Changes to the site this week:

July 30, 2021:

• NEW: Testing greylisting some email from non-members to +owner addresses, as a spam mitigation action.
• INTERNAL: Changed how we handle database images, reducing the load on our servers for tables with lots of images.
• BUGFIX: In some circumstances, a /posttosub draft was not clickable. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Links in the member subgroups page were incorrect. Discussion

July 29, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Tuning rate limiting on the website to protect it from robots and bad actors.

July 28, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Changed how we handle wiki images, reducing the load on our servers for wiki pages with lots of images.

July 27, 2021:

• CHANGE: Messages from .ru domains to +owner addresses where the sender is not a member of the group are now dropped.
• BUGFIX: Mobile member search was not working. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

July 23, 2021:

• BUGFIX: The link to the pending message in the pending message email notification did not bring up the message itself, it brought up the list of all pending messages.
• CHANGE: We are now a bit more strict in the types of email that we accept from non-members to +owner accounts; those that fail are rejected with a spam rejection notice.

July 22, 2021:

• CHANGE: When following a topic, we now send out messages in ascending order.

July 21, 2021:

• APP BUGFIX: - The New Poll option was missing from the group sidebar tray. Discussion
• CHANGE: - When adding or editing a member notice, if you try to save it with an empty Name or Message field, an error will be displayed. Discussion

July 20, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Clearing search fields now behaves in the expected way (ie. it clears the search). Discussion
• CHANGE: Now, messages from banned domains are rejected with the message Messages are not permitted from this domain. and messages that we flag as spam are rejected with This message has been flagged as spam.. This only applies to messages from non-members. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Fixed sort order of Member Notices. Discussion

July 19, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Made the generation of extended message pages with lots of image attachments more efficient.
• CHANGE: In chat, you can now activate the tapback menu by clicking on any part of a chat message, not just a little ... button.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

July 16, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Updates to our admin system to make researching group issues easier.
• CHANGE: For plain text messages larger than 500KB, we truncate the display of them.

July 14, 2021:

• NEW: You can now tapback chat messages (thumbs up/down/heart/exclamation mark/etc).
• NEW: You can now send photos as chat messages.
• NEW: When typing a chat message, if you type the @ character, that brings up an auto-completion list of user names.
• NEW: You can now delete chat messages.

July 13, 2021:

• INTERNAL: More work on detecting spammers.
• BUGFIX: Fixed an issue where erroneous moderator permissions activity log change messages were being generated. Discussion
• SYSADMIN: Switched our internal DNS caching architecture to use CoreDNS, in the hopes of being able to track down/eliminate spurious DNS MX lookup errors.

July 12, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Special event reminders were being sent as normal messages. Discussion
• CHANGE: The new activity log entry Moderator changed notifications is used for notification changes. Past changes were logged with Moderator changed moderator permissions.
• BUGFIX: In some instances the link included in the login link email contained a subdomain, which was invalid.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

June 30, 2021:

• APP BUGFIX: In some instances, entering a message in a chat could lead to multiple copies of that message being shown on the page.
• APP BUGFIX: Issues with polls have been fixed. Discussion and Discussion

June 29, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Moderator notifications and calendar event emails were not generated when adding members directly to subgroups. Discussion
• NEW: New mentions only notification option for chats.

June 28, 2021:

• CHANGE: Changed subject prefix Happening Now to Now. Discussion
• APP BUGFIX: Clicking on an image in a message should no longer give a network error. Discussion

I am now on vacation, returning on Monday, July 12th. This means responses to support email requests will be slower than normal. The next #changelog will be sent out on Friday, July 16th.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• INTERNAL: Completed the transition from using Go templates for the web site to Quicktemplate.
• INTERNAL: More work on re-organizing the code base.

