It’s been a while since I posted release notes, so I have some catching up to do. Over the past three months we’ve moved on to Amazon EC2 hosting, and I’m finally getting into a rhythm again.

Here some changes we’ve introduced over the past couple months.

• Introduced new topic option: Randomized Answer Order to help prevent voting bias (great for contests). More improvements to this feature are coming soon.
• Fixed rare cases where main topic list on the home page would not load for certain users
• Fixed bugs and improved formatting for the Answer Page “Vote!” button.
• New anti-spam tool for admins makes dealing with spammers a rather delightful, satisfying experience. Spam gets trashed and the spammers gets locked in one little click! Welcome to a cleaner Grupthink experience.
• Topic lists on group pages are now crawlable by Google, just like the home page list.
• Navigation: Fixed broken “cookie crumb” trail on group topics.
• Administration: WYSIWG editor for custom content works again as intended
• Fixes bad “Blank answers are not allowed” message when adding answers in certain situations.
• Fixed facebook login not showing up in certain situations.
• Many other minor fixes

Just letting you know that we have finally resolved the pesky, intermittent server bugs that were getting in the way of your Grupthinking for the past couple months! Also, we are very close to being live on Amazon’s servers. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Let me know if you have any questions or see anything that is out of whack.

- Steven

Since May, we’ve been experiencing some aggravating problems with our server, after an unfortunate foul-up during server testing. Symptoms include occasional errors when submitting forms and and other less serious annoyances. If you experience one of these ugly errors, you can usually click Back and re-submit or refresh until your post goes through.

Also, the server problems seem to cause half-page loads and other brokenness in Internet Explorer 8. If you are using this old browser, please upgrade to IE9 or try Firefox or Google Chrome.

Now for some good news. I’m happy to say that we are close to completing our deployment of Grupthink on Amazon EC2, which should fix the issues we’ve been having and also give us a huge boost in speed and scalability. We are hoping to have everything alive on the new host in roughly two weeks, hopefully sooner. I’ll keep you posted…

- Steven

Today we upgraded the web server and we’re seeing some intermittent problems on Grupthink-powered sites. Specifically, AJAX-related activities such as browsing the home page topic list and voting will frequently cause a “Bad Gateway” error prompt. We are working to resolve this issue now. In the meantime, refreshing your browser will usually clear the error.

- Steven

Patch tonight addresses the following:

• Youtube videos now show up full-size instead of as clickable buttons
• Minor layout improvements to topic pages
• Fixes issue where, while adding a new topic, the form could forget that you wanted to put the topic in a group under certain circumstances.
• Fixes Grup search on “Members & Groups” page.

Thats it for tonight. Some much cooler stuff is on the way…

Today I released a quick patch to prevent topic pages form prompting non-Flash browsers to install Flash. Grupthink uses a couple Flash-powered charts for the timeline and advanced reports that were causing this.

Over the past year, we’ve experimented with a cool new topic mode to facilitate photo contests for some of our clients, and now this option is available to everyone!. With this option, the topic layout is changed to a slideshow format, and allows for many, many more answers to be shown at once than the standard view. To enable gallery mode, just set a topic to Gallery mode via the topic edit menu.

Pictures speak louder than words, so here are a couple examples of Gallery Mode in action:
Best Cover of Rolling Stone Magazine
Best Lunar Eclipse Photos

Here are some other updates included in this release:

• New “Gallery” option when creating new topics
• Topic “Sharing” options (Facebbok, RSS, Embed, etc…) are relocated to the sidebar, prettier and more obvious.
• Topic and answer pages now have had some page structure adjustments
• Topic header area has had some visual cleanup
• Ballot “pull tab” is now labeled to so newbies know what the heck it is
• Admins: “Feature this topic” option is no longer buried in “Advanced Settings”
• Many minor fixes and subtle improvements

Since Thursday I’ve posted a handful of minor updates that include the following:

• Logging in via Facebook keeps you logged in until you logout of Facebook or log out manually
• Facebook connect/disconnect process streamlined
• Fixed issue where our custom Facebook javascript could get cached across releases and not work.
• To further dissuade spammers, locked users’ profiles are no longer publicly viewable
• Admin tool for locking and editing users improved
• Other minor fixes and improvements.

All Grupthink-powered sites are currently offline as we debug a database issue.

Something wrong happened while bringing our systems back online during the last update. We’re still working on identifying the issue, but I expect the site to be back online late tomorrow morning.

I will keep you posted with any updates or changes. Sorry for the inconvenience.

*UPDATE 11:11am MT* Still having troubleidentifying the root of the problem. Sites could remain down for the day.

*UPDATE 12:27pm MT* Co-founder stepped in and got things propped up. Thanks John! Everything is back up and upgraded to version 4.2.1-6.

- Steven

Today Grupthink gets an upgrade to the Facebook API, along with some other improvements:

• Facebook implementation upgraded to new Facebook GRAPH API
• Fixes issue where Facebook login button was not rendering in IE9
• Fixes issues where Facebook users with rather long uid’s could not complete login via Facebook login button.
• Option to import profile from Facebook is easier to find and more prominent.
• Added Facebook “Face Pile” to home page for Facebook-enabled sites
• Added Facebook “Like” buttons to topics, answers, and home page for Facebook-enabled sites.
• Admins: Facebook settings and mangement pages improved.
• Removed Facebook auto-share option for new topics and answers.
• Google image search is a secondary option and is more efficient, as we were reaching Google’s limit on the number of allowed daily queries.
• Many other minor fixes, plus improvements to verbiage and layout throughout site