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

Changes to the site this week:

• NEW: In the Billing tab, for premium groups, show which features would be enabled/disabled if you downgraded to the free plan.
• CHANGE: Formatting changes to the Past Members page.
• BUGFIX: In a premium group, clicking on a rejected member activity log item will now bring you to the /pastmember page.
• CHANGE: Work to make DNS resolution when sending out email more robust, including adding more DNS resolver caches and changing some of the logic in the code.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• SYSADMIN: More work to bring up the second email server; working to get Microsoft to stop rate-limiting it.
• DOCS: Updates to the Owners Manual from Nina.
• INTERNAL: Switched the internal dashboards/admin system to a different domain to fix cookie issues I was having.
• INTERNAL: More work on converting templates to quicktemplate.
• BUGFIX: Fixed formatting of the Past Members page when viewing on mobile.
• INTERNAL: Better integration with statuspage.io, the hosts of status.groups.io, to make it easier to report/update incidents as they are happening. Also, linked to the @groupsio twitter account.
• CHANGE: When rejecting a pending message, include the original message in the rejection notice, not the edited version if it exists.
• NEW: Added infinite scrolling to the message search results page.
• BUGFIX: Repeating events that end on a specific date sometimes would end one before that date, due to an off-by-one error.
• CHANGE: On submitting a donation, we now disable the donate button while the donation is being processed to prevent an error on a double submit.
• BUGFIX: Merging in the search results page was broken.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• SYSADMIN: Warming up a new email server by gradually sending some email traffic through it and monitoring email deliverability.
• INTERNAL: Cleaning up some technical debt around logging and tracing.
• API: Added endpoints to get and manipulate pending messages, including /getpendingmessages, /claimpendingmessage, /deletependingmessages, /rejectpendingmessages, /approvependingmessages. NOTE: These endpoints are still under development.
• NEW: Moderators have the option of replying to a message on the website from the +owner address.
• NEW: The /topics-test page has been updated to allow bulk setting of topic reply to.
• INTERNAL: Using the replica databases to serve /topic URLs for non-logged in users now (mainly crawlers).
• CHANGE: We now ignore errors in Content-Disposition lines when parsing email messages. We only need the parameters as a check on the Content-Type, so it's not important if we can't parse them.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• BUGFIX: For people with infinite scroll set, pagination was missing on the subgroup direct add page.
• INTERNAL: More work in transitioning to quicktemplate.
• CHANGE: Notification messages no longer obey group moderation settings, only hashtag moderation settings. This makes them consistent with #cal-invite notices and integration messages.
• CHANGE: Pending notification messages no longer are tagged as Integration messages and are now tagged with a Notification badge.
• CHANGE: Notification messages now are sent with an envelope sender of noreply@groups.io, to be more consistent with other automated messages.
• CHANGE: Various message activity log messages were re-worded for notifications.
• BUGFIX: Could not delete a specific wiki page revision.
• BUGFIX: In the activity log, we were not shortening some messages that we should have been.
• BUGFIX: Sorting in the Files search results page now works the same as the Files section.
• BUGFIX: Clicking No on the Follow Topic page would still cause you to follow the topic. Also, cleaned up the page and fixed two references to thread.
• BUGFIX: Newly uploaded files were not being indexed in the search cluster.
• BUGFIX: In the Files section, even if you didn't have permission to upload a file, you could still bring up the File Upload dialog box (but the upload would fail).
• BUGFIX: If a user knew the URL for a database table, they could view it even if they didn't have permission to do so.
• BUGFIX: Our new DNS server was not answering CNAME queries with appropriate A records. This prevented status.groups.io from resolving.
• BUGFIX: There were some semicolon escaping issues when we generated ICS files. This would cause Google Calendar to not parse the files correctly.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• CHANGE: #cal-summary emails now have 20 events, as originally documented, instead of 10 events.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• CHANGE: You can once again set a direct add and/or invite message as the active message.
• CHANGE: A pending message from a member who is not confirmed or bouncing can now be approved regardless. Previously it would fail silently.
• BUGFIX: Not all activities associated with a member were being displayed on the member's activity log page.
• CHANGE: When creating a new group and there's an error, remember the privacy setting.
• INTERNAL: Changed how we generate email footers to use quicktemplates.
• BUGFIX: Email footers now have Unfollow hashtag links when appropriate.
• BUGFIX: When viewing a topic on the website with a hashtag that you follow, it would still display a Follow link and not an Unfollow link.
• BUGFIX: When viewing a search page of all topics with a hashtag, it would sometimes not display the correct Follow or Unfollow link.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• INTERNAL: Created a system to automatically run all parts of the system in a dev environment instead of having to do things by hand.
• INTERNAL: Revamped build system to make development easier.
• BUGFIX: Wrote a utility to generate all possible VTIMEZONE entries. We now add VTIMEZONE entries to ICS files, to fix a Confluence calendar bug.
• NEW: Added an <hr> tag between messages in the Topic view for screen reader navigation.
• CHANGE: Include the full path in notifications for folder additions/changes.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• BUGFIX: Event times were not displayed in the correct timezone in the Feed view.
• INTERNAL: Upgraded to latest version of the Go compiler.
• INTERNAL: Convert more web pages to use quicktemplates.
• BUGFIX: Keyword search of a member's activity log was broken.
• BUGFIX: When viewing an event's responses, if you had not yet responded, it would still say You are attending.
• NEW: Activity log entries when an organizer sends an email to people that have responded to an event.
• NEW: New activity log entries for locking/unlocking/canceling events.
• NEW: New Group/Topic Reply To Setting: Reply To Topic Followers Only.
• NEW: When changing the reply to setting of a topic, we now record the new setting in the activity log (assuming it's different from the group).

