Release Notes for Tuesday, September 3, 2013

[iacas]

CK Editor Upgrade

Headlining this release is a significant version upgrade of CK Editor, which powers the rich text editing experience across your site. There are no changes to BBCode as part of this release, except some cosmetic updates to the toolbar.

To summarize the changes briefly:

1) Version upgrade with many minor fixes and compatibility improvements

2) "Quick" and "Advanced" mode switchable toolbar that shows most commonly used commands by default, with additional options behind a "More >" link.

3) No right-click interrupt in "Quick" mode. Right-click interrupt is still there in "Advanced" mode for table and list editing.

4) A "maximize" button that gives you a full-window editing canvas.

5) Better WYSIWYG fidelity: the editing area will pull the stylesheet from your site to a greater extent than in the past, which means that "what you see" will be closer to "what you get" than ever before.

6) Cleaner pastes: font size, line height, and background color will automatically be cleaned out when you paste content copied from a webpage.

7) Font faces are no longer settable by the user.

(Way) Better Email Verification / Password Resets

We did a massive overhaul of the entire system for handling "please click the link in the email you just received from us." It includes all of the following enhancements. We should see far, far fewer glitches and complaints with email verification and password resets process from now on.

It might help to describe some of the problems with the old process:

1) Verification messages were not sent immediately, but were queued. Sometimes this resulted in a delay of minutes, or more extreme cases.

2) If you clicked the link to request the verification be resent, we would invalidate the token in any previously sent messages. Clicking those would then result in an error. Send delays (#1, above) sometimes meant users wound up with several verification emails, only one of which would actually work... Confusion ensued.

3) Even if you got the right email and clicked a link with a valid token, you had to be logged in for verification to be accepted. If you registered on your computer but then clicked the email link on your phone, this might present an inconvenience.

Here's how things work now:

1) Emails are sent immediately, not queued with other site mail.

2) The link token in any verification or password reset email will expire when it's 24 hours old. In most cases, this means users won't have to worry about which link in which email will be the working link. Note that we also expire all such tokens the moment a password change is effected.

3) Email verification and password reset both work even if you're logged out.

4) We will send password reset emails even if you're opted out of email.

5) If you're on one of the Sendgrid blacklists: (mostly for repeatedly bounced emails), you'll receive an error message immediately, rather than having to wait forever for an email that's not going to arrive.

Inline Unsubscribes

Keeping your subscriptions well-pruned helps keep them relevant! That means removing stuff you don't want to follow anymore.

You'll now find handy hover-controls for unsubscribing from things right in the subscribed threads page.

[boogielicious]

OK, most of that went over my head!  But I did read it all.

[boogielicious]

Erik,

The paste improvement is "wicked awesome".  I just copied a table from Wikipedia and it pasted perfect.

[iacas]

Originally Posted by boogielicious

The paste improvement is "wicked awesome".  I just copied a table from Wikipedia and it pasted perfect.

It hasn't happened yet. It's the 28th. :) We've had that functionality for quite some time now. Years. So thanks for the belated compliment.

[boogielicious]

OH!  The last time I did a paste, it was all messed up.  I think it was when I was writing a review.

[iacas]

Originally Posted by boogielicious

OH!  The last time I did a paste, it was all messed up.  I think it was when I was writing a review.

It depends pretty heavily on the source HTML and how screwy it is. Wikipedia relies less on stylesheets and more on basic HTML, IIRC.

[iacas]

Release pushed to September 3, 2013.

[iacas]

Release now live on the site.

I hope everyone enjoys the new editor! :)

[Ernest Jones]

Release now live on the site.

I hope everyone enjoys the new editor! :)

Anyone else having issues with accessing the whole smiley palette? Seems I can't pan left and right once the box is open, just scroll up and down. I tried with Safari and Chrome and no dice. Possibly on my end?

[iacas]

Anyone else having issues with accessing the whole smiley palette? Seems I can't pan left and right once the box is open, just scroll up and down. I tried with Safari and Chrome and no dice. Possibly on my end?

Nope, that's a bug.

[TJBam]

Glad to hear about the copy paste fix.  Sometimes after copying and pasting certain texts,  the Sand Trap text box wants to have all follow up text written by the user in the same format as the copied text.