What Changed in April, May and June 2017

To Tuesday 4 April 2017

Added a new system: set of wiki pages, and code to allow people with the right access to edit them.
Made automatic generation of the motd file from this page on save
Added a link, if you have the rights, from "My page" to the system pages
Also edited index_pages/today to have the motd

Together these provide admins with a much tidier and less error prone approach to setting the message of the day, as suggested in issue 266

→ Release 9.29.8

Changes to "furthest place":

Changed the interface. Remove the "furthest place" button and made it a particular sort of route planning from a new selector instead
When selected you have the appropriate fields, and can only plan a "duration" based trip - fixes issue 182.
Changed the layout of the route editor screen to make hiding and showing stuff easier, and made it more consistent in the use of framesets
Fixed a bug where furthest place counted part days as though they were subtracted from the total, unlike everything else. There was even specific code to do this. Now made consistent with all other calculations and so fixed issue 206
Fixed a bug deep in the calculation engine where the times for furthest place selection where no calculated correctly - there were accumulating rounding errors. Now fixed (sometimes things still differ by a minute, but that's a lot better than several hours and unlikely to cause any problems). This was issue 267.

→ Release 9.29.9

Massive rewrite of whole placefinder and gazetteer structure. Made searches more consistent, code easier to follow, integrated all into a single "gazetteer" page rather than three, avoids problems with boats named after places or structures, makes much more use of the "explorer" I added to route planning a while back as an alternative way to find places.

Realised that problem with reference counting of arrays and need for explicit deep copies is not a bug but a design decision (Javascript has something similar). Changed "bugfix" to "clone" and changed the codebase to use this.
Added an "early termination" implementation of && and || for shortcut-like evaluation. These are specifically to avoid having to nest "if"s in circumstances like "if a > 0 && 17/a > b". They should not be used as general substitutes for "and" and "or" (in particular, they don't do precedence and can get confused if used inside nested conditionals).

Added code to turn on display of marker places on short routes. Made switch-point defined by a configuration variable. Addresses issue 278

Error reports showed that furthest place from the wizard was failing. Discovered a couple of default variables weren't being set if you came in cold ("private browsing" is very useful for testing this sort of thing) and fixed with a pre-release patch

Fixed - by pre-release patch - an XSS attack in the unknown place code (searching for a malformed place could cause JS execution). Credit and sincere thanks to 8bitsec via openbugbounty

Fixed - by pre-release patch - some oddities where if you started planning a route with lots of overnights and then changed to planning a furthest place it blew up.

Put all I have so far out to beta for further testing

→ Release 9.30 (beta only)

Several more small tweaks.
Added (pre-release) the session ID to the pop-up info from the logo to aid debugging
Background work on MySQL errors and packet size

→ Release 9.30 (live)