Hi,

We have recently been made aware of a bug which can cause the rules in dynamic audience to change when a site is upgraded to 2.4.8 or above.

For a site to be affected the following must apply:

• The site must have previously been on a earlier version than 2.4.8.
• While on that earlier version, one or more dynamic audiences were created ("Set" audiences are unaffected). The rules used by those audiences must have been using a "text" type, e.g. one of:

  • User ID Number

  • Username

  • Email Address

  • First name

  • Last name

  • City

  • Institution

  • Department

  • Position Name

  • Position ID Number

  • Organisation ID Number

  • Text input custom field ("text", not "choose" option)

• The site must then have been upgrade to a later version (2.4.8 - 2.4.12).

If all those criteria are met then the bug would cause the rule to be reversed - for example changing "username equals x" into "username doesn't contain x" or vice versa.

Rules created after the upgrade to 2.4.8 or later are unaffected and will continue to work as expected.

A fix will be included in 2.4.13 which will:

• Detect and automatically fix the incorrect rules in cases where the system can tell that the rule is definitely broken.
• Provide a list of other audiences/rules which may be affected and should be checked.

As a rule of thumb when checking the rules, if you created/modified the rule before upgrading to 2.4.8 or later the rule is likely to be wrong. If you created/modified the rule after your site was upgraded to 2.4.8 or later it should be okay. If your site was never on a release earlier than 2.4.8 all your rules will all be okay.

Sites which upgrade from an earlier version to 2.4.13 or later will be unaffected. Sites on other branches (e.g. 2.2 are unaffected).

We apologise for any trouble this issue has caused.

Simon