Milestone: Stour is scheduled for release in June 2026. Significant changes are as follows:
🪪 Custom properties
Need a Directory property that’s not included in the default list in Admin > Properties? At last, by popular request, your organisation can now define their own properties.
So if you need “Scanned volunteer agreement”, “Blood type”, or even “Favourite Pokemon” then that’s now a possibility (assuming, of course, that you have a legitimate basis for collecting that information in accordance with data protection regulations).
🪜 “Self” and Named Workflows
Administrators can now define Role Workflows that can only be run by qualifying volunteers on themselves. These can be used, for example, to permit volunteers to grant and revoke specific roles from themselves (making it possible to use roles as opt-in/opt-out mailing lists or to manage their own training progression, among other possibilities).
Workflows can also be given entirely custom names, though you can also continue to leave them blank to generate a default as before. To make it clearer what a workflow does and why you’re able to run it, we’ve improved how they’re displayed on Directory pages.
📆 Find A Shift respects Rota Visibility preferences
If you tell the Rota tab to “Save my default” to a subset of rotas, this is respected as the default when you use the Find A Shift feature from the Overview.
🗨️ Comments on Shifts can be optional
An option has been added to Admin > Features to disable comments on shifts. This means organisations can enable comments for News Items without changing the shift sign-up screens.
📏 Rota administrators can override rules “for the rest of the session”
If you’re using drag-and-drop or otherwise bulk-updating the rota in a way that involves overriding the rules (e.g. because you’re signing somebody up into a historical shift), you can now avoid having to repeatedly check the “override rules” checkbox by checking one that allows you to continually override the rules until you either log out or disable the feature.
🎨 Colour pickers modernised and more accessible
The colour pickers in Admin > Rotas > Choose colour and in the Admin > Themes panels have been replaced with modern ones that are more accessible and usable.
📱 BulkSMS now supports token-based auth
BulkSMS users may have received warnings about username+password deprecation, or have been unable to use BulkSMS due to having Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) on their BulkSMS accounts. Users can now provide authentication tokens to login and utilise BulkSMS.
✅ More uses for Signup Confirmation
If you use Shift Confirmation, Admin > Features now lets you choose whether shifts are automatically confirmed when a volunteer signs themselves up for them (the default), or if they’re left unconfirmed and can mark them as confirmed later.
🐞 Bugfixes and Minor Improvements
- Fixed a bug that could prevent an a volunteer being pulled out of into a shift if they replace a second volunteer via the swaps system, who in turn had replaced the first volunteer via the swaps system
- Made it much harder to accidentally sleep the last volunteer with Admin: Manage permissions, thereby locking your organisation out of the Admin tab
- Made Event titles wrap on small screens (e.g. mobiles).
- Improved formatting of XML version of Stats > Number of Shifts report
- User interface improvements to Wikis to make it clearer when a page can’t be edited because a Wiki is locked and to make it harder to accidentally make over-wide tables
- Improved accessibility of the rota
- Fixed Filestore drag-and-drop controls appearing for read-only users
- Fixed Filestore issue where re-uploading a file with the same name after deleting it could cause the new file to disappear from the folder view
- Removed a maintenance task relating to unpaid invoices following changes to our invoicing system
- Accrued shift points are no longer displayed if points are disabled in Admin > Features
- Improved the layout of the Admin > Features and Admin > Security panels so they’re easier to read
- Removed some UI “surprises” seen when switching between Directory’s Buttons and List views
- Improved performance of the Directory so you can load long lists of volunteers faster
We’re remain endlessly thankful for people who get in touch to suggest improvements to Three Rings.