🔧 Two reported UX fixes: visible / clearable topic association + always-fresh relative time | 4/18

Hey Pickful community,

Following the home-feed polish from earlier this week, today we’re shipping two fixes that came directly from real reports — one about topic association, one about how relative timestamps go stale.

🏷️ Posts no longer get silently tagged with a topic, and you can clear it with one tap

A user reported that posts composed in the mobile app sometimes ended up associated with a topic they hadn’t picked, and there was no obvious way to change or remove the association.

Three bugs were stacking on top of each other:

1. Stealth association: visiting any topic page would silently set “the next post goes here”, and that signal persisted across navigation. Compose far away later → still landed in that earlier topic, with no UI hint that it would happen.
2. Couldn’t clear it: even if you opened the topic picker and cleared your choice, the server would re-apply the remembered topic at create time (a ||= edge case where Rails casts the empty form value to nil, which ||= reads as “unset”).
3. Undiscoverable clear: there was a hidden “click the selected topic again to deselect” toggle, but nobody finds those.

The fix:

• Replace the hidden state with an explicit URL parameter. The “Post” button on a topic page now passes the topic along; composing from anywhere else (the global compose button, etc.) never auto-tags anymore.
• The compose form clearly shows the selected topic with a right-next-to-it “×” button for one-tap clearing.
• The server stops second-guessing — what the form submits is what gets saved.

🕐 Relative timestamps are always fresh

A side effect of caching: the home feed’s HTML is CDN-cached for an hour, so a “5m” rendered at cache time still says “5m” much later. Things look stale.

Every relative timestamp already carried a precise <time datetime="2026-04-18T…"> attribute — the JS just wasn’t using it. Now the browser recomputes the displayed text from the precise timestamp every time the page loads. The “5m / 2h / 3d” you see is always the truth at this moment.

This actually covers far more than the home feed: comments, DMs, notifications, points history, follows, recommendations… every place time_ago_short shows up gets fixed in one shot.

💬 To the community

The first one came from a direct report; the second is a “small thing that bugs you” we noticed ourselves. Neither is a headline feature, but both quietly shape what using Pickful feels like every day.

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

Keep the small annoyances coming our way.

Pickful team
April 18, 2026