CouchSurfing Alaska Collective Blog

 

The CS Tech team has put out the final release of the Alaska Collective.  Included in this release:

Features & Fixes

General

• Menu options on each page are now centered.
• Removed some old links from the footer of the website.
• Front page picture has changed.
• Gaps in the index page have been removed.
• Removed the character counter input field from references and show the characters left just as plain html text.

Changes in groups

• Added subscription settings button on navigation menu.
• Subscription page is under group tab.
• There are now different colors for different type of groups: normal groups are beige, cs organization groups are now green, teams are blue and communication channels are yellow.
• Tabs and submenu don’t disappear anymore when you go into a group.
• An organization group doesn’t highlight the info-tab anymore and stays under the group tab.
• Redundant buttons in groups have been removed and the group tab with navigation menu stays open (almost) everywhere.
• Added PAGING to the groups!
• Fix group digests not being sent out bug.
• Leave group button on group page.
• Fix bug in where square brackets couldn’t be used in group posts without causing problems with the text.

 

Volunteer Team Changes

Events Team

• Lets event approval team know the length of time between when the invite was created and when the meeting is scheduled to take place.
• Meetings list is now paginated instead of just showing a few of them.
• Page admin_meeting_view.inc addded to list of deleted meetings that was created for events administrators.
• Corrected weird formatting with meeting invitation email that invitees receive.
• Fixed crucial error that was preventing meeting messages from being approved.
Verification Team
• The verification team can see a list of all members needing letters and edit their addresses from one page rather than from the sending page. This also marks an address as being edited and removes it from the list. Doing it this way helps divide up the growing tasks by the verification team between those who edit the addresses to ensure that they are correct and those who just send them out.
• Changed the word ‘project’ to ‘team’ in email going out when getting verified as per request from the verification team.
• Refined the way addresses can be edited before sending letters to help the verification team.
• Added checkboxes to edit address for verification letters/postcards going out page to mark multiple ones as being ready to print instead of just one at a time.

Contact Us Questions (CUQ) Team

• CUQ team can see what member’s privacy settings are at when diagnosing user problems.
• Removed accidental ‘localhost’ from link for CUQ team.
• CUQ team can undelete profiles again after mysteriously not being able to anymore since the last tech release.
• CUQ team can reset passwords with one click instead of previous confusing and unnecessary interface.
• CUQ team can validate emails without having to click on user profile pages.
• When a CUQ team member manually validates an email address, an email is now automatically sent to that person letting them know.
• MDST/CUQ team can see more information about member accounts (like if they have selected not to receive any emails at all from our system) in order to further diagnose member issues.

Member Disputes and Safety Team (MDST)

• MDST can change someone’s user_name without logging in as them anymore, if necessary.
• MDST can only edit information on other people’s profiles because they have the appropriate permissions. This saves us in case someone figures out the exact url needed yet doesn’t have the permission.
• The ‘mdst read messages’ tool has been significantly restructured in order for greater versatility/functionality, and more sophisticated logging to keep team members accountable.
• MDST can change some account information for members, if necessary. Every action is logged.

Profile & Edit Profile

• All buttons used for navigation are highlighted now when you are on the page it refers too!
• Instant messaging options are now only shown to friends. Skype & MSN are now on top in the list as they are more common than the other instant messaging account options.
• ‘Optional contact method’ under couch information has been removed.

Communication Channels

• Integrated the communication news channels into the groups functionality.
• Integrated tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor into the communication channels groups (can be available everywhere on the site).
• Made a Yahoo! pipe RSS feed that takes all feeds on the channels and integrates it into one.
• Created page to make it possible for users to send article proposals into the communication news channels.
• Added a functionality on communication channels posts to help volunteers manage the status updates on articles through the drafting process.

Temporary changes

• Disabled image processing to keep webservers alive! It is currently set at six image uploads per member per hour, but we are slowly increasing this limit and watching the web server load to see how much we can handle.
• The search database server has been overloaded recently. We have temporarily disabled the radius search functionality to keep search working.
• Added another database server to split the load search generates.
• Added three more web servers to help with the site load while we investigate longer term solutions.

Backend

• We’re testing out memcached on all web servers.
• We’ve setup our own, internal, software package distribution repository.
• Greatly enhanced our code approval and deployment tool.
• Rewrote radius search to use a distance table.
• Rewrote some security checks in edit pages.

Bug Fixes

• bug 1807: internal comments on CUQs are now available on a history page that they were missing from.
• bug 1425: previous CUQ history is always shown when answering a question whereas before it was dependent on them replying in a very specific/non-uniform way in order for it to happen. Now it always shows previous history if the email address is the same.
• bug 1427: now makes really long URLs in CUQs behave like they do in group posts and trim them down.
• bug 1679: takes care of poorly worded information about how to change your address based on what level of verification you’re at, corrects link to right place to change it.
• bug 1797: fixed bug concerning date issue on past meeting messages that were approved.
• bug 1759: rearranging notice boxes for both internal CUQ team and ‘current known issues’ boxes are larger, in better positions, and have more basic functionality like who updated it last and at what time. This also lets people who view this information on contact.html to see when the last time we updated our ‘current known issues’.
• bug 1770: TBM icon was showing up on every profile in couchsearch/greeting page because of missing brackets.
• bug 1776: removing duplicate words in an error message.
• bug 1772: if in ‘people’ or other sub-folder clicking on site logo goes correctly to root directory.
• bug 1784: while our current policy prohibits members from searching out accounts by email it wasn’t clear until now how to find your friends that you’re trying to refer when they are already in the system.
• bug 1802: made ‘you are currently logged in as…’ information clearer.
• bug 1765: Tweaked email validation message to allow for 15 minutes to receive validation email rather than 5 minutes.
• bug 1808: removes duplicate ‘persian’ entry from list of languages, allows us to remove options that aren’t needed.
• bug 1121: people were able to add bogus friends where the id didn’t actually exist. Now it checks to see if the id brings back a valid profile before proceeding. Friend connection info only counts if both the ‘to’ and ‘from’ friends are valid

Miscellaneous

• Changed ‘CouchSurfing’ is a service mark of CouchSurfing International, Inc.’ to ‘CouchSurfing’ and ‘CouchSurfer’ are registered and unregistered service marks of CouchSurfing International.’ as per request from our lawyer.

Tags: Tech Team

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 2:43 am and is filed under Syndicated Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.