In 2016, VIP releases were every other month. Other customers received updates on an ad-hoc basis.
December
- Add full IPv6 support.
- Add and improve addon icons.
- Add meta tags for discussion links to generate Twitter cards (when added to tweets).
- Add settings to Dashboard for category max display depth.
- Add some padding to HTML tables in posts (improve legibility).
- Add support for our new CDN.
- Add accessibility attributes to Customize Theme.
- Add pager to log views.
- Improve category headings detection and table view support.
- Improve markup of category settings page.
- Ensure password editing fields toggle appropriately.
- Allow removal of button from HTML email.
- Restore Theme Preview functionality (except for Mobile 2014).
- Default to secure cookies if “ForceSSL” is set and using HTTPS.
- Skip validating discussion title when a draft is saved.
- Improve markup and make further enhancements to Dashboard v3.
- Restrict upload filename to be per post instead of by entire discussion.
- Allow uploading a Photo when creating a new category.
- Avoid auto-scrolling to top when in comment embed.
- Confirm that user wants to delete images before deleting (in Dashboard).
- Update documentation links for Social Connect addons.
- Replace “Hide Category” with “Mute Category” option.
- Allow new messages to accept a subject parameter (if enabled) via URL.
- Fix delete message button (in Dashboard).
- Fix delete ban button (in Dashboard).
- Fix category depth calculation in subcommunities.
- Fix IP filtering on user management page
- Fix heading categories sometimes being wrapped in an anchor.
- Fix dashboard pager next button when there are 0 results.
- Fix the user photo in search.
- Fix extra <br> tags in plain text emails.
- Fix issue where nav is cut off on category add/edit.
- Fix wrong heading for “activity” on profile page
- Fix activity notifications falsely flagging as sent when it was skipped.
- Fix ICO transparency issue after upload (in Dashboard).
- Fix permission check for Change Log page to allow moderators (Moderation.Manage).
- Fix avatar cropping in profile.
- jsConnect: Add warning to jsConnect dashboard when provider is in test mode.
- jsConnect: [Security] Add content-type to callback endpoint to prevent potential XSS.
- Badges: Add badge name as alt text to badge images.
- Badges: Add the ability to edit thresholds for some badges.
- Polls: Fix results percentage.
- Polls: Fix cancel button.
- Polls: Hide category dropdown when already inside a category.
- Polls: Fix auto-selecting first child category in category dropdown.
- Q&A: Fix auto-selecting first child category in category dropdown.
- Reactions: Add inform message to Reactions enable toggle (in Dashboard).
- Reactions: Fix RSS view when BestOf is configured as tiles.
- Reactions: Fix customizations reverting after database updates.
- Reactions: [Security] Add missing CSRF protection on “react” endpoint.
- Reactions: Fix reactions popup possible overlap.
- Reactions: Translate reaction names in navigation breadcrumbs.
- MailChimp: Fix issue with synchronizing lists.
- Profile Extender: Fix checkbox display on registration.
- Ignore: Fix failure to unignore user if their ignore privileges have been revoked.
- Groups: Fix search in groups when the category is not viewable.
- Warnings & Notes: Fix extra line after quote.
- Civil Tongue: Add support for groups and group events.
- Salesforce: Remove from options on profile social connect.
- Split/Merge: Make the System user the new discussion’s author when splitting comments.
- SAML: Allow SAML to accommodate differently-configured XML responses.
- SimpleAPI: Fix situations where other addons could conflict with API endpoints.
September
- New Dashboard! This changed every page in the moderator/admin backend, including all addon settings pages.
- Add navigation memory to the Dashboard. It will now preserve menu collapsing states & your page within each section between visits.
- Add “Flat Categories” feature and optional navigation module. This allows browsing hundreds of categories as an alphabetical directory.
- Improve how categories are managed in the Dashboard.
- Categories now default to type “Nested” and must have a type assigned.
- Add full recipients list to Badges. Click the “Given” number from “Badges” in the Dashboard.
- Add new “Post Numbering” addon (by request only, currently).
- Add new “Role Tracker” addon (by request only, currently).
- Add ability to convert discussions to “ideas” (if Ideation is enabled).
- Add ability to configure warnings in Warnings & Notes addon.
