Today we updated Grupthink.com to address a couple minor issues:

• Some topics could not be edited
• Some comments were incorrectly being hidden
• Link to topic in syndication method #1 wouldn’t work)
• Adding an answer incorrectly caused you to be auto-subscribed to a topic notifications
• A few security-related issues and administration bugs

We discovered a really “stupid” bug (and, by stupid, I mean kinda clever). Members couldn’t post topics!

I know. You’re thinking we didn’t test at all. The funny thing is, we’re doing more comprehensive testing than ever before. This bug juked it’s way through our sentry guns and snipers by turning our new creation against us. You see, while testing, we happened to be logged in as Admins (a new concept in Grupthink), and this bug happened to be invisible to Admins. We could post topics and do everything else just fine.

Anyways, the bug is fixed now! Thanks to everyone who reported this for us, and I’m sorry if this caused you grief over the weekend.

We’ve addressed a few nagging bugs. Here’s a breakdown:

• Notification digests (daily and weekly) not working
• Users getting logged out randomly
• Javascript Functions Without “return false;” Causing Links to Go to Top of Page
• Syndication: Method 2 does not work
• Topic RSS feed does not render because of a XML Parsing Error
• Use New Comment Links in Link Tags
• Old Javascript being cached and used after new releases, causing brokenness
• CSS not named correctly
• Lost /poll/### URI backwards compatibility.
• Topics: Comment count doesn’t match actual comment number
• Comments are Showing Incorrect Days Ago
• Child comments can’t be edited
• New answers aren’t marked as “New!”
• Grupie Quilt Broken
• Admins can’t edit answers in their own Grups anymore
• Child comments inherit feedback badge of parents
• Comment summaries in /top having display oddness
• /mystuff without trailing slash yeilds 403; Triggered by “Change Password”
• bug report form does not include Nickname in report
• Grup Admins Can’t Edit Grup Topics That Aren’t Theirs
• Add Topic: Clicking ‘Finish and View Answer’ gives JS error in IE7
• Topic Answers: Spellcheck functionality adding extra words
• Grups: New grup doesn’t show after accepting invitation
• Private Grup Topics: Ask to join link doesn’t work.
• Can’t Leave a Grup
• “Your favorites topics” typo on /mystuff/
• Profile: Private Profile setting not working
• Topics: Admin badge not shown for admin users
• Topics: Admins can’t view deleted topics
• Adding an answer to a topic induces notifications for any new answer to that topic
• Topics: Link to topic in syndication method #1 doesn’t work
• Topic Invitations: PHP error when trying to invite a user
• Voting When Not Logged in and Returning Without Logging in Causes Error

If you are having an issue where topic links don’t work, just clear your browser cache. How to clear your browser cache…

Old, cached Javascript can cause broken links on the front page of Grupthink, or an error message that says “It looks like the required parameters were not provided.” In the future releases, we’ll be sure to rename this file so your browser always gets the latest version.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve successfully upgraded Grupthink.com. In terms of the amount of code we’ve changed, this is the most significant release we’ve made since our initial launch. Yet, it is one of the least significant releases when it comes to user-facing changes. How’s that for an anticlimax!

With that said, I think you’ll be very pleased by these improvements:

• Major Performance Increases: Topics load about 5x faster, and the front page is about twice as fast as it was before. In the next few weeks we’ll be optimizing other areas.
• You can now browse all non-hidden grups at http://grupthink.com/grups/
• Code re-factoring that helps performance and code management. These changes will allow us to improve Grupthink faster. We also have another project in the works that depends on these improvements.
• Full Administrative back-end : Now, we can easily manage members and content, plus tweak many of the algortithms that keep Grupthink interesting.
• Minor UI enhancements & bug fixes

Thanks to the work that has been put into Grupthink.com over the past 5 months, we can expect many more frequent updates to come.

Please help us by reporting bugs. There a handy “Report a bug” link at the bottom of every page on Grupthink.

We’ll be taking Grupthink down tomorrow around 11am E (3pm GMT). The downtime could last a few hours as we run upgrades on the live database. We will have a better estimate of downtime duration tomorrow when we see how fast the update runs, so I’ll post new information here as it becomes available to me.

This release includes some major back-end improvements that will help performance and future development, plus a whole administrative interface that will help us manage the community better! Functionally, Grupthink.com will be largely unchanged, aside from some bug fixes and minor UI updates.d

* UPDATE * 11:00a Sunday MDT
As planned, the upgrade on Grupthink.com is underway.

* UPDATE * 1:00p Sunday MDT
We are now testing the new code in a stage environment and ironing out any kinks we find. If things go smoothly, we could be up again in about an hour. However, we are prepared to spend a few more hours on the upgrade if needed.

This afternoon we pushed a minor update to Grupthink that includes these changes:

• Fixed bug that caused topic edits to fail or remove tags.
• Fixed issue where friends lists could not be re-sorted
• Time slider (or “time line”) view for topic results feature now works properly. (This feature had been bugged throughout many of the past releases.)
• Fixed bug preventing grup invitations from working
• Fixed minor layout bug on front page caused by long grup names
• Fixed quote marks appearing as “&quot” on front page

I just wanted to quickly deal with a rumor floating around that we are locking abusive user accounts on Grupthink. The fact is, we are, absolutely, locking accounts on Grupthink. The infractions deserving this penalty may be abusing other members, violating our terms, or simply spamming. In fact, due to our laziness and poor communication skills, offending accounts will be locked down without warning and in most cases that condition will be irrevocable. Have fun and respect your fellow grupies!

Today we released a quick update to fix some bugs introduced in Grupthink 1.8, as well as some other minor things:

• “Favorite topics” — Adding a topic to your favorites is available again
• Restored “date created” on topic pages, and improved layout.
• Grup lists are now sorted alphabetically
• Other minor visual improvements

Grupthink 1.8 is now live. We had a few wide-sweeping changes that required more work than usual during the update, and that led to some unanticipated downtime. Thanks for your patience!

Topic thumbnail images should be finished in about 15 minutes. In the meantime, you may notice a lot of green topic icons in the topic lists as the rest of the images are processed.

**Update**
The image processing is complete and the unwanted green icons are replaced with the topic thumbnails.