What Changed in November and December 2017

Wednesday 1 November 2017

It was possible to manually exclude a waterway twice, which then caused a fatal error in route planning. Tests and helpful error messages put in to prevent this.
Social sharing changes (all experimented with on beta first):

Work-around for a recurring but rare and unexplained bug where the session has a route status but no places (or tables for them) in the route. This caused the gazetteer to blow up when checking if you visited or passed through a place.

Some tweaks to the caching code
Small enhancements to social sharing: added to "photos"; shortened texts for twitter.
Improved text and title for marker places
Improved text/title on photos
Removed extra > (between "home" and first thing below that) from breadcrumbs

→ Release 9.30.14

Fixed link to "marker place" wiki page from gazetteer pages
Changed edit menu so marker places have an "upgrade to full place" rather than an edit feature.

Fixed bug where https broke links to edit quotations and events on the home page - issue 354
Changed so that if you set a speed to zero then try to load a ring it warns you rather than crashes

Major piece of work to reduce the burden marker places put on the whole system. They no longer have any of the supporting information (the entire "place_extra" record), which should simplify things, reduce memory and disk use, and generally speed things up and avoid odd bugs in future.
Moved map generation from pdfwktoimage to phantomjs. I seem to be able to get maps with tracks on again, to solve issue 356.
Improved boat tagging in "new contributions" to address issue 358.
Removed error message from "nearest place" when there isn't an error - issue 348
Quite a lot of work on the "types of places" in response to issue 342. I've changed the database structure and the code and you can now add/delete/change the types that are allowed, and can tag places with these - and remove them. You can't use them in planning or do bulk edits yet. The whole "exclude from planning" type thing feels very odd: clearly nobody has needed to use it, and what on earth should happen if you try to exclude junctions? Or a class that includes a single junction almost by accident (say a milepost at a junction). This needs some thought and planning.

Making this release 9.31 as together these are pretty big changes behind the scenes.

→ Release 9.31

Updated the geograph plugin to use our local copy of the Geograph database rather than reading, parsing and caching it from theirs.
Fixed issue that caused problems on older browsers since yesterday (non-support of default parameters in JavaScript) - issue 360.
New favourite icon in foolish attempt to make it work with Edge

Improvements to make the new PDF maps work more elegantly (less messily!) over https.

→ Release 9.31.1

Fix so that setting preferences doesn't turn on marker places irreversably
Interpreter change to give empty extras rather than non-existent for marker places

→ Release 9.31.1.1

Fixed editing of structure details, including preserving wiki formatting, fixes and extends issue 334.
Added search for areas to the placefinder code

Areas are now found by the placefinder, and can be used in route planning (so if you put "market drayton") into a planning box it produces a screen that shows all the places within the area and lets you pick one, then uses it.
Cut-down Geograph code so pretty well all done on browser.
Fixed accidental deletion that meant many changes to places (all those that go into the 'place_extra' field) were not being written

→ Release 9.31.2

Fix to feature page so that the right waterway is shown for a feature that has a junction at one end (Foxton Locks were not working at all well)

Generated a master names table, with all the code to support this. Allows all input boxes to take places (and aliases), waterways (ditto), areas and features.

→ Release 9.31.3