## New Version of QOTO Released
The latest version of QOTO is now live on our server. There are a few minor bugs noticed when we deployed it that will be worked on over the next day, but otherwise everything should be up.
Here is a quick breakdown of some of the new features:
* **Groups** support for federated groups. QOTO will display a group batch on group accounts and properly render the relayed messaged. We also added a group directory showing any groups any of our users follow. We will be bringing up a seperate server soon as well dedicated to groups and allow for user moderated groups as well.
* **Markdown** support for toots.
* **Circles** allows you to add people to a circle and then when you make a post you can share specifically to one or more circles and only they can see your posts.
* **Captcha** Required when registering a new account, should help us eliminate some bots.
* **Rich-text** rendering. Rich text from servers that provide formatted messages will now be rendered with the formatting (bold, underline, coloring, etc).
* **Rich-text filtering** a new setting introduced to allow users to partially or fully suppress rich-text formatting.
* **Colored follow button** The follow button can now optionally be colored from the settings to provide additional information (gray if not followed, yellow if followed, blue if following, green if mutual follow)
**NOTE**: This was a pretty big change, so there will likely be a few bugs we flush out over the next few days. Everything seems to be working for the most part but there is one bug in streaming we identified after release. The consequence seems to be that when you make a post you wont see your own post in the local timeline until you refresh the page. It appears the streaming of other peoples posts is still working. I'll be looking into the bugs and fixing them over the next day. If anyone runs into any bugs or issues please let @freemo know and he will address it right away.
Not yet its brand spanking new. right now you can only follow open-groups (no moderation such as with guppe) and QOTO will basically handle the group and render it properly. User managed group isnt a feature in QOTO itself I will be bringing up a seperate server for that devoted exclusively to groups. On the group server you would create an account which represents the group and you would go there to post from the account or moderate its users. However you can interact with the group (post content to it as a contributor) from here of course with all the features built in to qoto to recognize the accounts on the group servers are, in fact, groups and to handle it and render it all properly.
Forgot to mention we also added read notifications to the notifications stream. **Unread notifications** have a blue marker next to them indicating they are unread and there is a check mark at the top of the column one can click to mark all notifications as read.