- Add redirects for Lithium and Ning community imports (Redirector addon).
- Add support for vBulletin 3 & 4 showthread.php?p={POSTID} URL redirects.
- Allow “Location” and “Title” to be edited from User Edit.
- Fix Profile Extender’s handling of non-ASCII characters in field names.
- Refactored how we handle all requests (dispatcher).
- Update MailChimp addon to use v3 of their API and support MailChimp “groups”.
- Update Facebook addon to use versioned endpoint.
- Fix “Mark All Viewed” endpoint to prevent accidental or malicious triggering and fix its redirect.
- Fix Bootstrap3 theme color schemes “paper” and “sandstone”.
- Remove “SafeStyles” option (previously deprecated).
- General addon code maintenance done on: Groups, Reactions, Ranks, Polls, SAMLSSO, and Badges.
- Fix issue with embedding where you could stay scrolled down when changing page.
- Add username validation to /message/add endpoint (when pre-filling “To:” field via URL).
- Fix conflict between Discussion Photos addon and Ideation addon.
- Add ability for Smarty templates to access
isMobile function, userAgentType function, homepage_title function, and Homepage (boolean variable). - Fix issue where default role settings weren’t transferred from old system correctly.
- Add additional line break to welcome email.
- Do not wrap images in a div if they are already in an anchor to fix potential clicking issue.
- Fix autocomplete dropdown display in modals with Bootstrap3 theme.
- Add the post that a user was warned for in the email notification.
- Do not serve empty (or comment-only) CSS files from Custom Theme feature.
- Fix photos’ URL for /user/summary API endpoint.
- Fix quotes that are done on a user with spaces in its name.
- Fix
tabindex for comments, conversations, discussions (for keyboard navigation around page). - Add announcements to discussions RSS (in posting order).
- Block adding banning rules that would HAL-9000 the entire crew, like
*.*. - Fix the basic (not advanced, which had no issue) search pager.
- Do not revalidate username on edit if no change on user edit.
- Do not send
noindex meta on error pages to prevent legit pages from being un-indexed. - Increase the priority of custom.css to be higher.
- Fix log link showing when no log exists.
- Allow “Unanswered Questions” page title to be translated (Q&A addon).
- Add support for alternate SAML document structures (SSO).
- Enforce max tags limit on the front end and cleanup tag validation.
- Encode slashes in usernames when creating profile links.
- Allow comment drafts to be orphaned (instead of removed) when their discussion is deleted and rework drafts view.
- Unregister plugins immediately after it has been disabled instead of waiting until the next page request.
- Hide email preferences when email is disabled globally.
- Hide the RSS icon from categories that are type ‘Categories’ since they contain no discussions.
- Trim all control characters from discussion title (helps prevent broken or blank titles).
- Fix scenario where discussion title could be blank.
- Fix user search to allow numeric usernames as long as it’s an exact match.
- Akismet will now validate your key before accepting it (Cloud customers do not require their own key; it is optional).
- Improve Akismet addon description and deprecate TypePad option (no longer offered by TypePad).
- Hide Participated menu for guests (Participated addon).
- Let welcome email fallback to HomepageTitle when the site’s name is not set properly.
- Turn off autocomplete on text fields when editing users in dashboard (to prevent accidental data insertion).
- Improve how table layouts choose their column widths according to the content in them.
- Improve Q&A and how it interacts with Subcommunities, especially displaying an Unanswered count per community.
- Change H2s for H1s for a few edit profile pages.
- Improve consistency in module (widget) titles (usually H4) so they are properly configurable.
- Add invited user data to user exports.
- Fix button height in Share This widget.
- Add OAuth2 library to core product for building custom implementations more easily.
- Fix potential duplicate rank promotion notifications.
- Change the priority order of the SimpleAPI plugin so Subcommunities does not interfere with API calls.
July
- New plugin: Role Tracker (aggregates discussions with posts by users in particular roles).
- New plugin: Welcome Post (invites newly registered to start an intro discussion immediately).
- Upgrade to Smarty 3 templating engine for custom themes. It’s a little bit stricter, faster, and more secure than Smarty 2 was.
- Further improve scaling for large numbers of categories. Faster page loads!
- Add option to exclude moderators and/or admins from leaderboards.
