Releases 0.9.420 - 0.9.426: Change Log

Over the past month, we rolled out behind-the-scenes upgrades and quality-of-life improvements across the site, including the addition of username links and chapter numbers to kudos and comment emails, respectively. We also made some major privacy and security enhancements, such as removing the email, birthday, and location fields from profiles and checking new passwords against known data breaches.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors anna, Liz Watkins, Riya K, and theamandawang!

Credits

• Coders: Abhinav Gupta, anna, Amy Lee, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, Domenic Denicola, EchoEkhi, Hamham6, kitbur, Liz Watkins, marcus8448, Riya K, sarken, Scott, slavalamp, talvalin, theamandawang, weeklies
• Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, HamHam6, james_, lydia-theda, marcus8448, redsummernight, sarken, Scott, weeklies
• Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Anh P, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, choux, Dre, Keladry, Lute, lydia-theda, Pent, redsummernight, Runt, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia, weeklies, wichard

Details

0.9.420

On July 15, we massively improved the user search used by admins.

• [AO3-6565] - We've improved the user search feature available to admins by moving it to Elasticsearch and adding the ability to search by past email addresses and usernames.
• [AO3-7042] - Instead of redirecting to the main Collections page, we now give a 404 error if you try to access the collections page for a nonexistent user, work, or collection.
• [AO3-7004] - We've added a database index to make it faster for database admins to search for comments using a specific guest name.

0.9.421

Following some email-related changes in our July 24 deploy, embedded images are now always stripped from comment emails, and usernames in kudos emails now link to the users' dashboards.

• [AO3-3154] - When you receive a kudos notification email, the names of users who have left kudos now link to the users' dashboards.
• [AO3-6060] - Even though they no longer had access to tag comment pages, former tag wranglers would still receive email and inbox notifications of replies to their old tag comments. This was both annoying and confusing, so we've stopped it from happening.
• [AO3-6746] - If you changed your username or pseud name and you had some chapters that you co-created with another user, the chapter bylines would not always get updated with your new name. We've changed this so the cache is refreshed more reliably.
• [AO3-6929] - The list of gift exchange sign-ups visible to collection maintainers now includes the pseud and username of signed-up users, instead of just their pseud.
• [AO3-7011] - Using the Tab key to navigate in desktop Safari used to select hidden inputs, causing the focus indicator to temporarily disappear. We've fixed it so only visible links and inputs receive focus.
• [AO3-7032] - If you tried to add your email to the invitation queue when it was already part of the queue, you would see two copies of the same error message. Now it only shows the error once.
• [AO3-7065] - We fixed some intermittent failures in the automated tests for the bookmark importing tool used by Open Doors.
• [AO3-7052] - We did a schema dump to capture what the current data structure looks like before we upgrade to Rails 7.2.
• [AO3-7053], [AO3-7054], [AO3-7067], [AO3-7068] - We updated a whole bunch of gems and GitHub actions: reviewdog/action-rubocop, awalsh128/cache-apt-pkgs-action, nokogiri, and thor.
• [AO3-5352] - We prepared the preface of work downloads that are attached to work deletion emails for translation.
• [AO3-7001] - As an anti-abuse measure, we now strip embedded images from comment notification emails even when image embeds are enabled on the site itself.

0.9.422 & 0.9.423

On July 28, we made a number of small improvements all around the site. There were some issues while deploying these changes, so we did another release to fix it all up on the same day.

• [AO3-5609] - We stopped sending subscription notifications for works hidden by admins, since hidden works are inaccessible to other users.
• [AO3-7006] - When a comment contains an HTML list, the list numbers or bullet points no longer overlap with the commenter's icon.
• [AO3-7024] - You'll no longer get an incorrect success message if you mark items in your inbox as read without selecting any comments.
• [AO3-5476] - We cleaned up some unused code in the works controller.
• [AO3-7064] - We updated the gems we use for automated testing.
• [AO3-7072] - We updated the unicode gem to solve some issues with developing the AO3 software on Macs with Apple Silicon chips.
• [AO3-5346] - Collection maintainers get an email notification when matches in a gift exchange have finished generating. We've improved the text of this email and prepared it for translation.
• [AO3-6484] - We made a small change to the code that generates the HTML class names we use for hiding work blurbs by muted users. We were hoping this tweak would improve performance, but unfortunately it had no effect, so we'll have to try again.
• [AO3-6997] - If an Open Doors archivist tries to leave kudos while logged in to an archivist account, they'll get an error message telling them to log in with their personal account instead.
• [AO3-7015] - Work blurbs now contain an invisible code comment with the work's update date, to make it easier for developers of third-party tools to automate downloads from index pages like tags, bookmarks, and search result listings.
• [AO3-7021] - To make it easier to filter or search using work languages, we've added the language codes on the Languages page.
• [AO3-7057] - We now provide any applicable error messages when an admin attempts to send an invitation directly to an email and something goes wrong.

0.9.424

On August 5, we deployed another batch of miscellaneous fixes.

• [AO3-5025] - The Tag Wrangling committee can now use the Rich Text editor to edit the Wrangling Guidelines pages.
• [AO3-7076] - We fixed some unwanted shadows that Chrome was adding to radio buttons and checkboxes.
• [AO3-7088] - We fixed some flaky automated tests related to importing works from LiveJournal.
• [AO3-7074] - We removed some unused CSS from our default site skin.
• [AO3-6580] - We updated the account creation confirmation page's title from "Create Registration" to "Account Created" so that it's clearer you've successfully made an account.
• [AO3-6818] - When an admin bans an email from being used for guest comments, that email is now also banned from requesting invitations.
• [AO3-7026] - When we run a spam check on edited comments by new users, we now tell the spam checker that it's an edit.
• [AO3-7046] - We migrated the subscriptions table so it can hold more rows and we won't run out of room in the future.

0.9.425

On August 19, we deployed an important change to account security that checks new AO3 passwords to see if they've been part of a known data breach. We also began allowing CSS variables in site skins.

• [AO3-7073] - To better protect users' privacy, we've removed the preferences and fields to display emails, birthdays, and locations on user profiles.
• [AO3-7091] - We stopped using fixtures in our integration tests.
• [AO3-7098] - We updated cache-apt-pkgs-action again.
• [AO3-7099] - We bumped the version of actions/checkout – a utility that helps run automated tests on our code – from version 4 to version 5.
• [AO3-3071] - Comment emails now include the chapter number, so you don't have to follow the comment link to know where exactly it was left.
• [AO3-7087] - To improve account security, we updated our password change process to prevent users from choosing passwords that are known to be compromised on other sites. (If you missed our post back on World Password Day, we also have some tips for keeping your AO3 account secure!)
• [AO3-7090] - We changed links in emails to be HTTPS instead of HTTP.
• [AO3-7093] - We added an automated test to make sure the fixtures used for seeding development databases result in valid records.
• [AO3-7094] - We now allow limited use of CSS custom properties in site skins! You can find more information in the skins help text.

0.9.426

We upgraded to Rails 7.2 on August 26.

• [AO3-7058] - We updated our version of Rails from 7.1 to 7.2.
• [AO3-7095] - We added more example admin and user accounts with a greater variety of roles to our basic development dataset, which will make it easier for coders to work on things that require specific access levels.