We shipped a major feature wave to the Lewis County Portal focused on speed, clarity, and daily usability for residents and staff.
What’s new right now:
- Realtime community layer
- New live chat rooms with server-backed channels
- Realtime updates via stream endpoint for board, thread, and room activity
- County Live set as the default room experience
- Community board now feels alive
- Live/connecting/offline status badges
- Board and thread pages refresh automatically when new activity appears
- Mobile experience improvements
- iPhone-friendly glass-style interface on mobile for chat
- Cleaner spacing and smaller compose area for better screen fit
- Mobile send-button exception (desktop still supports Cmd/Ctrl+Enter workflow)
- Better chat composition tools
- Toolbar shortcuts for bold, italic, inline code, quote, and bullet format
- Character limit guardrails (1000 chars) with remaining counter
- Display name is optional and now remembered across sessions
- Better message reading
- Chat messages now render formatting instead of raw markdown-like symbols
- Historic messages with formatting markers now render correctly as well
- Smart new-message behavior
- Auto-scroll when you’re near the bottom
- If you scroll up, a floating “new messages below” indicator appears so you don’t lose your place
- Navigation and visual refresh
- New sticky, clearer navigation with better grouping
- Mobile hamburger menu improvements
- Scenic county-inspired visual backdrop and refreshed homepage sections
This is an active build, and we’ll keep publishing update notes as we improve moderation workflows, polish interactions, and expand reporting tools.
If you spot rough edges, send feedback through the portal — we’re iterating fast.