Release Date: 2020-10-18

New features/fixes in this release:
* Allow links to be clicked in prologue / epilogue preview Task
* Create utility to populate the thread_activity table Task
* Admin App System Account Password Reset Function enhancement needed
* Do not show create new post or reply buttons if user doesn't have permission to use them. enhancement
* Appearance Maintenance Page Iframe Formatting bug
* Appearance maintenance preview frame should show demo disc app instead of actual full blown application enhancement
* Return correct content type on RSS feeds. enhancement
* Implement RSS feature enhancement nice to have
* Hold permissions new thread creation message configuration enhancement
* Update Admin Email Template And Update Controller to Handle Multiple Apps in a Single Report Email enhancement
* Create Admin Email Report enhancement
* Editor Search Can Search for Root and Deleted Users bug
* Add Admin report config values to production database as well as application_report_code table. Task
* Subscription confirmation url should url encode the email address query parameter bug
* Account creation email should URL encode query parameters bug
* Configuration for thread.sort.order value is in inconsistent case. bug
* Sort by activity does not move threads to top from other pages. bug
* Create thread_activity table Task
* User account configured time zone. enhancement nice to have
* Update News In Site Admin Page Should Have a Preview Option enhancement
* Update User Read Thread CSS Admin Documentation documentation
* Update News Should Auto Format Like Creating a New Message Board Post enhancement
* Exception Logged When Non-Existent App Id is Attempted bug
* Stats Pages Per IP only has Integer Precision bug
* Admin Edit Thread Subject Line Length Too Long bug
* Admin Stats Page Is Not Showing Total Of Unique Ips enhancement


As you can see, a huge list of changes. Some of them were done back in April.. there were a couple handled in July and the bulk of them handled in the past few weeks.

Some fixes to help make the site updates easier. These are only really for me, but it's nice to be able to preview what I'm about to post before I do. Once it goes out, it gets pulled into the cache and I can't actually see the update until the cache expires (~15 minutes) so previously updating was annoying if you missed some HTML tags.

The url encoding of email addresses on subscriptions and account creation is a small change but an important one. With Gmail (I'm sure with others as well) you can add a "+somestring" to your email address and it will still work. This allows you create rules based on the incoming email address. Ex: "myemail+nediscapp@gmail.com", I know all emails from there are coming from nediscapp. Annnnyway, this was busted in the subscription/account creation as you can't have a "+" sign in your URL. Now these urls are encoded so that some wonky characters are accepted as long as you're able to receive the email and approve it.


Admin report email is another cool feature. It's a feature the original site had that I had completely forgotten about. A configured schedule (day/week/month) you would receive an email with all the disc apps you've created. This email includes things like # of posts, latest post, # of subscribers, etc. I updated the notifier service a week or so ago so I could beta test these reports. Back in the day, I only received them monthly so I'll probably switch to that once I've let a run a bit longer.



Sort by thread activity is also finally fixed. Since the site was launched, it only worked on a per page basis. You couldn't bump a thread from page three to the top of page one, only page three. I created a new thread activity table that's updated on each new message posted that's used to display the activity sort now. In the original site, it was done through a single column in the articles table but I didn't want to touch the thread table as I pre-populated these values with my admin script before the release. I was afraid of causing performance issues as well as it's much easier to nuke a separate table than one that's already being used in prod. Thread activity should now be working as expected. There's only one forum that uses it, but at least it's fixed now. :)

Some configuration options for hold permissions so admins can define what message is displayed to the user if their message needs admin approval (or turn it off completely.) as well as a password reset option of disc app admin accounts. (Ones you just need the password to access the maintenance page). Previously there was no way to reset these passwords if they were forgotten. Now they can be reset via a link off the password reset screen. You need to know the disc app indices number and the owner email address. The password reset key gets emailed to the owner's email address. This owner must also know the indices number being reset. This is to keep people who are not the owner from resetting this password.

The RSS feature from the original site is now implemented. I never used RSS back in the day but after looking into implementing the feature, I found it's really a pretty simple format. I threw it into the release because it was fun to learn and to learn about the history of it. RSS has been pretty much dead now for a decade or so but it's cool to have it working.

The RSS feed for this board is: https://nediscapp.herokuapp.com/discussion.rss?id=10
I'm currently using: https://theoldreader.com/ for RSS feeds. It works for this site and was even cool enough to work with my debug RSS feeds while I was creating the feature.