Updates to the Groups.io service.
April 20, 2018
- CHANGE: When sending a message to a member and BCC All is checked, we previously would not send the message to a moderator that didn't have the pending message notification enabled. We now always send the message to all moderators.
- CHANGE: Wording tweaks on event notification emails re: RSVPs.
- SYSADMIN: Upgraded Elasticsearch software.
- SYSADMIN: Reconfigured some machines to avoid future downtime.
- BUGFIX: #cal-invite messages to all day events had the end date be one day earlier in the attached ICS file.
- CHANGE: The message sent to members after a group is moved from Yahoo is now from the +owner address, instead of the group address, to prevent inadvertent group replies.
April 14, 2018
- CHANGE: Change the URL sort for database tables to sort by title first, then URL, then description.
- INTERNAL: Upgraded to Font Awesome 5.
- NEW: For premium groups, you can now lock groups/subgroups, making them read-only.
- INTERNAL: Updated the Stripe API library.
- CHANGE: Instead of changing the Message-ID for all recipients, we now only change the Message-ID for the original sender.
- CHANGE: Formatting changes to the view event page for events with RSVPs.
- BUGFIX: We didn't recognize RSS feeds that were served to us in non UTF-8 format. We now fetch feeds and specifically convert them to UTF-8 before passing them off to the feed parser.
April 6, 2018
- NEW: When attempting to change your email address to an address that already has an account, and that isn't just subscribed to updates@, we now offer the ability to merge the two accounts automatically. An email is sent to the to account and that account has to accept it.
- NEW: From the directory, you can send an email to another member. Limited to 2 per day to a specific person, 10 per day total per group.
- NEW: We now keep and display the response from the email server on successful deliveries, in the Email Delivery History pages.
- CHANGE: The group home page month view now takes into account a user's timezone.
- BUGFIX: When editing a poll, the message that gets sent out now starts "A poll has been updated"....
- BUGFIX: Plain text messages had emails obscured even when the group was set to show them.
- CHANGE: Allow padding-left style, to fix indented HTML.
- BUGFIX: Fix page back in group directory.
- BUGFIX: Honor group aliases when processing emails.
March 30, 2018
- CHANGE: For groups with reply-to set to sender, include List-Post header in single messages.
- NEW: Delete account functionality, without having to contact support.
- BUGFIX: In a plain text message, if someone enclosed a link in < and >, we included the trailing > in the link.
- BUGFIX: Don't send event reminders and notices for cancelled events.
- FIX: Fixed wording in the message visibility sections of the create group and create sub group pages.
- CHANGE: If a wiki has a sidebar or footer, disable the 'Add a Sidebar' or 'Add a Footer' button instead of making them disappear.
March 23, 2018
- NEW: Enterprise groups can customize the HTML on the login page as well as on the send login link page.
- CHANGE: Two factor protected accounts can now use Email Me A Login Link.
- CHANGE: Improvements to the wording of the spam unsub email and moderator notification.
- CHANGE: When editing a wiki page, don't submit the edit on enter in the reason text field.
- CHANGE: When trying to change your email address, if you enter in your existing email address, it will now display an error (previously it was silently ignored).
- NEW: You can now edit the moderator notes of past member records.
- NEW: Display the name of the owner of each photo album.
- NEW: New View Members moderator privilege.
- CHANGE: If a group's Members Visible setting is Owners only, it used to be that we allowed moderators with one of the member change privileges (approve pending members, ban, etc) to also access the Members list. But now, if Members Visible is set to Owners, only owners can access the members list, regardless of whether moderators have those privileges.
- CHANGE: Don't create activity log entries for bouncing or unbouncing someone in banned groups.
- CHANGE: Title and description no longer required for Link database columns.
- CHANGE: Wording changes on Group Settings page for group/message visibility.
- NEW: For enterprise groups, add a link back to Groups.io under the account dropdown in the upper right.
- NEW: For restricted premium/enterprise groups, approving a Not Confirmed pending member now automatically confirms that account as well.
