Our Dear Unicorn Friend is Going on Vacation

We are making design adjustments to Forem (the open-source codebase that powers DEV and other communities).

We are removing the unicorn icon from the current set of possible reactions, and making room for an indicator of how many comments there are in the discussion alongside "like" and "bookmark".

There are a few drivers of this design decision:

• Members cannot easily view how many comments are in the discussion and easily scroll there.
• The unicorn, as it stands, is pretty confusing for a lot of folks.
• We want to build towards a more fun and expressive end state in terms of how these reactions work.

We are planning to re-institute the unicorn as a set of customizable secondary reactions which can be unique to each Forem, and possibly change for fun from time to time.

Anticipate the final result being something like this, but open source and more funky!

As mentioned, the unicorn has caused a good amount of confusion, here are a few of the hundreds of posts on this subject.

devto unicorn confusion !

Clive Da Jan 26 '20 1 min read

#discuss #smn #bmn #curating

What are the post reactions?

randysims Aug 28 '18 1 min read

#discuss

What means the unicorn response?

Sascha Manns May 24 '19 1 min read

#devto

Part of the fun of the unicorn is that it means nothing in particular, it's just there. However, we can have that fun without the clutter. And that is the plan.

This change will go live later this week.

Feel free to comment on some other reactions we may want to implement on DEV once we get to the "fully customized" state.

The unicorn will (eventually) be back and better than ever

Happy coding!