- Move profile thumbnail editing to same page as photo uploading.
- OpenID: Prevent bad rendering when URL is invalid.
- Don’t show Google+ login when enabled but not configured.
- Add support for inline (async) forms for future Vanilla use.
- Keep attachments when a discussion becomes a comment via Split/Merge.
- Automatically update CSRF token with async requests. This is so we can invalidate them more frequently in the future, improving our security.
- Add the ideation page as a target for messages.
- Add the categories page as a target for messages.
- Set a limit on the page number in Best Of (it helps performance to not let pages go infinitely high).
- Fix edge cases where notifications preferences would not display completely.
- Tighten security of Target parameter during sign in to disallow bad redirects.
- Refresh the page after announcing a discussion.
- Markdown: Allow starting lists without a newline.
- Change how IP addresses are logged and allow IPv6 (no more 0.0.0.2 placeholder addresses appearing).
- Remove the invite feature from the Getting Started page.
- Remove site logo from Deflector theme footer.
- Fix Cyrillic character recognition in CivilTongueEx, allowing
- Fix Ideation crashing /discussions/promoted.
- Fix default translation of “Post Discussion”.
- QnA: Fix “unanswered” status for discussions converted to questions by an admin.
- Hub: Add synchronize for subcommunities and default locale.
- Fix emoji menu not being properly dismissed.
- Hide “Dismiss” option on announcements from guests because it didn’t actually do anything.
- Add CSRF prevention and remove redirect from Mark All Viewed option.
- Encode mail subject properly (UTF-8).
- Fix broken reaction pagination on profile pages.
- Fix emoji and mention from rendering inside WYSIWYG code blocks.
- Add $Homepage Smarty variable that is true/false depending on if you are on the homepage.
- Fix double encoding Open Graph title tag. This would have shown up as extra ampersands in Facebook shares and the like.
- Hub: Do not sync category permissions for an overridden role.
- Hub: Add optional landing page.
- Switch to separate library for password hashing. We’re compartmentalizing some features like this to make maintenance easier.
- We completed some very large projects to carefully rework several parts of our framework to get ready for API v2, but there’s no outward effect of this for you.
May
- Upgrade to reCaptcha 2 (“NoCaptcha”).
- Make “NBBC” our new BBCode parsing library by default (no more plugin).
- Add ability for SAML SSO to not be the default login method.
- Allow moving a discussion between subcommunities.
- Add support for switching subcommunities.
- Improve category scaling.
- Make activities self-prune after 2 months to improve performance.
- Always redirect to the first page after saving a discussion.
- Add analytics tracking for Q&A’s accepted answers (coming soon to analytics).
- Allow censoring content in conversation message notifications.
- Allow censoring poll votes in comments.
- Fix a number of edge cases where certain actions could block other actions without a page refresh.
- Fix condition where category announcements disappeared from recent discussions page.
- Add caching for the default authentication provider.
- Improve security in signin redirects.
- Improve use of ‘Alt’ CSS class, which will be removed eventually (now redundant with current CSS specs).
- Add option to configure a redirect after logout on Auth0 plugin.
- Update Triple-A and Bootstrap 3 themes.
- Fix issue where Vimeo and Instagram embeds overflow out of the Best Of Tiles.
- Fix where SplitMerge addon may be unable to save split discussion with “Html” format.
- Fix the love bug (various problems with < 3 in user-generated content).
- Prevent unneeded recurring updates in dashboard’s database updater.
- Fix Gravatar’s use of system default avatar.
- Add optional rating parameter to Gravatar.
- Fix GitHub signin and API permission issues.
- Fix new discussion button showing in subcommunity when user has no permission.
- Allow the Photo field to be set in /profile/edit.
- Only use CommentID for spam check if available.
- Fix incorrect permission being checked in some category management actions.
- Groups: Simplify & fix event timezone handling.
- Make initial spoiler text the same colour as its background.
- Fix RSS title encoding.
- Add the ability to capture a user’s time zone.
- Fix LinkedIn “profile connect” feature.
- Move Recaptcha into a plugin
- Add support for Instagram embeds in Mobile 2014.
- Do more image optimizations.
- Fix Safari issue where back button wouldn’t refresh the page.
- Fixes issue where people can quote a post and see uncensored content.
