🛠️ Three quiet polish fixes on the home feed | 4/17

Hey Pickful community,

Following the home-feed CDN work from the past few weeks, we shipped three small-but-meaningful fixes over the last couple of days. They share one goal: keep the feed fast and keep it correct.

🔄 Like and comment counts refresh in real time

The home feed is cached for an hour. A post could rack up dozens of likes while the cached HTML still showed 0 — the site looked deserted.

Now, after the list loads, we asynchronously fetch fresh counts and patch them in. Counts only go up, never down, which protects an optimistic +1 from your own click against being clobbered by a stale value. And literal “0” no longer renders — empty is empty.

🔒 Fixed a cache leak in the welcome modal

CDN caching is fast, but the trade-off is leakage if personalized content sneaks into a cached response. We found one: the welcome modal (shown only to brand-new users on their first visit) was rendered server-side into the cached shell, with the user’s name baked in.

Fix: we lifted it out into a separate private endpoint (Cache-Control: private, no-store) loaded asynchronously. It never touches the CDN again. We also took the chance to polish the modal’s mobile layout while we were in there.

💬 Commenting without an account no longer breaks

If you weren’t signed in, clicking the comment button used to open a form, then fail at submit time with a “Content missing” error. Now it opens a login prompt instead, with direct links to sign in or sign up.

🔧 Other small improvements

• Charts now bundled locally: candlestick charts used to load from jsDelivr; we vendored them in to remove an external dependency and load more reliably.
• Escrow balance pre-check: when the bounty escrow wallet runs short, the system now alerts admins to top up rather than letting payouts silently stall.
• Cleaned up legacy editor code: removed the unused Trix / ActionText JS still loading after we migrated to Lexxy. Lighter pages.
• Search engines no longer crawl admin paths: robots.txt now explicitly disallows /admin, sign-in / sign-up, and other private paths.
• RuboCop gate on every commit: an automated style check runs before each commit (dev workflow).

These improvements are live across Web, iOS, and Android — no app update needed.

If you spot other “wrong number” or “weird modal” rough edges, please send them our way.

Pickful team
April 17, 2026