Changes to the site this week:

April 8, 2021:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• NEW: Each hashtag can now have a footer, which will be included in any message tagged with that hashtag. The footer will also be displayed in the New Post page if the person selects the hashtag from the Add Tags dropdown.

April 7, 2021:

• NEW: New filter pop-up on the Members page. Discussion

April 6, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Migrated several machine instances because Linode is retiring old hardware.
• BUGFIX: In some instances, when editing a repeat event, it would cause all existing RSVPs to be deleted, when it shouldn't have.
• BUGFIX: Fixed display of the Starts On field when editing a repeating event.
• CHANGE: The URL structure for individual photos has changed so that the URLs are now stable/refer to photo ids instead of relative placement of the photo in the album.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

March 31, 2021:

• APP: New version of the iOS app is now available for testing. Discussion
• INTERNAL: Upgraded build system to the latest Go compiler.

March 30, 2021:

• CHANGE: Going to the /login page when you are already logged in will keep you logged in. Previously, it forced a logout.
• NEW: We are now more strict in what messages we accept from non-members to groups (for those groups configured to accept messages from non-members), in an effort to cut down on spam. Messages from non-members that are determined to be spam will be logged as a Non-member message in the Activity Log, like Non-member XX attempted to send message "MESSAGE SUBJECT" and the message was rejected because it was determined to be spam.

March 29, 2021:

• CHANGE: Changed the chat window template to be less Slack-like and more conversational.
• INTERNAL: Fixed bounce processing for "swbell.net", "bellsouth.net", "sbcglobal.net", "att.net", "ameritech.net" domains.
• APP: Fix for forcing infinite scroll.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• NEW: Turned on new group message and chat message notifications. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• INTERNAL: More work on spammer prevention tools.

March 26, 2021:

• BUGFIX: In some instances, clicking on a link to a File in the Feed or in the Files Search results page, when the File was a link, would not work.
• BUGFIX: The Download button when viewing a photo would not work correctly if the photo had spaces in its name. Discussion
• BUGFIX: With infinite scroll enabled, you could not click on a member in the Members page past member 60.Discussion

March 25, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Locked groups could not be upgraded.
• CHANGE: Added List-Subscribe and List-Help email headers and changed List-Unsubscribe to a mailto: instead of pointing to the website. These changes were made to get rspamd, a popular anti-spam system, to recognize our messages as mailing list messages.
• BUGFIX: Include proper References/In-Reply-To headers for edited messages for threading. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Muted hashtags were ignored when sending edited messages. Discussion

March 24, 2021:

• CHANGE: Improved text explaining why a basic group has been locked automatically (because it's over the 100 member limit or because it's a subgroup).
• NEW: Member Notification checkboxes to receive notifications for new group messages and new chat messages. The notifications themselves will be enabled on Monday, March 29th.
• CHANGE: Ended trial of Spamhaus for filtering incoming messages.
• DATABASE: Changed all subscriptions that had Message Selection set to Follow Only or Follow Only And First Message with email delivery of No Email or Special to have Message Selection set to All. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Switching subscriptions to No Email or Special should force Message Selection to All. Discussion

March 23, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Made the search processing pipeline more efficient by bulk-processing sub, group and activity changes.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

March 19, 2021:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• NEW: You can now specify an event either on the last day of a month, or the last day of week of the month. Discussion
• CHANGE: In the Create/Edit hashtag page, indent Lock Topic under Topic Duration and disable it when duration is Forever. Discussion
• CHANGE: When parsing hashtags from subject lines, include punctuation (except .?!) when parsing them. Discussion

March 18, 2021

• INTERNAL: Work on internal tools for identifying, monitoring, and disabling spammers.

March 17, 2021

• BUGFIX: Publicly was misspelled in the create subgroup page. Discussion

March 16, 2021

• BUGFIX: For hashtags that are set as moderated as well as Use by Mods Only, the Use by Mods Only setting now takes precedent over the moderated setting. Discussion
• CHANGE: For groups that allow reposting, if the #repost hashtag is set to Use by Mods Only, do not give the user an option to repost if they are not a moderator. Discussion
• NEW: Include a count of waitlisted people when viewing an event summary. Discussion.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

March 12, 2021

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• CHANGE: Tweak the text describing the various Email Delivery options, from Nina.
• CHANGE: We now block emails from servers that present an invalid HELO response, as a spam prevention measure.

March 11, 2021

• INTERNAL: Upgrade and harden the DNS servers against attacks. Discussion.

March 10, 2021

• BUGFIX: Use the unencoded message subject for activity log entries. Discussion.

March 9, 2021

• INTERNAL: Much improved monitoring of anti-spam RBLs. Discussion.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

March 5, 2021

• BUGFIX: Updated the invite and join group pages to reflect recent changes in the subscription settings. Discussion.

