Today's update (39c09ac) brings with it the follow changes:

Security issues

• Improved our HTML form spam protection mechanism. You'll now need to check a box to confirm you're a human when you want to recover your password or register an account.

New features

• You'll now be notified by email if you have unread messages in your inbox. You can choose to get these notifications immediately when a new message arrives, or once per day or week. You can also turn them off if you don't want them. The default is to get weekly notifications. You'll need to go to your user profile page to change this setting. Only the user itself can change this setting.

Enhancements

• It is now possible to preload videos by using the preload attribute in the embed template function. It is actually enough to just preload metadata to ensure the video object is cached properly by the backend. This is most likely only needed for somewhat large videos.
• Syndication feeds (RSS) are now handled by an external component instead of using XSLT. This should ensure we encode content much more standards-compliant. We also now support all RSS variants and Atom. The default feed format has changed from RSS 2.0 to Atom. If you have used feeds from Portfolio somewhere else you'll need to update the link to the new format.
• Additional reference documentation for template handlers have been added from our internal wiki. Especially the quiz and embed template functions have gotten much better documentation, including examples. Clarification on recommended and deprecated ways of calling them are now documented.
• All of the XML returned by the HTTP API is now generated in a more consistent way. This should not impact anyone.
• We're now using an automated method for gathering code coverage, which will help the developers to improve the quality of the service over time.
• The access key feature has been modified extensively in the backend. This means it has a higher risk of regressions. Be aware.

Feature removals / deprecations

• The XSLT feature was completely removed. That also means that the server_xsl query parameter to read_container request handler was removed.
• The PORTFOLIO.do_decoding() JavaScript function was removed. It was not in use.

Today's update (9899ece) brings with it the follow changes:

Security issues

• Updated third-party SSL/TLS modules to support OpenSSL 1.1 properly.

Performance improvements

• Diminished the number metrics emitted from the queue worker when new jobs are created.

New features

• A tracing identifier is now generated and added to all HTTP requests, allowing for more in-depth analysis when issues are encountered.

Enhancements

• Improved database restore script allowing for point-in-time recovery.

Bugfixes

• Fixed issue with accidental overwriting of config set entries, site config entries and user config entries.
• Fixed issue with course rebuilt timestamp not being updated when course is rebuilt.
• Previously plain text files created in Notepad with default encoding would be detected as UTF-8, which was wrong. They should now detect properly as ISO-8859-1 (Latin1).

Today's update (d75be48) brings with it the following changes:

Security issues

• Operating system of all servers upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04. This was part of a larger process to migrate away from the soon-to-be unsupported Ubuntu 14.04 version.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a race condition in the wav2mp3 request handler that could sometimes cause the playback of voice recordings to not play back on the initial attempt.

Today's update (a195d1b) brings with it the following backend changes (no user-facing changes were added in this update):

Performance improvements

• The database backup solution has been changed from a logical to a physical backup, decreasing page load while the backup is running.

Enhancements

• It is now possible to do point-in-time recovery of the database in case of disasters.
• Testing of template functions was improved.
• Diminished backend logging from ffmpeg when generating video thumbnails.

Today's hotpatch (3b3bbbc) includes these changes:

Performance improvements

• Increased number of BlobMachine workers. Should allow fetching of more blobs concurrently.

Bugfixes

• It was not possible to remove your saved or sent answers because the delete_quiz request handler was generating an internal server error. This should now be fixed.
• Increased timeout for thumbnail and avatar request handlers to 30 seconds, to avoid timeout issues on large video objects.