Choose It By Looking, Because Filmstrip Means Nothing Until You See It
Your social links are drawn in one of several artwork sets, and until now the set was decided entirely by whichever design you were on. You can pick it yourself now, under Website then Design.
The picker shows your own links
Every option carries a strip of your actual links drawn in that artwork, not a generic sample. This is the whole point: "Filmstrip" is a meaningless word until you see what it looks like, and it looks different depending on which platforms you are on.
The entire row is clickable, not just the radio button beside it, because the strip is the thing being chosen between and making somebody aim at a small circle next to the thing they are looking at is a small daily annoyance for no reason.
The first option follows whatever your design prefers, which is where every account starts. Choosing nothing renders exactly what it rendered before, which is the only safe default across roughly two thousand live sites. The order is: the set you picked, then the set your design prefers, then the platform's own artwork.
Sets whose artwork is white with no background of its own get a dark strip in the picker. On a white settings card they would otherwise be an empty box. That is also why they are not offered for email signatures at all, since an email background is not something we control.
The tidy-up underneath
Worth mentioning because it explains two long-standing oddities. The question "what counts as a social platform" was answered in five different places, and they had drifted apart: one knew 16 platforms, another 14, another 16, another 14, and a retired one knew 12 with different short codes for two of them. There is one list now, with 18.
Two platforms turned out to be missing rather than broken. Casting Frontier has had artwork sitting on the server the whole time, but no list knew the name, so a Casting Frontier link rendered as a nameless external link rather than as itself.
And x is now its own platform, deliberately not renamed artwork for twitter. An actor can hold both accounts, and quietly rewriting everyone's existing twitter rows would be a migration nobody asked for that also loses information.
The honest caveat
x has no artwork in most sets yet, so it draws the generic link icon until a set covers it. That is a visible gap and it will look slightly out of place beside the others.
It is still an improvement on the previous behavior, which was that any platform without an artwork file pointed at an image that did not exist, producing a broken image rather than a plain one. Falling back to something is better than falling back to nothing.
Related
The same artwork drives signature icons, and the links themselves are managed on the rebuilt Links page. For which platforms are worth listing at all, see which social media profiles to get and connecting your website to your profiles.
Those links also feed the structured data that tells a search engine which profiles are you. Create a free actor website.
