Totara Social Release Notes

Totara Social 2.6 Released 7th April 2016

Hi everyone!

Totara Social 2.6 is a "security" release. It includes bug fixes, improvements, and security fixes. We recommend upgrading to this version.

The highlight on this release is a new feature called "Mentions" which allows users to be notified when someone is talking about them. Mentions work in all types of content and mentioning someone is as simple as typing @ followed by their name. Mentions generate notifications which can be sent by email, to inbox, or appear in the Activity Stream, depending on user settings.

Here is the changelog for Totara Social 2.6 releases:

Release 2.6 (7th April 2016)
==================================================

New features:
    TS-427    Added user mentions functionality:
              - Now users can mention anyone by typing @ followed by the name of the person
                they want to mention
              - Mention notifications have their own setting in user notification settings
                and work the same way as other notification types
    TS-789    External videos can now be played directly from the Activity Stream.
              This feature is currently supported for YouTube and Vimeo videos

Improvements:
    TS-827    Improved the display of status updates in the "Status Update" block
    TS-836    Enabled a simplified version of the HTML editor on mobile devices
    TS-826    Uploaded images and videos are now displayed in the Activity Stream
    TS-785    Added file attachments to Ideas and Questions

Bug fixes:
    TS-840    Fixed an SQL error in the get_my_folders() function
    TS-841    Corrected form element label and placement of social sharing warning
    TS-829    Made sure that group/site/tenant files are displayed in alphabetical order
    TS-822    Made sure that users cannot report their own content items as objectionable
    TS-813    Fixed the display of tagged site/tenant files on the Tags page
    TS-675    Hid superfluous radio buttons from the page layout selection
    TS-834    Fixed the display of status updates when comments are edited or deleted

Third party libraries updates and changes:
    Updated VideoJS HTML5 media player to version 5.8.8. Moved this library from
    artefact/file/blocktype/internalmedia/js/ to js/ folder.
    Updated SVGGraph library to version 2.21.0
    Updated jQuery library to version 2.2.3
    Updated jQuery File Upload Plugin to version 9.12.1

Backported security fixes from Mahara:
    Clean up XSS vulnerability due to target="_blank" and window.open() (Bug #1558361)
    Any links that previously opened in new windows will no longer do so.
    For more details see https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=7558#post30363

    Added some HTTP headers for security (Bug #1531987)

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Hi Yuliya,

Thanks for that. We are enjoying testing out 2.6. Please find below a couple of bits of feedback from Medcast and the Andro team.

1. Mentions- this is great and a good update. Would you consider making it possible to mention a Group?

2. Ask a question- it's great being able to upload a file and this works much more easily now.

-Images/videos/text from the question don't appear in the Activity Stream (it works in Status update but not Ask a Question)

-The status bar on upload file seems to prematurely go to 100% even when the file is quite ready

3. Post a video. This worked a couple of time on update status, then stopped working........Then started working again but slowly (i.e. needed to refresh the page before it displayed).

-Note- when a video is posted, a ; seems to appear on the activity stream below the posted video.

- Post video doesn't appear to work for Ask a Question.

-When post a YouTube video in the Status Update, it shows two preview images of the video in the activity stream, as well as the ; mentioned above

-The ; bug appears not to happen when you remove non ansi characters e.g. copying from notepad, however users need to be able to copy straight from URL. It also happened with Chrome on a Mac, but didn't happen with Firefox on Windows

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Hi Yuliya,

Some further feedback -hope you don't mind!

-I thought Add Images/Files was going to be persistent throughout the site, but still can't add files/images to Forums

-Adding images to Status Update from mobile works really well, but image comes through sideways on page.

-Comments on a status update- these do appear in the Activity stream, but only if you expand the stream......any way of defaulting it to expanded?

-Looking forward to the text/images etc from forums to flow through to the activity stream. Any idea which release that might happen in?

Thanks again for the TS work on this. We are planning to launch our community 1st of July, so would love to have some feedback on the timeframes/expected features in the next couple of planned updated:)

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Hi Stephen,

Thank you very much for your feedback. I put together some answers and comments:

- Currently only text from status updates is displayed in Activity Stream. We are now also showing images attached to status updates and uploaded separately (through "Upload new files" page), as well as videos uploaded separately. When you said that posting videos "worked a couple of time on update status, then stopped working" - did you mean external videos? We don't display videos attached to status updates yet.

- Related to playing external videos in Activity stream. There seems to be some issues with the browsers on certain operating systems. I discovered yesterday that some browsers do autolinking of any URL that is being typed. Our code does autolinking as well, and as a result URLs are linked twise. I filed a bug and I am looking at this issue now. We will make sure to fix it in the early May release.

- The status bar for file uploading gives us a feedback from your system on how fast upload happens and it depends on your upload speed. This is actually an accurate representation based on the information the we get. However, after file is uploaded to the server, it also has to be registered in the system and this might be creating some visible delay. We will need to investigate what we can do about this.

- Adding images/files to Forums will be done through HTML editor. We discovered an issue around the file list paging in the patch that was supposed to be released and had to pull it out of the release to ensure that we don't introduce a serious bug along with the new feature.

- I am not sure I understand the issue around images on mobile "image comes through sideways on page". Would you by any chance have a screen shot for us?

- To make comments expanded by default would require changes in code as there is no way of controlling this through user interface.

- Making Acitivity Stream a primary place where information is displayed requires API and language string changes which we try to avoid in minor releases due to an impact it can have on the earlier releases of the same series. It is also important for us to get the right balance between showing little information and displaying too much information and as a result making page interface too noisy with something a user would not be interested in. We already have a similar issue filed for this and I will add your feedback as well to make sure we bump its priority.

It is really great to get feedback from someone trialing the system. I would suggest that you feel free to open helpdesk tickets if you come across any issues. Our triage team would then be able to assist you by reproducing the issue and filing a bug directly to our bug tracker so that our developers can start working on it straight away.

Yuliya

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