We’ve just released version 0.32 of Alaveteli, our open source platform for running Freedom Of Information sites. Here are some of the highlights.

Making correspondence threads easier to navigate

Thanks to our designers, it’s now possible to collapse individual messages in a correspondence thread in order to focus on just the parts you’re trying to read. Plus you can quickly collapse (or expand) all the messages in the thread using the “Collapse all” and “Expand all” links from the “Actions” menu.

Alaveteli Pro users gain the additional benefit of a redesigned sidebar which allows for easier navigation of lengthy correspondence and avoids having to scroll to the top of the request thread to update its status. See Martin’s full explanation here.

Better password security

We’ve started enforcing stricter password length constraints wherever a password is set or updated to help users keep their accounts secure. And we’re also using a stronger encryption method for storing password data, using bcrypt rather than the older SHA1 algorithm to obscure the actual password. (Be sure to run the rake task documented in the release upgrade notes to upgrade secure password storage for all existing users.)

You can read more about what this does and why it’s important if you’re interested in the technical details behind this upgrade.

Authorities not subject to FOI law

We’ve adopted WhatDoTheyKnow’s foi_no tag for authorities to indicate that although the authority is listed on the site, it is not legally subject to FOI law. This could be for advocacy purposes – if it’s felt an authority should be covered by legislation – or where the authority has agreed to respond on a voluntary basis.

Adding the foi_no tag now causes an extra message to appear under the authority’s name on their page and on all related requests, and removes language about legal responsibilities to reply from the messages sent to users.

To improve the UI, we’ve made a similar change for authorities with the eir_only tag to make it clearer that such authorities are only accepting requests about the environment.

(Don’t worry admins, you don’t need to remember all this – we’ve updated the documentation on the edit page to reflect the new functionality!)

Improvements for site admins

We’ve made it easier for admins to ban users who sign up to post spam links in their profile. There’s now a “Ban for spamming” button which is available on the user edit page or as soon as you expand the user’s details in the listing rather than having to manually edit user metadata.

We’ve also made it harder to leave requests flagged as vexatious (or “not_foi”) in an inconsistent state. Previously the site just assumed that vexatious requests would always be hidden. Now the admin interface enforces the hiding of vexatious requests by showing warnings when a request is set as vexatious while it’s visible on the site, and prevents the updated request from being saved until a valid state is selected.

Announcements

And last but not least – introducing the new Announcements feature!

Easier popup banner management

Site admins will be relieved to hear that they can now update the popup banner message on the site without needing to schedule developer time.

This feature supports multi-language sites so if you set the announcement for your main (default) language, it will appear across all language versions that you have not added a specific translation for.

Admin-only announcements

You can set announcements that will only be seen by fellow administrators when they visit the summary page. (If you’re running a Pro site, you can also have announcements that will only be seen by your Pro admins.)

Pro announcements

Announcements for Pro users appear as a carousel at the top of their dashboard. So far we’ve used it on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro to publicise new features, offer discount codes, and encourage people to share their published stories with us.

The full list of highlights and upgrade notes for this release is in the changelog.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed!

You may have heard that a widespread security problem – ‘Heartbleed’ – has been found that affects a large proportion of all websites on the Internet.

Here is one of the many explanations about the nature of the problem.

Members of the mySociety team have reviewed our potential exposure to the vulnerability.

We have no indication that our sites have been attacked, or that any information has been stolen, but the nature of the vulnerability would make an attack difficult to detect, and we prefer to be reasonably cautious.

What does this mean for you? The advice from around the web has been for people to change passwords, especially on sites they use that contain a lot of very important information (e.g. your email account).

We think the risk that passwords have been compromised is low, but as changing passwords occasionally is always a good idea anyway, now might be a good time.

For those of you interested in the technical detail of our response, we have:

• Upgraded the SSL software
• Installed new SSL certificates based on a new private key
• Revoked the old SSL certificates
• Replaced the secrets used for security purposes in the affected sites
• Removed active sessions on affected sites, so that users will need to log in again
• Required that users with administrative access to affected sites reset their passwords
• Required that staff users reset their passwords
• Notified affected commercial clients so that they can take appropriate action