March 3, 2021

• CHANGE: Changed the color of the Owner link in the header of the photo album page to be white.
• BUGFIX: Fixed pricing displays for legacy groups in the Change Plan/Upgrade page. Discussion.
• NEW: Clicking on an Unsubscribe link for an email sent to an account that has been banned by Groups.io now displays a message saying the account has been disabled and explaining how the person may have received the unwanted email.

March 2, 2021

• CHANGE: In the Group Activity and Member Activity pages, changed the Today date range to Past 24 Hours, Within 7 Days to Past 7 Days, and Within 30 Days to Past 30 Days. Discussion.
• CHANGE: Recognize Réf: as a subject reply indicator. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Don't use the word Update when viewing an event RSVP if the event doesn't allow additional guests. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Button formatting fix. Discussion.
• CHANGE: Changed wording of email delivery and post status activity log entries. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Don't convert parentheses to underscores in the preview slug in the uploader dialog. Discussion.
• CHANGE: Don't include the via Support tag in Banned by system activity messages. Discussion.
• CHANGE: Include the group subject tag in +owner subject lines. Discussion.

March 1, 2021

• CHANGE: In the edit photo album page, sort the members by email address.
• BUGFIX: Removed async/await references in Javascript so that older browsers will work again.

February 27, 2021

• BUGFIX: Fix some styling issues with the chat screen.
• CHANGE: Reverted the text field font size to standard Bootstrap sizes, removing a workaround for iOS mobile automatic text field zooming.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

February 26, 2021

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• APP: Support for adding attachments/photos from the device (the new app is not yet ready for general testing).

February 25, 2021

• CHANGE: Updated the list of timezones that we use and added a list of aliased timezones, to address ICS file errors. Discussion.

February 24, 2021

• NEW: Filtering incoming messages using the Spamhaus blocklists. We're trialing the service to see if it makes much of a difference.
• BUGFIX: In ICS files, for modified instances of repeating events, we were not using a unique UID. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: In ICS files, for repeating events specified in UTC, we were not using the correct format for the DTSTART/DTEND lines. Discussion.

February 23, 2021

• BUGFIX: We were not properly escaping HTML elements in the topic summary lines in the /topics page.
• CHANGE: If you click on an Unsubscribe link that's already been used to leave a group, we now display an error message.

February 22, 2021

• INTERNAL: Work on monitoring tools to help prevent abuse of the site.
• CHANGE: If a message is emailed to a non-existent group, we no longer return a list of groups you are subscribed to in the error response. As has been pointed out, that is a security breach.
• CHANGE: We are now less forgiving of incorrectly formatted SMTP commands from incoming email servers.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

February 19th, 2021

• BUGFIX: Modal buttons on the edit wiki page were the incorrect colors. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: The RSS feeds for groups without titles now have the title set to the URL of the group.
• INTERNAL: Some HTML cleanup.

February 18th, 2021

• BUGFIX: The Subgroups tab under Admin in the group sidebar would not display as active when clicked on.
• INTERNAL: Second pass at bundling CSS and JS files.
• BUGFIX: In some cases event times in the Feed view were not displayed in the correct timezone. Also, the user's date formatting was not observed. Discussion.

February 17th, 2021

• INTERNAL: First pass at bundling CSS and JS files. This will speed up web page rendering but more importantly is needed to support the app.

February 15th, 2021

• CHANGE: On the edit subscription, group member and group default subscription pages, made it so that incompatible changes to Email Delivery and Message Selection are changed immediately on the page, instead of when the changes are saved. An example: setting Email Delivery to No Email and then Message Selection to Following Only will immediately change the Email Delivery radio button to Individual Messages. Discussion.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

February 12th, 2021

• DOCS: Updates from Nina to the Owners Manual and Members Manual.
• CHANGE: On the edit subscription and group member pages, under Advanced Preferences, Auto Follow Replies has been moved under Following Only. When Following Only is not checked, both First Message Also and Auto Follow Replies are now disabled and unchecked. When Following Only is checked, Auto Follow Replies is now automatically checked. Discussion.

February 11th, 2021

• CHANGE: When editing your subscription or a member's subscription, if Email Delivery is set to Special or No Email and the Message Selection is changed from All Messages, force Email Delivery to Individual Messages. Conversely, if Email Delivery is changed to Special or No Email, force Message Selection to All and uncheck Auto Follow Replies. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: When displaying a text-only message, if a link ended in a < or >, we would improperly include that in the link.