March 16, 2018
- CHANGE: For the Yahoo group transfer process, enable deleting of the transfer request after the transfer has been completed, so that it can be resubmitted in cases where Yahoo's Files or Photos weren't working at the time of the original transfer.
- CHANGE: For enterprise groups, remove Sign Up link in header.
- BUGFIX: Fixed bounce probe emails to display proper group names with enterprise groups.
- CHANGE: Allow style attributes on h1..h5 when displaying html messages and wiki pages.
- CHANGE: Wording/collapse tweaks to the user sidebar.
- INTERNAL: Streamlined some of the process of getting an SSL cert for new enterprise groups.
- CHANGE: In the post to sub view, also show Pending Subscription notices in the notices selector.
- CHANGE: When viewing a member's delivery history, check the successful delivery cache for a more recent successful delivery than what's in the database.
- NEW: The edit subject page for messages without tags sent to groups that require them has been reformatted, with a selector to select existing tags.
- NEW: Added Messages -> Attachments -> Moderate to group settings, to moderate messages with attachments.
- CHANGE: In a table, don't show a date or time field if it has not been set (ie if a date or time column has been added, and there are existing rows).
- BUGFIX: Muting a hashtag manually didn't work.
- CHANGE: Changing your password now displays a proper 'your password has been changed message' and you're redirected to the home page.
March 9, 2018
- CHANGE: Clicking a link database table column now takes you to the link, instead of to the view row page.
- CHANGE: Display more information on the Yahoo Transfer page for each In Process transfer request.
- BUGFIX: When viewing a subgroup home page, redirect when one of the unlisted privacy settings, but not otherwise.
- INTERNAL: Improvements to the structured logging of web queries to make it easier to track activity.
- BUGFIX: On mobile, in the Topics/Messages view, the Filter Funnel got pushed to a new line. Fixed.
- BUGFIX: When adding a Reply-To line because of DMARC, use the original From line, email address and name, instead of just email address.
- BUGFIX: Wiki pages were not being incrementally indexed by the search engine. Bug fixed and wiki pages fully re-indexed.
- NEW: You can now cancel an event, which sends an email to everyone who RSVPed Yes or Maybe.
- CHANGE: Removed requirement for sending a login link with an enterprise domain that the person have at least one subscription to that enterprise group. Made it impossible for someone with an account without a password to subscribe to their first enterprise group.
- BUGFIX: Fixed the header when downloading the member list.
- CHANGE: In the members page, changed the Action dropup to a dropdown.
- BUGFIX: Fix stripping 'Sent from my ...' lines in plain text only messages that don't end with a newline.
- NEW: For premium/enterprise groups, you can view past member activity and moderator notes.
- CHANGE: No longer defaulting to send event notices to the group on creation/update.
- BUGFIX: Fix redirect to login when trying to view the private guidelines of a group.
March 2, 2018
- CHANGE: Removed the list of public subgroups from the group home page, as it's a duplicate of what is shown in the Subgroups tab (which also has a better display of them).
- CHANGE: Added more 'Sent from my ' lines to automatically strip.
- SYSADMIN: Upgraded the second web server for more capacity.
- SYSADMIN: Moved one of the two Groups.io DNS servers to a different data center, for redundancy in case our main data center goes off-line.
- INTERNAL: Moved the final part of the system, messages to karld, off the Redis-based queue and onto a nsq-based queue.
- BUGFIX: I mispeled the word committed in several places.
- SYSADMIN: Upgraded the backup database instance to double the memory/disk because we ran out of disk.
- BUGFIX: There was a deadlock when two users viewed the same group calendar at the same time.
- BUGFIX: Editing one event in a repeating event series created extra events.
- NEW: 'All Posts By This Member' in group profile pages.
- NEW: When a user changes their email address to an address taken by an account with no subs (or subbed just to updates@), we now let them take over that email address.
- NEW: Moderators can now change members' email addresses.
