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The highlights of these release notes are also available in Deutsch, Español and Русский. Many thanks to our fantastic translation teams!
Welcome to Revision 2846, up from 2732. Nine different coders worked on this release! \0/ We're especially excited to see some of our newer coders growing in confidence and committing more and more fixes! We're also very happy to have welcomed some new folk to our testing team. :D
Highlights
Refactoring and performance fixes
Our senior coders have been working hard on refactoring some key sections of code to improve performance. Refactoring involves rewriting the code to make it less complicated, easier to understand, and more efficient. It's a bit like giving the code a really good beta. The refactored code should bring some noticeable improvements in terms of speed. This is an ongoing project and we'll be refactoring lots more of the Archive.
Automated tests
Along with improving the actual working code, we've been working on improving the automated tests which test whether the code is doing what it should. This makes it much easier to refactor (it's nice to have a quick way to check that rewriting the code hasn't broken it) and helps ensure that other changes haven't caused problems. We've had some great contributions from our newer coders in this area - we're using a system called Cucumber which makes writing automated tests much friendlier, and we're happy to see it drawing more folk in.
Viewing history
We've added some more options in viewing history - one of our neatest features - which tracks what you read on the Archive so you can easily find that work you read last week with the handcuffs. (Only you can see it, and you can turn it off in preferences if you prefer.) It's now possible to clear your entire viewing history, and we've also added a count of the number of times you have viewed any given work. If you haven't been using viewing history up until now, it's well worth checking out - we'll be adding some more features in the future.
Known Issues
See our Known Issues page.
Release details
Features
- FAQ - Split FAQ sections onto separate pages for faster loadtimes and easier navigation.
- FAQ - Added ability for admins to delete and reorder FAQ sections.
- FAQ - Added validation so that all sections of the FAQ must have a title.
- Improved search function to work with limited terms, so that it's easier to link to a specific search.
- Added a list of all fandoms a user has created works in to user home page.
- Improved the options for chapter edits on multi-chapter works so that work edit shows only the details for the whole work, while editing chapter by chapter shows the details for the chapter.
- Made many small formatting and cosmetic consistency changes to the TOS and TAS FAQ.
- Viewing history - added an option to clear entire history.
- Viewing history - added a counter for the number of times you have viewed a work.
- Collections - added 'x results found' to search results.
- Improved URL autocomplete function on external bookmarks.
- Added a way to add or remove an author from a series as a whole.
- Added the ability to mark a series as complete.
- Added a link to the account rename function from the edit profile page.
- Added lots more automated tests!
- Added some icons optimised for users with low vision as part of our ongoing preparations for alternative skins.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug which was preventing the editing of bookmarks created before we upgraded our bookmarking function.
- Tweaked the wording of gift notification emails to reflect our current functions.
- Ensured that all automated Archive emails include a link to our Support form.
- Ensured that unused drafts will be deleted after one week (intended behaviour) - in the future we'll have better draft functionality, but for now this ensures they don't cause problems.
- Fixed a bug which was causing unrevealed multichapter works to be inadvertantly revealed!
- Fixed a problem where drafts in a series caused problems with series numbering and reordering.
- Fixed a bug which caused a 500 error when someone other than the creator tried to access an unposted chapter in a work.
- Fixed error redirects so that trying to access a page for a non-existent user gives a 404 error instead of a 500 error.
- Fixed bug causing overlapping navigation on comments - you can reply to comments again!
- Ensured that gift notification emails do not include an empty slot for the name of a collection if the gift is not part of a gift exhange challenge.
- Tweaked the wording on our admin settings page to make more sense!
- Fixed inspiration function to ensure that URLS are properly saved and it's possible to add more than one work as an inspiration.
- Fixed broken comment links on multichapter works.
- Added missing p tag in the TOS FAQ.
- Tweaked work blurbs so that the count for bookmarks only includes publicly posted bookmarks.
- Performance fix - moved values for hit counters to their own database table.
- Performance fix - refactored the series blurb for greater efficiency and faster load times.
- Performance fix - masses of refactoring across the site for cleaner code and much improved performance.
- Performance fix - improvements to mass wrangling pages to make them much faster and more efficient.
- Performance fix - refactoring on people page to make it load faster and be usable.