Huddler Release Notes for August 4, 2011

[iacas]

This is our biggest release in a long time. It's full of fixes and optimizations, as you can see below. You will see a couple of minor new features but it's largely polish, refactoring, performance, and general bug-squash.

What's in the August 4 release?

Tapatalk "Latest" tab:
This is the Tapatalk equivalent of the "new posts page," an important part of tracking what's happening on your favorite forum. We had to punt support for this out of our very first Tapatalk integration, but we've now circled back to add it.

Infinite login sessions:
Users will now be logged in and remain logged in indefinitely. We also refactored the way we store these over time to be much less resource intensive. Note that all of you will be logged out by this release, but this should be the last such occurrence of that.

Lists refactor:
The underpinnings of the user product Lists feature have been rewritten. We had a number of outstanding Lists bugs that had sat for a while but they should have all gotten fixed in this release. Let us know if you see any irregularities.

You actually shouldn't see any changes yet if everything went correctly. However, this work will pave the way for a much more powerful version of "custom list types" in the near future. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Forum Link Feature:
This allows you to insert links into your forum hierarchy, an old practice among some vBulletin sites. Just create a forum and add a valid URL to the "Forum Link" field. After that, clicking on the name of the forum in your navigation will instead take the user to whatever link you entered, be it on site or off site (instead of taking them into a forum of that name). Useful for creating aliases in your taxonomy tree.

(We may do this to create a link back to the blog within the forum structure - http://thesandtrap.com/b/ http://thesandtrap.com/b/ .)

Private Message Love:

• You can now forward PMs. Nothing too fancy. Hit "forward" and the entire PM chain you're looking at will be quoted in a new message you can send wherever you need. We have no plans to support "BCC" right now but forwarding will get you pretty close. If you get PM spam, please forward it to me.
• There is now a user preference to turn the 'New PM' popup alert on/off.
• The tab order on the PM compose window now goes straight from subject line to message body field rather than tabbing through all the editor buttons.
• When pressing the "Send PM" button on a classified page, we now automatically drop in a link to the classified ad. Many users didn't realize that it was just an ordinary PM, and negelected to reference what they were writing to the seller about.

Other small enhancements:

• All forum pages, including the forum root index and thread list pages, will now obey the "View forums full width" preferece (in addition to thread pages, which always have).
• Users can now alter their settings for 'Editor Type' and 'Posts-Per-Page' in the forum "Preferences" popup - they no longer have to dig into their Account Details for those. Be sure your members know about this little popup. There's a lot of good stuff in there!
• When a member tries to post to a social group thread and they are not a member, there is now a clearer user experience prompting them to join, instead of just an error message.
• We now support showing a review count in the user postbit. This will show up later today.
• If you use the Reputation system, you can now disable post thumbs-up on a per-forum basis. This is helpful if you don't think users should be earning reputation for empty chatter in off-topic forums.
• User titles are now displayed on user profile pages.
• Reply counts were added to the Classifieds list view so discussion activity would be evident.
• The Featured Items tool will now show the name of user who last updated the featured item.

Bugs fixed in this release:

• Deleted listings will no longer count towards the total open Classifieds cap
• Closed listings can no longer be reopened if they break the Classifieds cap
• Long usernames with spaces will wrap more successfully now
• Tickler email messaging update. We've seen the last of the "Are you hiding under a rock?" email. We replaced it with "Been busy?"
• Insiders can once again disable sticky note, featured products, or albums. This broke temporarily.
• If user had "lists in sig" but no text signature, we were not showing the signature area divider line, but this is now fixed.
• Layout issues with the "play" button area on Activity Stream were resolved.
• The comment submit button is now right-aligned for consistency with rest of site.
• On-hover tooltip previews now disappear reliably and are not cut off by page borders.
• Classifieds pagination will scroll you to the top of the page now.
• Banned members will now see a proper error message when trying to start a new thread.
• The menu that drops down from usernames will now work a little more reliably for long, wrapping usernames.
• Tagged social groups will now show up as "related groups" in threads with the same tag(s), even if the social group has no activity in the last 24 hours.
• BBCode quotes are now rendered without as much padding.