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Hubb > Release Notes > What's New - November 2018 Release Notes

What’s new in November 2018

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Our latest round of improvements to the Hubb platform is now live. Here are the highlights:

Giving you more control of your data

The new GDPR legislation has got us all thinking about data and our aim has always been to make it as easy as possible for you to look after the data you are responsible for.

In the last two releases we have added significant new features to help you comply with the latest legislation, including tools to manage consent. This time our release is focused on helping you ensure your user data is up to date, and that you are only keeping records which are current.
 

Deleting user data

We've always stopped you deleting records that have financial information attached to them for two reasons 1) you could be left with incomplete financial records/reports and 2) there are legal requirements around keeping certain financial records.

Of course, as data gets older there does come a time when it's necessary to delete it and we also recognise that financial records are often kept on other systems and so don't need to be kept on the Hubb platform.

So, we've given you full control over when and how to delete this data. This includes being able to 'anonymise' financial records so that you can keep the financial data but remove the personal data associated with it.

Deleting user records
Up until now, to remove someone from your site you had to take away all their group memberships - but couldn't fully remove them if they still had financial data.

deleteuserNow, you have a new task on the user record which will help you to quickly delete a user. If the person doesn't have any financial transactions associated with them, the task will simply say 'Delete this record'. For those with financial transactions you need to make a choice about what to do with their financial records and the task will say 'Delete or anonymise this record'. If the person has uncancelled payment group registrations, you will be prompted to cancel them before proceeding.

In the simple case where there are no associated financial records you go ahead and delete the user record, which will permanently remove the person from your site.

For a record with associated financial data, you have 3 choices:
  • Delete all data. This will delete the user record and any payment group registrations and shop orders from your site
  • Keep financial transactions but delete all personal and other data. This enables you to keep your numbers right - you'll still have a correct record of income, but the user record is deleted. To facilitate this, we attach an 'anonymised' user record to all the financial transactions - you can either let us create that for you or you can pick from previously anonymised users.
  • Keep financial transactions and basic personal details but delete all other data. Someone might have moved away or left your organisation and so you want to end their involvement, but you need to keep their financial records to fulfil your legal obligations. This leaves the basic user record, including contact information, intact, but removes group memberships, custom fields and other involvement.
Deleting (or anonymising) payment group registrations
pgmenuYou now have new tasks on cancelled and expired payment group registrations. You can delete the registration which will fully remove it from your site - including all associated financial transactions. If the booker or any of the delegates have no other reason to be on the site (they don't have other registrations, group memberships, shop orders or staff roles) the user record(s) will be removed too.

pganonymiseIf you want to keep the financial transactions but remove personal details (perhaps you want a record of the donation so that your numbers for the year add up, but you have been asked to remove personal details of the donor e.g. because they have left your organisation) then you can anonymise the registration. This process involves detaching the registration from the original user record(s) and attaching it to a new, anonymised user record. There are two options to do this: 1) (quickest) you can accept our suggestion of creating a new user with the name 'Anonymous User' with the current date or 2) you can select from previously created anonymous users (or create your own). Just as when you delete a payment group registration, if the booker or any of the delegates have no other reason to be on the site (they don't have other registrations, group memberships, shop orders or staff roles) the user record(s) will be permanently deleted.

Deleting (or anonymising) shop orders
For shop orders, you have an identical pair of options - you can fully delete or just anonymise the order. If your shop creates 'shop user' accounts (rather than full login accounts) for new customers then you will also get the option of whether to do the same thing for all orders which share the same email address.

Important notes:
  • A payment group registration can only be deleted or anonymised if it is either Cancelled or Expired. This is important to ensure that the registration is in a final state - i.e. no more payments can be taken.
  • You can't delete or anonymise a user record which has active payment group registrations - you must cancel the registrations first.

 

New 'whole site' view of users

Whilst for most sites the root group gives a pretty good view of who is on your site, there can be users lurking in other places - other independent groups, payment groups, those who have ordered in the shop - and there hasn't been an easy way to track them all down... until now.

If you have the "Edit Members' Details" permission over the root group, then you will get an additional Task on the members tab (under Account Management) to "View all users on the site". This will give you a listing of all users on your site together with details about why the record remains - its group memberships, payment group registrations, shop orders and organisation roles.
 

Gender

People in Hubb have always defaulted to male, and there hasn't been an option to leave this field unset (sometimes this information just isn't relevant).

We've added two further options to the gender dropdown, including being able to leave it as not set. So you now have the choice of Not set, Female, Male, Other.
 

Changes to the user record

summarytabSummary view visible to everyone
In the re-design of the web office a couple of years ago we added an improved 'read-only' view which was intended for admins who have the membership manager permission, but not permission to edit. Some of you have said this view would be useful even to admins with full editing permission, so we have made it available as an extra tab to the left of 'Details'.

Improved user activity list
The summary tab shows a list of things that have recently happened involving the user; we've improved this list to include relevant icons and to add entries when someone is added or removed from a group, or is absent from an event.

