Talkyard tyse-v0.2025.001

Changes since tyse-v0.2024.011. Full changelog: tyse-v0.2024.011-1f1c92bc5-regular...tyse-v0.2025.001-b8a91e87a-regular

Features

• Scrolling up in chats to read older messages. Finally Ty's chat channels start working more "for real", when at last you can scroll up and read old messages (instead of previously only the most recent 50 or so).

Fixes

• Now talkyardSsoHow = 'RedirPage' (for blog comments Single Sign-On) disables may-compose-before-signup. Previously, this combination made the login popup window appear instead, resulting in a bad blog comments SSO user experience.
• On the Inspect page, sort groups in the correct order.

Internal

• Merge the bookmarks branch. (This is the major thing in this release.) But this feature disabled for now.
• Merge a cache-pages-client-side branch. This disabled too, for now. Quite nice, though, together with bookmarks, since I think that if you use bookmarks, you'll tend to jump back and forth between different bookmarked pages, and then it's annoying if you need to wait 200 ms (or whatever the latency is) for a server roundtrip in between (or at least I think it is).
• Minor performance improvements, probably mostly not noticeable. E.g. avoiding running React virtual DOM diffs in some cases.

License

Talkyard is licensed under the AGPL (excluding future enterprisey things like SCIM and SAML2). Each specific Talkyard version used to become GPLv2+ after 4 years, but we're changing that to 6 – 7 years. The reason: There's going to be (is the plan) long term stable Talkyard versions, and I want some years between a LTS version going end-of-life, and Talkyard becoming GPLv2+. But only 4 years isn't enough time for some gap year(s) in between.

(Technically this happens by no longer dual-licensing Talkyard under the Business Source License, BUSL — it requires at most 4 years until GPLv2+. Instead, there'll be a GPLv2+ license grant in the README file or in a license file, effective on a date 6 – 7 years into the future, for each specific version.)

Talkyard tyse-v0.2024.011

Changes since v0.2024.009. (2024.010 was internal only.) Full changelog: tyse-v0.2024.009-797271e37-dev...tyse-v0.2024.011-1f1c92bc5-regular.

Features

• New Inspect tab that shows how you've configured access permissions, anonymity and privacy settings, in the whole forum. So you won't need to navigate to each category and user groups one at a time, and look at its settings, to verify that the forum is configured like you want. Now instead you'll have everything on one single page. But with a bug: group ids sorted randomly, I forgot an order by. And a wrong-colors bug.
• New privacy preference: Min trust level to see user's profile page. This can be good in small forums with primarily anonymous discussions, so it's not possible to guess who is who — you cannot, when you don't know who the other forum members are. For example, if you're a university, and the students discuss things anonymously, but in the beginning only a few students have joined the forum. (If you can't see someone's profile, they also won't appear if you start typing a @username_mention (e2e test), unless they're in the same discussion using their real user account already.)
• Privacy preferences are inherited from one's trust level groups. This means that you can configure e.g. all students at once, via the All Members group. — These settings are visualized on the above-mentioned Inspect admin tab. (But the old priv prefs: may-mention-me and may-message-me, are not yet inherited from groups.)
• Make the "You're anonymous" warning / tips look less like a warning, and more like a tips. Now there's more e2e tests, so bugs less likely.
• One-click ban spammer button, which also deletes all the spammer's posts. Previously, you had to go to their user profile and click Suspend, which meant annoyingly many clicks. Background: More spam started appearing in Talkyard's support forum, maybe because of LLMs?, so I wanted a ban-spammer button myself. (Later, there'll be some detect-spam LLM integrations so the LLMs can fight it out with each other.)

Security

• Don't show if username exists on reset password page.

Internal

• Configure admins' & mods' priv prefs via the Staff group, not Mods. Otherwise it's unclear if changing the mods' privacy preferences should affect admins too, or not. But the Staff group includes both mods and admins.

Talkyard tyse-v0.2024.009

Changes since v0.2024.008.

Security

• Fixed anonymous comments bug: Real user ids were included in WebSocket messages (that's no good).
  Fortunately, there's a popup about maybe-bugs and not writing sensitive things just yet, if starting to write anonymous comments.
• Don't look at who the true author is, when deciding if an anonymous comment should be queued for moderator review or not. Otherwise, moderators can in some cases better guess who is who (if they know that "oh, this must be by a new user, since it's in the review queue").

Fixed

• In some cases, people could get two emails about the same comment. For example, if a new member replied to a moderator, then, the moderator first got a new-comment-to-review email, and then, once they had approved the comment, a you-have-a-reply email. And another case related to anonymous comments.

Internal

• More automated tests. (That's how the bugs above got discovered.)

Talkyard tyse-v0.2024.008

Here are changes since v0.2024.006. Full Changelog: tyse-v0.2024.006-07ac81a05-regular...tyse-v0.2024.008-327b77491-regular

New features

• Private support categories, thanks to a new permission setting, May-see-own: If you grant All Members the May-see-own permission on a category, but not May-see (all topics), they can see their own topics, but not others' topics. Now, if you grant May-see (all topics) to a Support group, you have created a private support category.
• Customizable login dialog: Add custom header, a bit text, image. Especially useful for private communities, where just "Log in" doesn't really tell anyone what they can do there. (You can edit it here, as admin: /-/admin/customize/login.)
• New site settings:
  • Show presence. Enabled by default. If disabled, everyone's online status gets hidden, and info like "Last visited at" is not shown.
  • Sensitive anonymous discussions. Enables the sensitive discussions anonymous comments purpose (where anonymous comments stay anonymous, permanently). If enabled, the show-presence feature mentioned above, gets disabled. (Otherwise it can sometimes be possible to guess who the author of an anonymous comment is — if it gets posted when just one other person is online, for example.)
• Better blog comments Single Sign-On: A new setting, talkyardSsoHow = 'RedirPage', which makes Talkyard redirect the whole embedding page to your own SSO page. (Maybe this should always have been the default, for embedded comments — better than opening a popup window for SSO login.)

Other changes

• Removed some unimplemented admin settings.
• When creating a category, Full Members are now granted the May-edit-wiki permission only. They inherit all Everyone's permissions anyway, so nothing more is needed. (And, if they were to be granted May-see, there would be a tiny risk that this was overlooked / forgotten, if trying to enable only May-see-own, to create a private support category.)
• Feature flag for disabling the "That's a short comment" tips. (Later, could be a user group setting instead.)

Internal

• Silence warnings about Ty's own deprecations. Now it'll be simpler to upgrade to Scala 2.13.

Talkyard tyse-v0.2024.006

(Maybe it'd be good with release notes? I keep forgetting what's changed. Ok, so this is the first release notes)

Not yet

Bookmarks works, but I haven't had time to code review and merge the branch. Finishing anonymous comments & Persona Mode took 5 times (?) longer than what I had guessed.

What's Changed

Changes since v0.2024.004 (tyse-v0.2024.004-678d1190f-regular) (not v0.2024.005, that became a -dev only release):

• Database migration to structure v426.
• OpenAPI spec for /-/v0/search, so you can integrate Talkyard with your AI, using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation).
• Persona mode: Switch to Yourself Mode, or Anonymous Mode. Or, later (> year) , pseudonyms.
• Anonymous comments for sensitive discussions. But not enough automated tests! Therefore:
• A popup about maybe-bugs and not writing sensitive things just yet.

Minor changes

• Feature flag ffImp to disable impersonation
• An annoying num-links spam check is gone.
• Don't incl TLD when generating embedded comments local hostnames (Chrome thinks addresses like comments-for-your-domain-com... then is too similar to your real (your.domain.com), and shows a phishing warning).