June 25, 2021:

• BUGFIX: The activity log entry for a moderator changing a member's email address did not properly include the new email address.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

June 17, 2021:

• DOCS: Member Manual updates from Nina.
• NEW: You can now sort columns when viewing poll responses by answer.
• BUGFIX: If a #poll-notice is pending, and the poll is edited by a moderator before approval, and the moderater had a display name set but the member who created the poll did not have a display name set, the member's display name would be set to the moderator's display name.
• NEW: You can now export individual poll results, in either CSV or JSON format.
• NEW: Poll responses are now shown with links to the responders' profiles.
• NEW: When viewing poll responses, the respondents display/fullnames are now updated if they've changed since voting occurred.

June 16, 2021:

• NEW: Export group now has an option to export polls.
• BUGFIX: For enterprise groups with Disable Signups set to true, we were still showing the Apply button on the group home page, even when it did nothing.
• BUGFIX: Fix overlapping box when no events to display in calendar list view. Discussion

June 15, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Strip out duplicate group subject tags in messages sent +owner. Discussion
• NEW: Added more sig tags to be stripped out. Discussion

June 14, 2021:

• CHANGE: Make the quoted printable decoder more liberal by accepting lower case hex letters.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

June 11, 2021:

• NEW: Stripe connect should now work for Enterprise groups looking to set up donations.
• BUGFIX: Fixed infinite scroll in the app in the View RSVPs page. Discussion
• CHANGE: In full digests, we were limiting the number of attachments per message to 2. Now we limit the number of included images to 2, but include all other attachments (as links back to the website, as before).

June 10, 2021:

• DOCS: Updates to the Members Manual and the Owners Manual from Nina.
• BUGFIX: The Preview button when adding/editing a Markdown formatted Member Notice did not work.
• BUGFIX: The Back button on the Add/Event event page did not work correctly for people with date preferences other than the default US format. Discussion
• CHANGE: Limit the chat text entry window to 3 lines. This fixes the bug where the text area could be hidden under the mobile/app footer. Also, it's just a good idea. Discussion

June 9, 2021:

• SYSADMIN: Migrated primary pgbouncer instance to a dedicated CPU instance for better performance.
• BUGFIX: When viewing a pending member in the /member page, we were checking the Remove Members privilege instead of the Approve Pending Members privilege to determine if the moderator could reject the pending member.

June 8, 2021:

• APP BUGFIX: When editing an event in the app, sometimes the date picker fields were not initialized correctly. Discussion
• APP BUGFIX: Using the back button/swipe to return to the Groups page would cause infinite scrolling to not work. Discussion
• INTERNAL: More work on improving tests and the test harness.

June 7, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Re-sent invites had potentially incorrect expiration dates. Discussion
• CHANGE: Margin formatting tweaks in the chat window.
• BUGFIX: An error prevented viewing a +owner message via an activity log message from a person who is no longer a member of the group.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• INTERNAL: It was infrastructure week, with a focus on reorganizating the repository, refactoring code, general cleanup, and improving tests.

June 3, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Fixed export of some files. Discussion
• CHANGE: Reorder processing in the export group service to hopefully fix a database timeout issue.
• CHANGE: When doing a JSON import of a table, keep the existing Updated fields on the rows. Discussion
• BUGFIX: If doing a message search with a poster ID representing a user who is no longer a member of the group, don't return every single message. Discussion
• CHANGE: When sending a message to a member, if you select a member notice, the activity log entry will now point to that member notice instead of showing the entire message as sent. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Some system notifications were not treated in a consistent way in that some were not ignoring the Normalize HTML Emails setting, as they had previous to a change on May 27th. Discussion
• BUGFIX: The chat window was not sizing properly, so that the text entry box was not visible on the screen. Discussion
• NEW: There's a new Locked Topic Member Notice. If there is an active locked topic member notice, it will be sent to the group when a topic is locked using the Lock Topic dropdown in the Topics page. Also, in the Topic Properties page, when you click the Lock Topic checkbox, a new selector appears allowing you to send a specific locked topic member notice to the group when you lock the topic.