Always opens in a pop-up dialog
We've also made the user record consistent in that it now always opens in a popup dialog rather than in the body of the main window. If you can't quite see all that you need to, you can always make the dialog go full screen by clicking the square icon in its top right corner.

Gender and age category shown on the summary
The summary view didn't previously include information about the user's gender and age category, so we've added this.


Helping you manage your donations

We are introducing a new finance area to the web office that brings together some previously little-known financial management features of Hubb with some new tools to give you a fresh way of managing your donations and other payments to your site. Just click on the new Finance tab to:

  • See a dashboard that shows you key income-related stats at a glance
  • Easily import your standing order / bank transfer income by uploading your bank statement
  • Use a new quick keyed-entry screen for adding other offline income e.g. giving envelopes, including searching by "gift aid number"
  • Run a search for any payments that are eligible for Gift Aid and we will send your claim for them direct to HMRC
  • See when online card payments will be deposited at your bank account
  • Collect together any offline payments in the system and mark them as an offline bank deposit for end-to-end payment tracking
Just click on the Finance tab to get started, and see our support site articles for more information.

Finance Tab Overview

Canning SPAM

Spam posting in forums and comments on articles has become an increasing problem over the years and in spite of various steps - including the latest captcha technology - we have still been seeing large numbers of unwanted spam posts in public forums.

Since the vast majority of spam posts contain one or more URLs, we've taken the step in this release of blocking all public (i.e. from non logged-in users) posts which contain a URL. This affects all forums which are using the 'Anyone can write' security setting.

If you have a really good reason for accepting links in your public forums, you can still change the security settings to use custom rules to determine what posts are accepted, but we would not recommend that unless you are closely monitoring the forum for unwanted posts.
 

Other improvements and bug fixes

We're always looking for ways to make things better and we fix bugs as quickly as we can after they are discovered. This time we've ironed out all these issues:

  • As previously announced, we have removed the Chatter feature from Hubb. It was based on the fast-disappearing Adobe Flash, and one of the least-used features on the platform.
  • We've made some improvements to the behaviour of popup dialogs on iPads and iPhones
  • Some customers were experiencing problems adding images to documents. We eventually tracked this down to a narrow set of circumstances where the Web Office had been entered from a link which opened a new browser tab. This is all sorted now!
  • You can now edit JSON files directly in the design template editor.
  • If you downloaded a file from the assets area in the template editor, you'd get a screen overlay which wouldn't go away.
  • When picking a theme from the theme gallery you'd get an extraneous warning about unsaved changes if you changed the sort order.
  • When configuring related groups, the Save button didn't always turn orange to warn you of unsaved changes.
  • Similarly, when picking users to add to a group (for example) you weren't warned if you closed the dialog box before completing.
  • Same thing when making a resource booking - no warning if you cancelled without saving.
  • When adding accompanying links to a document the unsaved data warning didn't always work correctly.
  • An odd 'g-recaptcha-response' field was appended to form response notification emails.
  • Added a new 'Forwarded' form response status.
  • You'd get an error in the dialog for editing payment group registrations if you (or the customer) had deleted the associated card.
  • When adding new custom fields some of the dialogs didn't always size well.
  • Same for the dialog for sending login details to unused accounts - we've made it bigger.
  • When adding and removing users, the Quick Find (search box at the top of the Web Office) didn't always reflect the changes immediately.
  • On the user-side media page, entering anything other than numbers in the 'chapter' search box would give an error. We've made it clearer what you can type in that box.
  • In the web office, if you had overridden the security (i.e. set to not inherit from the group) of a recording or document file then moved it to a group with a more restrictive permission, the visibility would then be reported incorrectly in the web office (though the item would continue to display on the user-side with the permission previously set). Confused? So were we. It's fixed now, and you get a warning if the recording or file ends up being set to be more visible than the group it's in.
  • In the Mailing area, we display how many people have read the mail and clicked on a link. This doesn't make much sense for system emails which are sent repeatedly so we have removed this information for system mails.
  • If you are an administrator on more than one Hubb site, you can import users from one site to the other. However, it wasn't possible to correctly select the source group.
  • If you had set the 'Apply group membership permissions in the user picker' setting, you'd find that you couldn't select any groups in the user picker if in a context where the picker's group tree was only showing a partial tree (for example adding members to a sub-group of an independent group).
  • We've made some changes to the way we report the status of deleted podcast feeds so that third party software can better understand that a feed has gone away.
  • We've increased the number of characters allowed in the Gift Aid declaration message.
  • An intermittent bug where the task 'View moderators for this forum' on a forum page didn't quite show the full list.
  • Apostrophes in the hotpick module would be output as '
  • In group settings for a payment group you would sometimes end up with duplicate entries in the 'Allow registrations from' dropdown.
  • In check-in the clock was broken in IE/Edge.
  • We've renamed/reformatted some buttons in check-in to make them clearer.
  • We've made it clearer when a check-in  has been closed.

Coming up...

We have a number of exciting features already in the pipeline. Watch this space for....
  • Brand new My Area with new messaging features and mobile support
  • Easy, low-cost, event bookings
  • Expanded rota functionality, including enabling your members to arrange their own swaps and sign up to serve directly on the website