August 2026

What's new in August: Key product updates, and improvements.

Enhancements

Ads

• Publishers can now tailor the look of their ad units to match their brand, including custom fonts and colors, the placement of the "Sponsored" label, and the position of the AdChoices icon (within the ad frame rather than only in the footer) - giving ads a native, on-brand feel without affecting performance.

• Ads placed within the conversation now render as native comments that inherit the look and feel of the surrounding discussion - matching avatar, name, and body styling with a clear "Sponsored" label - so they blend seamlessly into the conversation flow instead of interrupting it with standard display banners, delivering a less intrusive experience for readers and higher engagement for advertisers.

Safety

• The new and improved Low Quality model is now live. Mode is context aware and covers 100 languages. This is our second largest model and covers many comments across OpenWeb and therefore accuracy was our number 1 priority in the refactoring of the model.

Admin Panel

• Added the ability to highlight malicious links and IP addresses in comment content within the Admin Panel.

Social

• Added localization support for system messages, which now respect the configured language and locale.

Bug Fixes

Social

• Fixed an issue where typed text overlapped the "What do you think?" placeholder when comments began with special characters.

• Fixed an issue where @mention suggestions did not appear when the username existed.

• Fixed an issue where the conversation share link opened the page at the bottom and could not be closed.

• Fixed an issue where the Community Guidelines modal appeared empty.

• Fixed an issue where the UI Notifications empty state displayed ":(" and ":)" instead of the intended copy.

• Fixed an issue where the Login Modal displayed an unnecessary double scrollbar.

• Fixed an issue where GIFs were broken when added as a reply in a Conversation.