I will be on vacation until Monday, June 7th.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

May 26, 2021:

• CHANGE: The long format for dates for people and groups that have a preference of MM/DD/YYYY is now Monday, January 2, 2006. For all others, it continues to be Monday, 2 January 2006.
• INTERNAL: Cleaned up some technical debt around #cal-reminder and #cal-notice message generation. As a side effect, #cal-reminder messages now include ICS attachments, like #cal-invite notices.
• CHANGE: For message notifications, use the sender's name or email address as the title when possible, instead of just "New message". Discussion

May 25, 2021:

• CHANGE: Moderators and owners can now reply to a locked topic. Discussion
• APP: Added support for Android back buttons, and on iOS swiping right now goes back one page.
• BUGFIX: Fixed apostrophe conversions in notification subjects and bodies. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Better parsing of Qmail bounce messages. Discussion
• CHANGE: Work on being able to go back to search results from the breadcrumb line, for viewing members and messages.

May 24, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Pagination didn't work on the Sent Invitations page on mobile or the app. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Due to a previous change to support unread message tracking in the app, sometimes digests would not be generated when they should have been. No digest messages were lost, some were just delayed. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

May 21, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Sending a message to members via the Members page ignored any checked members other than those on the current page. Discussion
• CHANGE: Added some text to the Default Subscription Settings page to hopefully explain better that those settings apply to new members, not existing members.
• CHANGE: Clicking the Identity tab in your account now takes you directly to your editable overall profile. There is now a dropdown selector to select a different profile to edit. I've also added some text to hopefully explain the (quite complicated) profile system a little better. More can be done, however.
• BUGFIX: Fixed Discard button in /posttosub and also made it red and moved it to the right corner, to match the /post page. Discussion
• NEW: Claiming pending messages and pending members is now logged in the Activity log. Discussion
• CHANGE: Display the Claimed by badge for pending members in the mobile/app view. Discussion
• API CHANGE: When calling the /getgroup API endpoint with a group_id of a group you are not subscribed to, return a new response of not_subscribed instead of group_not_found.

May 20, 2021:

• CHANGE: When composing a message on the website, inline images will always be resized to be <=640. Previously, if the Max Emailed Photo Size was unlimited, inlined images were not resized. Attached images and inlined images in emailed photos will continue to have the previous behavior of being resized to <640 if the Max Emailed Photo Size was set and was larger than 640.
• NEW: Working photo upload from the app into the Photos section. Still work to be done.

May 18, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Fixed apostrophe conversion in subject lines of emailed notifications. Discussion

May 15, 2021:

• CHANGE: Group filters in the /members page by how we process them. Discussion
• CHANGE: Change URL structure on /messages page going to an individual message so that it doesn't change/browsers can correctly remember which ones have been seen. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• INTERNAL: Wrote an app deployment system to automate deployment of new versions of the apps.

May 14, 2021:

• BUGFIX: The search filter on the Topics page was not working. Discussion
• CHANGE: Clicking on files in the Files section now opens them in a new tab, to be consistent with how we treat links in messages.
• BUGFIX: Re-indexed the Files search index to fix sort-by-type issues. Discussion
• CHANGE: Updated the icons in the Files section. Discussion
• CHANGE: Changed the ordering of sort-by-name in the Files section to not prioritize folders. Discussion

May 13, 2021:

• NEW: More work on catching more spam sent to groups from non-members.

May 12, 2021:

• APP BUGFIX: Fixed external links in messages. Discussion
• NEW: We now log in the activity log messages from moderators to members. The new activity log entry is Message to member. Discussion
• CHANGE: Make the Files search results page consistent with the normal Files page. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Using the 'Select all' check box to the left of the 'Display Name' column header on the member list also checks all of the member list filters. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

May 7, 2021:

• BUGFIX: When deleting a subscription (by leaving a group, being removed, etc), we deleted all pending digest messages for the user, even if the messages were in other groups the user was still a member of.

May 6, 2021:

• CHANGE: More work on making the breadcrumbs behave consistently.