- NEW: Moderators can now edit members' signatures.
- CHANGE: More updates to the Yahoo Group transfer process after I learned that many groups do not accept -subscribe email requests.
February 24, 2018
- CHANGE: Added meta headers to the maintenance page to hopefully prevent caching.
- NEW: There's now a status page for the service, at http://status.groups.io
- CHANGE: Completely revamped how Yahoo groups are transfered, adding a new web-based system to specify the groups to transfer and to track the progress of the transfers.
- CHANGE: Reduce the max size of a group name to 32 characters to avoid potential DNS issues.
- BUGFIX: For a specific PDF, pdftotext would hang during processing. This would cause our search ingestion to time out. Now we kill that process if it takes too long.
- BUGFIX: If someone is logged into an enterprise group's domain, but they are not subscribed to any groups, and the enterprise group is set to only allow access to subscribed members, that created an endless redirect loop. Now we automatically log out the person in this situation.
February 16, 2018
- BUGFIX: After editing an event, return to the same month on the calendar.
- BUGFIX: Fixed updating a single event to a repeating event and converting a repeating event to a single event.
- BUGFIX: Fixed privacy setting options for subgroups on the settings page.
- INTERNAL: Upgraded Go compiler to latest version.
- BUGFIX: Changed repeating parts of a repeating event were not saved.
- CHANGE: Change 'Send Invite To Group' to default to checked, 'Send Notice to Group' default to unchecked when created a new event.
- CHANGE: For repeating events with RSVPs, the link from the #cal-invite page takes you to a view event page that lets you select which instance to RSVP to.
- CHANGE: Direct adds now contain a link to the normal /leave page instead of a special /directunsub page, for more consistency and to prevent spam filters from unsubscribing someone accidentally.
- NEW: New Muting and Following section of help from J. Changed 'All Messages' to 'Individual Messages' Email Delivery option.
- CHANGE: Text clarification in the confirmation email and when joining a group for the first time. Also, you can now set your password directly in the welcome screen from the confirmation email.
- BUGFIX: For polls with answers that contained quotes, when editing the poll, the answers were chopped off.
- BUGFIX: When viewing profiles groups with a subdomain in the Accounts view, the profile photo was sometimes broken.
- NEW: Enterprise groups can use their Google Analytics code.
- CHANGE: Viewing poll responses in the 'Answer' mode, we no longer page because that gave incorrect results. Also display total responders instead of responses, and we now display percentages for each answer.
- CHANGE: Temporarily removed jump points on the overall Topics view because my algorithm was completely wrong and did not work.
- CHANGE: Added Help link to top navbar.
- CHANGE: Tweaked limits of email sending server to fix delayed email delivery.
- NEW: When transfer@groups.io receives an invite to join a Yahoo Group, we automatically send back an acknowledgement that we received the invite.
February 9, 2018
- BUGFIX: Fixed a permissions problem that would sometimes not allow someone to edit their own row in a table.
- BUGFIX: Fix issue that would sometimes cause the Downgrade Group button to not do anything.
- CHANGE: Reformatted the login page, changed some wording to hopefully make it easier to understand.
- INTERNAL: Updated the publicsuffix package for parsing domains when figuring out DMARC.
- CHANGE: Changed "email group" to "group" in direct add/invite/subgroupdirect add emails.
- BUGFIX: Hopefully fix deadlock issue when multiple simultaneous clicks on a mute thread link.
- CHANGE: When migrating a group to an enterprise group, change any default welcome messages to reflect the new domain.
- NEW: Can disable converting +1 emails to likes on a per-enterprise group basis (some enterprise groups don't want this feature).
- BUGFIX: Don't HTML Escape the email subject used for mailto replies in full digests, because it was causing html escaped entities to show up inappropriately.
- INTERNAL: Support for dns-01 authentication scheme with Let's Encrypt when fetching new certs, because tls-01 has gone away.
- NEW: New subgroup privacy option: unlisted, public archives.
