and looked like it: different layouts, different wording, different treatment of the same fields. They are one product now, which matters most for the person who arrives at the wrong one and has to switch.

The same pages had been showing testimonials. Those testimonials were fabricated — nine reviews written for seeded accounts, all marked published, being served to every visitor while six reviews by real students sat unapproved. That is covered in its own entry; what changed here is that the pages no longer depend on social proof to work.

We also stopped vouching for pasted links. A link somebody types into a post was being rendered with our own styling and no indication of where it went, which quietly lends our credibility to a destination we know nothing about. Links now carry the attributes that tell a search engine we are not endorsing them, and the panel shows a moderator the link and its verdict together.

The tablet fault was small and had been there a long time. The mobile navigation bar was set to disappear at one breakpoint while the padding that made room for it disappeared at a different one — so on every screen between those two widths, which is most tablets, the site had no navigation at all and a strip of empty space where it should have been.