February 8th, 2021

• BUGFIX: If a pending message rejection member notice had quotes in it, they would display as escaped when editing the message in the pending message screen. Discussion.
• CHANGE: New groups are now subject to per-member pricing. Discussion.
• CHANGE: Premium groups now have 30GB of storage.
• CHANGE: The Member count on group home pages and search results now no longer includes Not Confirmed members.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

February 5th, 2021

• DOCS: Updates from Nina to the Owners Manual, Members Manual, and Getting Started Guide.
• CHANGE: Changed hover title for P badge to Posting Always Allowed and hover title for NP badge to Not Allowed To Post.

February 4th, 2021

• BUGFIX: For Enterprise groups with Disable Signups checked, don't display the link to register on the /login page.
• BUGFIX: Fixed missing Moderator changed moderator permissions activity log entry description in the dropdown. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Use the message's unprocessed subject for the sent message activity log entry. Previously the cooked subject line, with end hashtags removed, was used.

February 3nd, 2021

• NEW: New activity log entries for when someone reports a message, file or photo. Discussion.
• CHANGE: Display a photo album's owner when viewing the album, not on the /photos page. Discussion.
• CHANGE: We're now including a member's Display Name in notifications if available. Discussion.
• SECURITY: You can no longer change the email address of a member who is a moderator of a group. Discussion.

February 2nd, 2021

• BUGFIX: We were not returning SMTP error codes for some errors. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Fix confirmation email subject line example to agree with the actual email subject line. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Include the sender in the activity log entry for non-member sending a message requiring approval. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: There were inconsistent tooltips on the Members page. Discussion.
• CHANGE: In the Pending Message page, the NM badge is now red, and when viewing an individual pending message, the Non Member badge is red. Discussion.
• BUGFIX: Drafts now remember if you have toggled the Private button in message replies. Discussion.
• NEW: Activity log entries for adding/removing group aliases. Discussion.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• CHANGE: New, better favicon.
• NEW: Group sponsorships can now be paid using Paypal.
• BUGFIX: In the members page, if you did a new search while on the second or later page of an existing search, the pagination was messed up.
• BUGFIX: Changed Elasticsearch sub search mapping to fix partial searches.
• NEW: Prioritize 2factor authentication support requests to ensure they don't get lost.
• BUGFIX: In some cases, people on banned domains were allowed to subscribe to a group.
• BUGFIX: A banned user, going to a group page, would get endlessly redirected, resulting in a browser error.
• BUGFIX: After adding an attachment when composing a message or reply, delay updating the attachment list for 3 seconds to allow S3 to propagate.
• BUGFIX: Fix date display for 20th century dates for people with date formats not MM/DD/YY.
• NEW: Add a link to the help center to the /static/welcome page, the default group welcome message, and the confirming confirmation email message.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• APP: More work on the new version of the app.
• INTERNAL: More work on converting templates to quicktemplate.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• NEW: Added RES: to the list of subject reply indicators.
• CHANGE: In the Group Settings Page, move the Subject Tag setting to the General panel from the Message Formatting panel.
• BUGFIX: When replying to an +owner message, fill out the subject line.
• BUGFIX: In the activity log, for +owner messages without a subject, display (No Subject).
• BUGFIX: On the +Owner Msgs page, display (No Subject) for messages without a subject.
• CHANGE: Only mods can change the ownership of photos.
• NEW: Added Generic link type to files.
• CHANGE: Help center links now open in a new browser tab.
• BUGFIX: Fix scrolling in /album views for people with infinite scroll set to true (infinite scroll is not supported on that page yet).
• BUGFIX: The help text for group names in the Group Settings page said no periods allowed for subgroup names, when in fact they are allowed.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• INTERNAL: Work on stopping spam accounts and spam groups as well as deletion of many existing spam accounts and groups.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• CHANGE: Ensure that if a message is sent from a banned member, it's logged as such. Also don't display badges in the banned member page.
• CHANGE: Changed special message to special notice in the activity logs for consistency.
• BUGFIX: Fix timezone offset issue with event times on the /feed page?
• NEW: Groups can now allow people to sponsor their hosting fees.
• CHANGE: Mobile reformatting: iPad widths now use the bottom navbar like phone widths. The More menu in the bottom navbars is now a drawer that slides in from the left. Several little mobile formatting tweaks.
• BUGFIX: It's no longer possible to input a negative reminder time before an event.
• CHANGE: Formatting changes to the add event page for adding reminders.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• APP: A lot of work on the new version of the app.
• INTERNAL: More work on converting templates to quicktemplate.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• CHANGE: For messages that don't follow group hashtag requirements (missing a hashtag/using a restricted hashtag/etc), we would save a copy as a pending message and allow people to edit the message. We now just do not accept the message in the first place, and return an error message.
• BUGFIX: The bouncing email notification wasn't properly escaping the email address encoded in the unbounce URL.
• BUGFIX: When clicking Send Message from the view pending message screen, an erroneous You must include a message error message was displayed in the compose screen.
• NEW: When direct adding or inviting an email address that is an alias of an existing member, show that existing member's email address in the error message.
• BUGFIX: Fixed the Taken display when viewing individual photos.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• BUGFIX: Hopefully fix the weird feed event time discrepancy bug.
• APP: Work on a new version of the app utilizing the website templates instead of React Native.
• INTERNAL: More work on converting templates to quicktemplate.
• CHANGE: Added a breadcrumb bar to the group calendar page.
• SYSADMIN: Upgraded the load balancer nodes to dedicated CPU instances.