- CHANGE: We now support more Facebook pages, ones that have their Facebook ID appended to the end of their name.
- BUGFIX: Database table searches could return results from other tables in the same group.
- BUGFIX: Fixed a bug in the code that looks for inline attachments in HTML parts that would result in a broken MIME part.
February 2, 2018
- CHANGE: Don't set a user's name from email if the subscription has a name already set.
- CHANGE: In the direct add page for a group with subgroups, sort the subgroups alphabetically.
- BUGFIX: Fix for brackets in subject lines screwing up full digests and summaries.
- BUGFIX: If 2 factor is enabled, do not allow the user to delete their password.
- CHANGE: Don't strip CC headers if present in the original message.
- NEW: Fig Leaf group setting to disable fig leafing.
- INTERNAL: Centralized all logs, on a big disk, to be able to reference more than a day's worth.
- CHANGE: Improved information display after sending a login link; contains info about the subject line and sender.
- CHANGE: Smarter about when to make a member clickable in the Members page based on moderator privileges.
- CHANGE: Added text to moderator privileges part of member page, explaining more of what access is granted with each one.
- CHANGE: When viewing a table, you can now click anywhere on a row to bring up the row itself.
- CHANGE: Added anchors to the FAQs on the Pricing page.
- CHANGE: Prevent known bots from submitting an email a login link request.
- NEW: Automatically strip out common email sigs like "Sent from my iPhone".
- INTERNAL: Sped up the overall topics view.
- NEW: Added J's Member Notices help text to the help section.
- BUGFIX: When creating a repeating event with an RSVP, the RSVP note was not included in the message sent to the group.
- CHANGE: Changed the Yahoo crawling code to retry all fetches of messages, files and photos, and to report errors in group transfers.
- INTERNAL: Changed the database queries to make jumping to a specific month in the archives more efficient.
January 26, 2018
- INTERNAL: senddigest service now using distributed nsqd system.
- INTERNAL: DMARC lookups no longer caching in Redis.
- INTERNAL: sendmessage service now using distributed nsqd system.
- BUGFIX: When editing a message that had been transferred from Yahoo, an error was thrown.
- NEW: You can hide the ID column when viewing a database table.
- INTERNAL: Many improvements to the admin dashboards.
- SYSADMIN: Moved several internal services to different machines and duplicated them, for redundancy.
- CHANGE: Added a pricing FAQ explaining some features of the calendar/events/RSVPs.
- BUGFIX: When removing/banning/unbanning someone without a display name or user name, and if you have a user name, your user name was improperly displayed as the banned person's name.
January 19, 2018
- SYSADMIN: Completed reboots of all machines in Phase 1 of Meltdown/Spectre patching.
- CHANGE: Reformatted the calender event popups and added timezone.
- INTERNAL: Began migration off using Redis as a work queue. s3server now using new distributed nsqd system.
- INTERNAL: Updated and added additional features to internal dashboard.
- INTERNAL: No longer using Redis to store LSN/Index versions for esstreamer.
- SYSADMIN: Upgraded Elasticsearch nodes to latest 5.6 version.
- CHANGE: Removed 'Sincerely' from pending email reject message.
- BUGFIX: Changing the non-date parts of a repeating event doesn't result in deleting past events.
- BUGFIX: Changing a repeating event after changing one instance of the event doesn't result in the deletion of that modified instance.
- CHANGE: Better error message when doing an accidental group reply to a topic that's set to sender only replies.
- SYSADMIN: Added an additional search node.
- BUGFIX: The /removemember API call was crashing.
January 12, 2018
- SYSADMIN: Added a second load balancer for redundancy.
- CHANGE: Changed subdomain SPF records in an attempt to track down Outlook spoofing warning message.
- SECURITY: Fixed a case where an attacker could confirm an email address that didn't belong to them.
- BUGFIX: When replying to a digest in an enterprise group, we sent back the wrong error message.
- NEW: Groups now have a default timezone, for new members.
