First of all, I hope you are all safe wherever you may be. We held a couple of FixMyStreet user groups recently for body users of FixMyStreet in the UK, and someone from a large body said that their FixMyStreet installation was proving really useful in these times, as they were making far fewer internal reports due to the UK lockdown.

Admist all this, we continue to develop the software, and today are releasing version 3.0.1, a bugfix release with a couple of new features.

Admin improvements

You can now provide an automatic initial update on reports made in a particular category to a particular body, perhaps to provide information on timings or similar. Make sure the body has a user to associate comments with, and then add a response template in the Open state with auto-response checked, restricted to a list of categories if you wish. After that, the template will be used to provide an initial update on new reports made.

We have also added “staff-only” categories, which are categories that staff users can see but normal users cannot. One council is using this to provide emergency categories that their contact centre staff can use to make reports after manual triage.

The dashboard export and report search should now be quicker, after some investigation that area. We’ve also moved the overall stats off the index page to the stats page, so the index page loads more quickly.

Bugfixes

Thanks to those of you letting us know about bugs or problems. Those we have fixed include an incorrect To header on emails about inactive accounts, a couple of issues with the front page recent reports list showing different results depending on whether the cache was used or not, and a double escape in the Google Maps URL.

Others we have fixed include maintaining the category group on pin move with same category in multiple groups, and fixing sorting by most commented on the /around map view.

Development improvements

As well as the cron scripts, this release now includes a dæmon that you can use to send reports and updates. Using the dæmon will mean reports and updates are sent almost immediately after they are confirmed, but will require a bit more setup, as you’ll need to set it up as a dæmon running all the time in your system. We’ve provided an example config file for systemd to hopefully help with that. If you do run the dæmon, be sure to remove the lines of your crontab that send reports and updates :)

Alongside that, send-reports no longer prints out failures in verbose mode, there is a separate send-reports-failure-summary script to do that. Also the fetch-comments and fetch-reports scripts have been consolidated into one fetch script, which can also now parallelize fetching.

Upgrading

A full list of changes can be seen in the changelog as usual.

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If you have any questions, or problems installing the code, please do get in touch, or post on our mailing list.