We were close to having a feature release (planned for roll-out this weekend) but the browser bug that was impacting NEARLY EVERYONE (yikes!) forced us to push an emergency release tonight. Just finished it before writing this at 0513GMT on 13Oct so will have just noticed a few minutes of downtime if you were using your instance.
This is a longer than usual update message because there is more than normal to, well, update!
Browser bug
This was a Javascript error buried on ONE form in ResultFlow – the task edit form – that was failing gracefully until recent updates to pretty nearly all browsers. The effect was that the “Items” in the task dialog did not display so it was sorta impossible to do much with the task. 🙁 This should now be fixed on ALL browsers. If your mileage differs, then we need a screenshot of the task dialog and a screenshot of your browser “about” box so we know precisely what browser+version+OS to address.
Features (Yay!)
[1] First, there are SEVERAL updates – some big and some not so – and the help will be updated during the day tomorrow (Thursday in the US) so in the meantime feel free to be delighted by the occasional little surprise. 😉Topping the list is the first version of the “Scheduler Workflow”. We’ll get the help topic on this done first so you can start playing with it, but in a nutshell, this new flow takes an input folder, and output folder and a list of times (in GMT) and at each of those times (all days of the week – more on that in the upcoming help) will move items from input to output. The number of items moved at each time is configured in the workflow.
The most obvious use case for this is to “batch” your content generation into a folder and “schedule” it from there into Venues. Perfect for “faking” periodic daily updates.
Way way way more cool scheduling functionality coming now that the underlying problem has been defeated.
[2] Waaaaay easier Worker management. You will see a completely redesigned “Members” page where you can, on one page, manage the membership of all your Workers and all your Personas in one place. The “Invite” scheme still works the same way, but now, after you invite them into one Persona, you can add them to others without the email round-trips and the new Personas just magically appear on your worker’s dashboard the next time they login (emphasis: the next time they login – think “browser cache”). [3] Workers can no longer create personas. That was a bug really but not harmful to you so we’ll call fixing it a feature? 🙂 They can also not invite more workers and change what workers can see which Personas which really is about you I suppose! [4] There are some relatively minor UI improvements that get us setup for even bigger improvements later. For example, the actions allowed on Feeds and Venues are now restricted to reduce the potential to “make a mess” (edited version of the technical term).Here’s another one: The “Create Venue” button is now a drop-down … with only a single item in the menu??? It’s waiting on Posterous and RSS to be completed sometime next week.
[5] Newly created Personas, but not yet existing ones, have a different dashboard layout. Upgrading existing Personas requires some code that is a few days from done, but for anything you create now you will see the “datalists” gone [they will come back when they work the way I want them to!] and (better yet) you will see a Persona Tasks dashlet where only the tasks for the given Persona appear. This makes pacing and prioritizing work across multiple Personas waaaaay easier.What about existing Personas? We ***will*** have a solution deployed by mid-next-week at the latest, even if I just have outsourcers do it by hand.
[6] You can find out about updates to ResultFlow without logging into your instance by following the RSS feed from this blog.What’s Next?
One word: MTurk. Look for really cool new capabilities next week. Where this line of development was important before, with Panda it has not been elevated to critical!