- NEW: The API now returns various counts on the group object.
- CHANGE: Switch default poll response view to the answer table.
- BUGFIX: When viewing tables on mobile devices, the specified column widths were being ignored.
- BUGFIX: Changed the subject lines of event notifications to use a dash instead of comma, which was breaking hashtag processing.
- CHANGE: Made invite address parsing smarter to catch some common formatting mistakes.
January 6, 2018
- SYSADMIN: Upgraded and rebooted all instances with new kernel patched to fix the Meltdown bug.
- SECURITY: Fixed issue where an attacker could create an account with someone else's email address (assuming it didn't exist) and get it confirmed.
- BUGFIX: Very long text attachments could cause the search indexer to ignore some messages during indexing.
- BUGFIX: When editing a markdown formatted message, the markdown formatting was not preserved.
- BUGFIX: In the activity log, the wrong person was displayed for banned/unbanned/removed records.
- SECURITY: Added X-Frame-Options HTTP header to prevent clickjacking.
- BUGFIX: Some bounces to enterprise groups were not being processed correctly.
- CHANGE: Removed List-Post headers from emails because of Thunderbird.
- INTERNAL: Upgrade pgx package to fix Postgres replication timeout bug.
December 15, 2017
- CHANGE: Member leaving activity logs no longer link the member name/email address.
- NEW: Added List-Post header to email messages.
- INTERNAL: Speed up Activities viewing.
- INTERNAL: Work on speeding up the /topics view.
- NEW: New poll results view.
- BUGFIX: When editing an event in a different timezone, the times did not match the event timezone.
- BUGFIX: Searching groups by starting letter excluded groups that began with a capital letter.
- INTERNAL: Removed old sticky thread database indexes.
December 8, 2017
- CHANGE: Moved expired topic from a member activity to a message activity.
- CHANGE: Cleaned up the account billing page.
- INTERNAL: Fixed internal esstreamer process to be able to deal with null columns.
- NEW: An event can now have an event organizer.
- NEW: With RSVPs, you can now request additional information from attendees.
- NEW: You can specify a message that is sent to people who respond yes to events.
- NEW: You can now lock an event, preventing people from changing their responses.
- NEW: You can now sort RSVPs by either who responded first, or alphabetically by name.
- CHANGE: Reformatted the Add Event page to be more consistent with the rest of the site.
- INTERNAL: Rearchitected how we page through topics to make that process much faster.
- SYSADMIN: Added another web server to deal with the new extra load.
- SYSADMIN: Changed our deployment procedures to not upgrade all web servers at exactly the same time, so that hopefully no one experiences the kittens during a simple upgrade.
- CHANGE: In the Files section, always show the New Folder and Upload File buttons but disable them if you can't do those actions.
December 2, 2017
- NEW: For enterprise groups that do not allow signups, disable the email +subscribe command.
- CHANGE: When viewing a database table, open links in new window.
- CHANGE: On the website, do not pull hashtags out from the middle of a subject anymore, but duplicate them at the end instead.
- CHANGE: For event notifications and reminders, made hashtag handling in the event name consistent with how we handle hashtags elsewhere.
- NEW: Bounce any messages with subject lines that begin with 'Private:'.
- NEW: Can specify the width of database columns.
- INTERNAL: Ability to specify max number of outbound SMTP connections per domain.
November 18, 2017
- BUGFIX: Fixed email subscription process for some Enterprise sub groups.
- SYSADMIN: Changed the messages and activities tables autovaccuum scale factor to 0.00.
- CHANGE: When visiting a /leave link for someone else, display an error message and an option to log out.
- NEW: Added 'Member Page' option to 'More' menu and dropdown when viewing messages.
- BUGFIX: Fixed subjects for new member notices to match new terminology.
- BUGFIX: For member notices with HTML links that have text that is the same as the link itself, don't display it double when converting it to plain text.
- NEW: Generate name tags for people who have RSVPed Yes to an event.