Milestone: Parrett is scheduled for release on 8 February 2025. Significant changes are as follows:
👍 Comments and Reactions to News Items
If you use Comments (enabled via Admin > Features and with permissions managed via Admin > Roles), it’s now possible for volunteers to comment on news items on your overview page, so long as a checkbox is checked to permit this when editing the news item. Comments provide a way for volunteers to feed back on organisational news and engage with one another.
It’s also possible to respond quickly to a news item with an “emoji reaction”: e.g. a thumbs-up (👍), heart (❤️), or smiley face (😁), acknowledging that you’ve seen it with just a single click.
🪪 Bulk Editing in the Directory
Volunteers with Admin: Manage access can now edit the Directory in bulk, a little like a spreadsheet, but clicking the “Edit All” button on the Directory page. There, they can change any number of properties across any number of volunteers: once they’re happy, they can click to save all of the changes they’ve made simultaneously.
📧 Comms can send emails from Alternate Email addresses
By popular request, it’s now possible (via Admin > Email) to allow volunteers to send Comms emails “from” their alternate email addresses, if your organisation uses that property.
🥂 Celebrate join date anniversaries
Via Admin > Features, you can now enable the showing of not only birthdays but join date anniversaries on the Rota and Overview page, to make it easier to mark when volunteers have been with you for whole numbers of years.
🌟 Starcharts indicate Closed/Confirmed/Swap status
Starcharts on Directory pages and Stats reports (and lists of shifts on the Stats > Number of Shifts report) now indicate whether shifts are Closed (with a red “forbidden” icon), Confirmed (with a green tick icon) or Tentative/Needing A Swap (with a yellow “arrows” icon), and the tooltip shown when hovering over a star provides more detail about these states (e.g. indicating when a shift was confirmed or a swap requested).
🔤 Font size option on News, Comms, and Wikis
You can now change the font size in News Items, Comms emails, and Wiki pages. Note that this is entirely decorative – you cannot rely on font size to convey information in this way: for example, some people’s email software will render all fonts identically, and users of accessibility technologies such as screen readers and braille pads will experience all font sizes so-set identically (the same is true, of course, of existing features such as text colour).
🔐 Improved usability of TOTP codes generated by Filestore Secrets
If you’re using Filestore Secrets to generate “second factor” TOTP codes to help your volunteers log in to shared accounts, these have received a few improvements. It’s now possible to delete a TOTP key (for example, if you no longer use two-factor authentication for a shared account, or if you no longer want to make the codes available via Filestore Secrets). Also, the “30 second refresh” of codes now doesn’t continue indefinitely, which could prevent Three Rings sessions from timing-out (instead, it’ll auto-refresh once and then require you to click a button to see the next and subsequent time-based codes).
📅 Improved Shift > As an administrator interface
We’ve made the “As an administrator” tab (after clicking on a shift) clearer and easier to navigate, and made it harder to accidentally delete a shift by showing an “are you sure?” confirmation first.
📤 Improved Comms > View Sent Messages interface
Sent messages viewed via Comms now show whether the email had attachments, and make it clearer that deleting the email from the sent messages list will prevent future downloading of those attachments by its recipients.
📳 SMS provider credit level checks
Using the Admin > Text Messages panel, for most supported SMS providers, you can now check the number of credits available on your account without leaving Three Rings.
🐞 Bugfixes and Minor Improvements
- Tidied up the display of Directory pages when editing to make controls line-up better
- The appearance of comments on shifts has been updated to give them the same visual appearance as the new design used on news items.
- Fixed various rare problems occasionally faced by users who are required to change their password after logging in, which can result in a “loop” of confusing password change forms or even their password being changed to something they no longer know
- Filestore Secrets no longer sometimes claim to have TOTP codes associated with them when they don’t, and it’s now possible to delete the TOTP code generation keys associated with Filestore Secrets
- Ensured links in the footer, our emails to volunteers, and elsewhere use
https://rather thanhttp://(the latter redirects to the former, but specifyinghttps://improves security and can make the links resolve faster) - Improved reliability of cache disposal when CSS and JavaScript assets are updated (helps prevent users seeing “old” styles after future Three Rings updates)
- When generating the Number of Shifts report, relationships weren’t being found for volunteers who hadn’t done shifts in the report period. This has now been fixed.
- When you ask Three Rings to delete all your cookies, it now also asks your browser to delete any
localStorage, cache, or anything else that might be left on your computer following your visit. - Made it easier for our Support Team volunteers to verify your identity when filling in our contact form: so long as you get to our contact form by clicking a link or button within Three Rings, after logging in, your authenticated identity will be passed-on to us, which can make it easier for us to get you help faster
- Fixed a bug that would reject creation of new rotas with spaces at the start/end of their names, rather than simply automatically removing those spaces
- Fixed a bug that could cause volunteers’ birthdays not to appear on the rota if they were born early in January
- Improved error messages when trying to connect a third-party authentication (e.g. a Google Account) to a Three Rings account if that third-party authentication is already used with a different Three Rings account
We’re remain endlessly thankful for people who get in touch to suggest improvements to Three Rings.