The next #changelog will be published on Friday, January 8, 2021. Part of the time I will be on holiday, but the rest I will be focusing on the long lamented app. I had hired a firm to develop an app, as a separate program from the code that runs Groups.io. That meant that any change I wished to make to the website would also have to be made to the app. I was unhappy with how this was developing, so I spent some time recently figuring out how to develop an app using the code that already runs the Groups.io website. In this scenario, I would only have to make a change in one place, and I would not have to worry about the website and the app getting out of sync with different changes. I've figured out how to do this, and am now focused on finishing up the (new, new) app. As part of this, I may be tweaking some parts of the mobile website.

As is the case when I am on holiday, I will still be monitoring the site, but support email responses may be slower than normal.

Take care everyone, and happy holidays!

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• INTERNAL: More work on converting templates to quicktemplate.
• CHANGE: The RSVPed Only button in the calendar will no longer show events you've RSVPed no to.
• CHANGE: Moved the Discard button in the New Topic and Reply pages to the right side of the screen.
• BUGFIX: Time column search results in a database would not display the correct time.
• BUGFIX: After updating a moderator note on a past member, you were redirected incorrectly to the Members page.
• NEW: Added a confirmation dialog when saving a photo album edit and moved the Notify Members checkbox into it, for hobgoblins.
• CHANGE: Revamped the groups search page to propagate the search term when filtering the results.
• BUGFIX: Unchecking the Cover Photo checkbox when editing a photo did nothing.
• CHANGE: Removed the timezone line when hovering over an event in the calendar. The time in that display is in the user's timezone, and showing the (possibly different) event timezone is confusing/wrong.
• INTERNAL: Made it easier to test specific webservers.
• SYSADMIN: Updated all machines.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site the last two weeks:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• NEW: Added a confirmation dialog when saving a photo edit and moved the Notify Members checkbox into it, for hobgoblins.
• NEW: Added a confirmation dialog when saving a wiki edit and moved the Notify Members checkbox into it, for hobgoblins.
• NEW: There wasn't an option to notify members when deleting a wiki page.
• CHANGE: Added a confirmation dialog when changing an email address.
• CHANGE: Added (members with private profiles are not shown) to the member directory display, for when non-mods are viewing the directory.
• INTERNAL: More work on converting templates to quicktemplate.
• CHANGE: Make +owner messages obey DMARC and the other from re-write rules that we typically apply to group messages.
• BUGFIX: For users with military time display preference, time columns in databases were displayed using standard time notation, and editing rows would lead to blank time columns.
• CHANGE: In addition to sending a one word 'unsubscribe' email to start the unsubscribe process, it is now also triggered if just the first line of an email to the group is 'unsubscribe'.
• CHANGE: Updated the plan comparison page with suggestions from Bruce.
• INTERNAL: Updated the Go compiler.

The next #changelog will be on December 4th.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• CHANGE: Login links in direct add emails now expire after 24 hours, to match the time frame we use when sending a login link.
• BUGFIX: If there's only one photo album, disable the Move button when viewing a photo.
• NEW: If you send a message with just the word 'unsubscribe' and nothing else to a group, we now treat it as an unsubscribe request, like sending a message to +unsubscribe (still requires confirmation).
• BUGFIX: When following a topic, we send out all existing messages. We were not adding the group subject tag to the messages.
• NEW: On the /topic and /message pages, there now is a Follow/Unfollow/Mute/Unmute button.
• CHANGE: Changed 'Reason' column title in the Past Members page to 'History'.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina
• INTERNAL: Improvements to internal admin tools and dashboards
• INTERNAL: The second mail server is now processing half of all outbound email.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• BUGFIX: In the /topic view, with infinite scroll, some messages would be displayed without the message footer.
• BUGFIX: Trial premium groups weren't being downgraded to free after the trial was over.
• SYSADMIN: Added two additional web servers to deal with increased load.
• CHANGE: Changed what we consider a valid email address to make it more strict and to reject extended unicode characters.

Take care everyone.

Mark