- Remove gender from user-facing elements like registration.
- Prevent “Messages” from being displayed when you do not have view permission.
- QnA: Return the correct number of questions for a subcommunity.
- Switch YouTube links to https.
- Fix mention issues including using an ‘@’ in the middle of two words.
- Fix PNG compression issues in file uploads.
- Fix some minor issues that could make spoilers malfunction.
- Add a safety feature to avoid too-big database changes all at once.
- Allow any user with moderate permission to add discussions and events in a group.
- Fix aggressive span stripping in the HTML purifier.
March
- New addon: Ideation (vote on ideas) - Contact your CSM for more details
- New addon: Microsoft Account SSO
- New addon: CAS SSO
- New addon: Keyword Blocker (send posts with certain keywords to mod queue)
- New addon: Necro Posts (labels recently-revived discussions)
- New addon: User Points Booster (allow awarding points for discussions or comments)
- New addon: Whitelist (provide an IP whitelist for site access)
- HTML emails now available.
- Applicants list is now asynchronous with improved UI.
- Spoilers added as core feature with updated formatting.
- Automatic bans (from Banning rules) can now be reversed.
- Reactions will now always show on all devices, instead of on-hover for larger screens (“desktop”).
- Sign In form now auto-focuses on Username field.
- Fix newest comment data for zero-comment discussions in table view.
- Post excerpts (as in search) now have a minimum length of 32 even if a double-return is found first.
- Remove line breaks in meta description.
- Added events to support new analytics system.
- Fix styling of ‘/me’ posts.
- QnA: Allow users to accept their own answer.
- Reactions: Add an option to allow users to react to their own posts.
- Add advanced editor options to New Poll screen.
- Fix plus signs in URLs, especially usernames / profiles.
- Improve SSO workflow for existing usernames.
- Rework discussion sorting and filtering architecture.
- Add no-store header to profiles so read/unread status updates on Back button.
- Pockets: fix repeating pockets between discussions, and enable on table view.
- Subcommunities: Fix category dropdown filtering when in a subcommunity.
- Hide editor toolbar when previewing.
- Fix double-deletion of comment drafts when posting, which could cause a Javascript error.
- Fix scenario where Quotes could interfere with Spoilers.
- Vanillicons: Now defaults to v2.
- NBBC: Fix scenario that could break search results formatting.
- Fix opaque photo cropping box.
- Fix and unify logic for determining permission to edit a user’s photo.
- Allow quotes to be collapsed in reported posts.
- Allow collapsing of quotes with alternate formatting.
- Make even deeply-nested quotes minimally legible.
- Update dropdown menu rendering in several places.
- Update number formatting for discussion & comment counts on All Categories page.
- Update stock themes for Ideation.
- Groups: Allow anyone who can edit an event to also delete it.
January
- Restore no-store header to discussion & category lists (fixes “read” markers not updating on “Back”).
- Improved formatting of Vanilla Comments in certain input formats.
- Updated Smarty template parsing library.
- Fix an issue in draft saving.
- Fix spam deletion error.
- Update Editor to use files’ real names when downloading.
- Fix RSS feed when table view is in use.
- Remove deprecated form field name prefixing.
- Add more category data to VanillaPop emails.
- Update gifv embed to prefer WebM.
- Various low-level fixes for PHP 7 compatibility.
- Fix CSRF check when deleting a ban.
- Close open redirect & fix flood control in database updating endpoint.
- Improve security in how Vimeo is embedded.
- Add Wistia embed.
- Enforce POST data for several endpoints.
- Improve theme compatibility with Groups.
- Automatically remove spaces around Banning rules to prevent bad data being entered.
- Improve image resizing to always use highest quality images possible.
- Fix Facebook SSO: retrieval of email address, avatar distortion, & name overwriting.
- Remove “dashboard” namespace from several dashboard URLs.
- Fix several MySQL strict mode errors.
- Remove livequery jQuery extension and all remaining uses of it.
- Remove base64 encoding from all asynchronous requests.
- Allow setting of avatar via API.
- Allow category permissions to be set via API.
- Allow certain configurations to be set depending on permission level.
- Re-add user count to the user list whenever possible based on size of table.
- Give full formatting bar to Activity form.