Release Notes - GeoChat: 1.5.3

Users can now login using either username, mail account or mobile phone number. A hint is displayed inside the login textbox.

During sign up if the user enters a mail that is already registered for another account, the application will give him the chance to log in with that account.

Superadmins can test mobile phones within the Test Mobile functionality that allows them to send a test message and verify that it is sent through the correct gateways and that the user gets it. This page is located under Admin/Test Mobiles.

The implementation allows uploading a CSV file supporting the columns: - FullName - Phone - DisplayName - Email - Login

None of the fields is mandatory. Currently these column names must be present on the first row. (this could be improved auto-detecting the columns by analyzing the content).

After uploading the file, a review page is displayed, showing errors and warnings. Records that contains errors are displayed as red rows, and are skipped if the user accepts the review.

The process detects users that already are members and are ignored. Also if the user already exists, just an invitation is sent.

More documentation can be found at Bulk Member SignUp

Any person can donate to a group by accessing the group's public page: geochat.instedd.org/group/GROUPALIAS

Group owners can configure a group as chatroom or not chatroom after its creation.

The page My Profile has been split in three different tabs an it has been renamed to “Settings”

The user icon that is displayed in the map, needs to be resized depending on the place it's used. That resizing was done in the browser. Now it's done on the server side, resulting on a performance improvement.

Huge improvements on the way we handle and load scripts on the page have been done, resulting on a very noticeable improvement on the performance.

The installer for the Local Gateway has been redone to move away from ClickOnce, a Microsoft technology that was causing some usability glitches.

As the page loads, elements were being re-layout resulting in a degradation of the browser performance for the page loading. That is avoided now.

Many improvements done to optimize the loading time of messages and user locations, resulting in a quicker loading and interaction of the map and stream.

In the Settings page, if the group alias was too long, it overlapped with the Basic / Advanced Links. Now it is fixed.

There were some errors in the way message threads were being handled for replies through mail. Mail replies now correlate fine to originating thread.

Some messages in SRRT group were stuck at the top of the stream because they were using Buddhist year (+500). The problem was already solved, but we corrected those specific messages.

If the message contained an invalid LAT, it was being interpreted as a message with tags. Now, when sending “LAT*LONG*MESSAGE” if the user sends an invalid LAT or LONG (outside -90..90 range) he will be sent a message warning about the invalid values.

Fixed a bug that caused the map to display wrong in IE7/8

Even after canceling the “start new conversation here” the location for the user was changed to that place. Fixed.

When zooming in and out if the user checked or unchecked groups at the same time in the filter, icons in the map were disappearing. Fixed.

Now blank messages cannot be sent from the website anymore.

Now when the ping is sent without any content, the response format is:

Ping received at Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:37:13 GMT via sms

When the ping is sent with content, the format is:

(<content>) received at Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:37:13 GMT via sms

When the map was at the max zoom-in level and the groups were checked and unchecked, the icons in the map would not cluster. Fixed.

Now, whenever any user sends a “at LOCATION” message to a chatroom group, only a single thread marker is added at the LOCATION.

When you replied a message from the web, the reply was being shown as if it was done from the same protocol of the original message. Now the correct used protocol is displayed inside the bubble (web).

When the map was first loaded the icons which had just a location update from a user were not being counted for the number in the cluster icon. Now the cluster counts both location updates and user conversations.

The #owner command is now sending notifications both to the user who was made owner and to the sender of the command: To new owner: <sender_displayname> has made you owner of group <group_name> (<group_alias>) To sender: The user <new_owner> was successfuly set as owner of group <group_name> (<group_alias>)

Administrative section renamed to “Admin”

Users were listed as in: LOGIN (DISPLAYNAME). The “Pending Requests List” now displays the users according to this format: DISPLAYNAME (USERNAME)

As IE8 is incompatible with IE7, an indication to IE8 has been added to ask for compatibility with IE7. This should solve most of the problems for users with IE8.

The service we were using to suggest locations based on IPs was taken down, we replaced this functionality with another service.

Some tweaks have been done to avoid the autocompletion of user/password in custom gateways with the user's credential.

After adding a new layer it is now selected by default.

Due to encoding problems in the SMS library we are using, messages sent through the Local Gateway had trailing ”@” sometimes. Fixed.

Clustered conversation count was not being increased when new conversations arrive. Fixed

In Membership tab within My Groups section, when the message text box expanded, the page footer overlapped with the sent invitations sectio. This was fixed.

A message is displayed whenever the user's machine goes offline.