May 5, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Pagination in database tables was not working for people with infinite scroll preference.
• CHANGE: More work on making the breadcrumbs behave consistently.
• CHANGE: The filter on the Members page is now scrollable and height limited, to work better on mobile.

May 4, 2021:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• BUGFIX: Fixed issues with /viewevent page when viewing a repeating event: the Pick A Different Date to RSVP selector was never displayed, and we now present the repeating criteria in a more clear and separate way from the single event date.
• CHANGE: Moved search bar into breadcrumb line in the search results page.
• APP BUGFIX: Fixed issues with member filtering. Discussion

May 3, 2021:

• INTERNAL: Switched primary replica database machine to a dedicated CPU instance to see if that fixes the periodic slowdown we were seeing in database responses.
• CHANGE: Monthly updating of timezone selector.
• BUGFIX: Fix breadcrumb issues in photo albums, messages, and topics. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

April 30, 2021:

• CHANGE: Reformatted the headers of several pages, moving the search bar into the breadcrumb line and improving behavior on mobile/app.

April 29, 2021:

• CHANGE: Improved the mobile formatting of the edit subscription, group profile, member integration and email delivery history pages. Also converted them to qtpl.

April 28, 2021:

• BUGFIX: Fixed some spacing issues between the desktop and mobile version of the site.
• APP BUGFIX: Fixed viewing a database row. Discussion

April 27, 2021:

• APP BUGFIX: Fixed extra padding between the top nav bar and the page content. Discussion
• APP BUGFIX: Fixed clicking on notifications going to the correct page in the page. Discussion

April 26, 2021:

• APP BUGFIX: Fixed collapsing the Admin menu as well as collapsing the Account/Cog menu. Rolled out on Android, not yet rolled out for iOS. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

April 23, 2021:

• NEW: When viewing a member, we now include how that member became a member of the group, at the top of the page, after Joined via.... The options are: web, email, invite, direct add, signup form.
• CHANGE: The /unbounce link emailed to people when their account is bouncing will no longer log them in if they are not already logged in. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Make the button behavior on the Past Members page be consistent with the button behavior on the Members page. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Align search button on Past Members page. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Fixed the HTML in the Group Directory page and Past Members Page. Discussion

April 22, 2021:

• NEW: Released first test version of the Android App. Discussion
• BUGFIX: Logout wasn't working on the Apps. Discussion
• CHANGE: The Discard button on the New Post page now returns to the group home page, and displays a banner saying the draft has been discarded. This is in part to fix an issue with the Discard button not working in the app.

April 20, 2021:

• CHANGE: Unsubscribe because of FBL now reported as via system. Also, added commas before the via in the activity log. Discussion

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

April 16, 2021:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• NEW: We now support Single Sign On from YourMembership, for Enterprise groups.
• CHANGE: Changed invite link expiry to 14 days.
• INTERNAL: Upgraded the kernel on the other replica database machine to see if it helped reduce the unexplained freezes we're seeing.

April 15, 2021:

• CHANGE: Invite links now expire after 24 hours. We no longer delete old invitations after 14 days.
• INTERNAL: Converted the add event page to quicktemplate.
• INTERNAL: Improvements to the admin dashboard involving spammer detection.

April 13, 2021:

• NEW: Delete invites that haven't been accepted that are older than 14 days (rolled back on the 15th).
• CHANGE: If you click on an invite link and are logged in under a different account, we now display an error message instead of automatically logging you out.
• BUGFIX: In Full Digests, we would display the Attachments line under a message even if all the attachments were inline images.
• BUGFIX: In some instances, hashtag footers were not showing up in digests.
• INTERNAL: Upgraded the kernel on one of the replica database machines to see if it helped reduce the unexplained freezes we're seeing.

April 12, 2021:

• BUGFIX: When converting plain text emails to HTML that contain links with query parameters, we were only linkifying the part of the URL up until the second query parameter.

Take care everyone.

Mark

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