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• BUGFIX: When editing a plain text pending message, the -- Add Tags -- selector did nothing.
• INTERNAL: When merging accounts, update the cached group pending subscriber counts and also make sure that the per-subscription timezones match the merged into user's timezone.
• DOCS: Updated docs from Nina.
• INTERNAL: Wrote and deployed a new DNS server that supports TCP queries, because of an Enterprise group's requirement.
• BUGFIX: The RSVP Only button in the Calendar was only working for the list view.
• API: Fixed sort_field processing for /getdatabaserows endpoint.
• CHANGE: Upon completion, adding members to a subgroup now returns to the subgroup direct add page, and now displays a flash notice indicating success.
• CHANGE: Switched to new premium plan/basic plan feature split.
• CHANGE: When approving multiple pending messages on the website, process them in ascending order by when we originally received them.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• INTERNAL: Revamped the login system for the admin dashboard to deal with a cross-site cookies issue.
• CHANGE: Changed the From for all RSVP email notifications to be noreply@groups.io and added a Reply-To with the event organizer's email address, to fix DMARC issues.
• INTERNAL: Added code to checker to look for orphan repeat events and delete them, to prevent ghost events from showing up in ICS files.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina.
• INTERNAL: Fix for logical replication timeout when extracting text from large PDF files for Files search.
• CHANGE: Collapsed panels in the default sub settings page.
• CHANGE: Some reorganization of the group settings page and all panels are now collapsable and collapsed by default.
• BUGFIX: Fix file search pagination.
• BUGFIX: Accounts with two factor authentication enabled could not log into enterprise groups with SSO set up.

I will be on vacation next week. The next #changelog will be sent the evening of August 28th.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• APP: A test version of the Android app is now available and bugs are being fixed.
• DOCS: The new Getting Started Guide For Group Owners is now live, with a link from the Help Center.
• DOCS: Various updates from Nina.
• SYSADMIN: Oversaw Linode bug patching of several servers.
• BUGFIX: For enterprise groups that did not have disable signups set to true but did have a logged out wiki page defined, we would erroneously redirect all logged out accesses to the / URL and display the logged out wiki page, preventing access to any of the group.
• API: Added polls_visible to perms object.
• INTERNAL: Upgraded pgx library to latest version.
• CHANGE: Rollback change to poll/topic locking behavior. Locking a topic once again does not close the poll.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• CHANGE: When emailing RSVP responders, default the From line to the person sending it (it would normally default to +owner if a mod was sending the message).
• CHANGE: Exporting event RSVP responses now returns a CSV file, containing all responses.
• DOCS: Updates from Nina and beta of the new Getting Started Guide for Owners.
• NEW: Enterprise groups can set the logo used for web push notifications.
• NEW: When you RSVP yes to an event (and are not waitlisted), you will get an email notification.
• CHANGE: Only display RSVP additional information fields for moderators/event owners.
• CHANGE: Consolidated some RSVP notification messages.
• NEW: When a moderator/event owner changes an RSVP, a notification is sent to the person.
• CHANGE: Changed help wording of RSVP yes message when creating an event.
• CHANGE: Locking a topic that contains a poll now also now closes the poll.
• INTERNAL: Optimized the code for converting an HTML string to plain text to deal with some pathologically large style blocks we encountered in an uploaded file, which was causing exceptionally long runtimes and timeouts.
• CHANGE: Changed terminology from maybe to not sure for event RSVPs.
• BUGFIX: Don't send out a yes message email to someone RSVPing to an event if there is no yes message.
• NEW: You can create files in the Files section that are links to Google Docs/Dropbox/Box/OneDrive documents.
• BUGFIX: Fixed links in Files search results.

Take care everyone.

Mark

Changes to the site this week:

• BUGFIX: Fixed sorting of Files section search results.
• INTERNAL: More work converting templates to quicktemplate.
• UPDATE: Owners and Members manuals updates from Nina.
• SYSADMIN: Upgraded the machine instance dedicated to virus scanning.
• NEW: If your position on an event waitlist changes, you will be notified by email.
• NEW: You can select either a grid or list display when viewing event rsvps.
• NEW: Moderators and the event owner can now manage RSVPs, changing them to Attending/Not Attending/Not Sure. These changes are logged in the activity log.
• CHANGE: If you are on the waitlist for an event, change your RSVP to no or not sure, and then change back to attending, you're put at the back of the waitlist.
• NEW: When someone is moved off the waitlist, it is logged in the activity log.
• BUGFIX: Fixed several issues with ICS file generation, especially around UTF-8 conversion. Also stopped stripping out ':' characters, because the other fixes addressed the original issue with ':'.

Take care everyone.

Mark