Not everyone may know this, but I am involved in a project called BetterPonymotes. It’s a browser extension to add emotes to Reddit based off of the stylesheets of subreddits. Recently, a lot of changes have struck, Safari disabling auto-updates for extensions not on the store and Firefox requiring the use of WebExtensions (starting in the autumn) are the best examples. Now there is one that tops the cake. Let me show you:

I was just browsing Reddit as I always do and when I read this I immediately thought of BPM and my other projects that depend on custom stylesheets (like my spoiler solution I did some time back). A tl;dr is that Reddit plans on replacing the CSS with something more user-friendly. Seems good, right? Nope, because this means the death to CSS theming.

CSS theming is done on nearly every big sub. All the default subs do it, and even smaller subs like the ones I moderate. It allows for stuff like inline spoilers, content filtering, night modes, and emotes.

Now with this change, that begs the question: what will happen with BPM?

First, I think it will be ported to work on the native solution provided by Reddit as long as it’s good. However, this isn’t known for sure, as nobody but the admins know how this new system works. Will it use JSON? Converting to CSS? Something else? We don’t know. Next, I believe that some major revamps might be needed. Especially that the DOM will be changed, some of the code might need adjustments. Additionally, the generation scripts (used to help compile BPM) will need to be rewritten to work with this mysterious solution. Is this certain? No. However, we can only speculate.

I think it’s safe to say that BPM will survive, but we’ll just have to wait and see…