Hi all,
This week's change log:
Feel free to reply to this topic if you'd like to comment on the
changes. Or better yet, if you expect a lot of discussion start a new
topic (or rejoin an existing one) about a specific change.
* System for dealing with DMCA takedown notices, for hiding topics and for storing notices.
That may all be part of DMCA handling, in that the handling of a take-down notice requires that the message be removed from the site, but handling a put-back notice requires that it be restored. So a mechanism to hide it instead of actually deleting it from the database would be useful.
There's also speculation in beta@ that the "hiding" part could be a step towards resolving the various problems that occur when people reply by email to messages which have been deleted from the group. And/Or that it could become the basis of a future "undelete" feature. Whatever the case, I haven't spotted any new user controls related to hiding messages or topics.
* Testing adding Recaptcha for some registrations. Sigh.
The "Sigh" no doubt relates to Mark's expressed dislike of captcha systems. But at least the Google "reCAPTCHA" mechanism works at being minimally troublesome. It is adaptive, putting up a something as simple as a checkbox or something more challenging, depending on whether the user seems more human-like or more robot-like, according to its own heuristics.
Note that Mark is testing this with a single group so far, and only in one of the registration (sign-up) flows leading to joining the group. Failing the captcha would prevent the user (presumed robot) from creating a Groups.io account, and hence from joining the group via a web link. I don't think this would affect +subscribe email commands or responding to an Invite.
The group was selected because they embedded a signup form on some website and were subsequently besieged by robotic attempts to join the group. See the Promote page (under Admin) in your group, under "Embed a Signup Form" for more information about that. I gather (from an earlier message) that the group's moderators couldn't keep up with rejecting Pending members quickly enough to keep ahead of the robot(s), and were put at some risk of tossing legit people along with the robots.
Comments about these others are also welcome:
INTERNAL: Work on tracking down a crash bug in the database replication system.
SYSADMIN: Moved the monitor instance to another physical machine.
CHANGE: Try to 'clean up' invalid search queries.
BUGFIX: Possible fix for Chrome autocomplete location field in adding an event.
BUGFIX: You could not edit a message from someone whose entire account has been deleted.
BUGFIX: New databases were not being indexed by the search cluster.
CHANGE: Group guidelines are sent to the group, not to individual subscribers. There's also now a separate email subject field. The guidelines are sent with the hashtag #guidelines, which if it doesn't already exist, is created with a topic duration of one month.
Please call out any you find significant.
Shal
Shal Farley