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Release Notes

v13.2.0

December 2023 Version 13.2.0

13.2.0 is a minor release.

Bug Fixes

  • Set contactTimezones for campaign when Redis is disabled

Improvements

  • Additional error catching
  • Update bug report template
  • Indicate progress in UI for bulk send
  • Support for PostgreSQL 15
  • Update Auth0 instructions

Appreciations

v13.1.0

October 2023 Version 13.1.0

13.1.0 is a minor release.

Bug Fixes

  • Upgrade Auth0 Lock
  • Fix Auth0 password reset issue
  • Update Heroku deployment

Improvements

  • Remove required Twilio fields
  • Bump dependencies
  • Mobile-compatible texter UI

New Features

  • Per-campaign bulk send
  • NGP VAN service manager

Appreciations

v13.0.1

September 2023 Version 13.0.1

This is a patch release that has passing tests and updates docker file to node16.

Appreciations

Arique Aguilar, Kathy Nguyen

v13.0

February 2023: Version 13.0

13.0 is a major release. This release is a node upgrade from Node 12 to Node 16.

Appreciations

v12.3

October 2022: Version 12.3

12.3 is a minor release. This release includes JWT-powered Delegated Authentication, a new contact-notes section in the texter-sidebox, along with additional improvements and fixes seen below.

Bug fixes

  • Fixes views for Demo Texting
  • Fixes auto-optout if Redis is not enabled

Improvements

  • Add disabled prop to GSSelectField
  • Updates dependencies

New features

  • JWT-powered Delegated Authentication
  • Adds a new contact-notes Texter Sidebox

Appreciations

v12.2

June 2022: Version 12.2

12.2 is a minor release. This release includes the CiviCRM integration, a well-tested Bandwidth integration, as well as other minor bug fixes, improvements, and new features detailed below.

Bug fixes

  • Fix CSV upload error messages
  • Fix Auth0 password reset behavior
  • Fix wrong counts in edge cases
  • Fix wrong service vendor error links
  • Fix modal going blank after clicking "Clear Response" button

Improvements

  • Update dependencies

New features

  • Send auto opt-out response
  • CiviCRM integration
  • Bandwidth integration

Appreciations

v12.1

April 2022: Version 12.1

12.1 is a minor release bundling many small bug fixes, feature implementations, and documentation updates.

Bug-fixes

  • Fix action handler bugs
  • Delay seeding zip codes until database is created
  • Add error validation to canned responses
  • Fix documentation links and formatting
  • Fix bugs when viewing all messages
  • Fix wrong message sending in bulk send
  • Fix "Bulk Send" button display

Improvements

  • NGP Van user guide
  • Azure deployment documentation
  • Updates to onboarding and email configuration documentation
  • Automatic TexterTodoList updates (when we have Redis+Postgres)
  • Add GitHub workflow to automatically build Spoke images
  • Update dependency versions
  • Update migration instructions for Heroku

New features

  • Ability to hide interactions workflow
  • Show duration of message assignment
  • Features to reduce messaging costs
  • Add Nation Builder event RSVP action handler

Appreciations

v12.0

February 2022: Version 12.0

Migration Notes

This is a major release and includes a schema change. This is a minor schema change, which you can run before/during deployment (either by leaving/disabling SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS=false or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions. It includes adding nullable columns "answer_actions" and "answer_actions_data" to the canned_response table. If you are using Redis, you will need to clear the canned response cache keys after deployment.

Bug-fixes

  • Fix failing GitHub Actions tests
  • Fix scrub landlines bug
  • Set default twilioDialogOpen value for Dialog open prop
  • Parse campaign timezone offsets
  • Fix service manager's "onOptOut" function
  • Fix outbound unassign behavior when Redis isn't configured
  • Fix need to click twice on save button after assigning contacts to texter
  • Fix TZ issue

Improvements

  • Implement Zapier response handling
  • Implement Canned Response CSV upload
  • Message review action for multi-change message status
  • Implement Assignment Contacts sidebar
  • Material UI Theming
  • Add auth/account hook to Twilio onMessageSend
  • Document --no-optional-dependencies for AWS Lambda
  • Document TEXTER_SIDEBOX_FIELDS environment variable
  • Update default auto optout documentation
  • Add per campaign Twilio account switching

Additional changes

  • Remove "Add All" button from Texters admin page
  • Dependency updates: moment, nodemailer
  • Remove unnecessary Twilio env variables
  • Remove old texting interface

Appreciations

v11.1

October 2021: Version 11.1

11.1 is a bug-fix release. After many changes in 11.0, there were a few problems that surfaced and with the help of reporting from the community (special shoutout to Karla Bradley at NYCET and Brendan, Daniel, and Amy at State Voices).

Bug-fixes

  • Campaign Admin: Texter manual changing/adding of assigned triggered app failure
  • Setting/Updating Twilio credentials in admin Settings failure
  • Buying numbers for an organization's message service failure
  • Clicking Re-open
  • minor additions/fixes to service-managers api

Appreciations

v11.0

August 2021: Version 11.0

This major release upgrades several backend libraries and significantly extends and refactors the way vendors (e.g. Twilio) are connected. First, Stefan Hayden has helped us upgrade our Material UI library -- so all components may look slightly different in style, but nothing should look unfamiliar. This will make future UI improvements much easier and for developer-contributors to use current documentation and resources (and less buggy!) for continuing UI evolution.

More details below for a few migration steps depending on your deployment:

  • There is a database migration for anyone upgrading -- instances with a very large message table have special instructions
  • AWS Lambda deployments have slightly different deployment commands now
  • Anyone using EXPERIMENTAL_CAMPAIGN_PHONE_NUMBERS or EXPERIMENTAL_TWILIO_PER_CAMPAIGN_MESSAGING_SERVICE require setup changes (these were experimental features)

Improvements

Service vendors and Service managers extensions

Based on work from Larry Person, there is a large refactor of "service-vendors" which makes it easier to contain the code to support a vendor connection like Twilio (and others -- there is an experimental Bandwidth.com implementation now, as well). Service Managers is in-turn an extension-api that allows one to hook into service-vendors and other campaign events easily. Adam Greenspan has created a Sticky Sender feature which allows one to keep the same phone number across conversations, so e.g. Twilio message services aren't necessary.

Additional changes

  • Redis upgrade -- please report any issues -- new Heroku installs support Redis 6 which requires a TLS connection
  • keyboard shortcuts for advancing left/right
  • service-managers: carrier-lookup, scrub-bad-mobilenums, and per-campaign-messageservices (replacing EXPERIMENTAL_TWILIO_PER_CAMPAIGN_MESSAGING_SERVICE)
  • NGPVAN updates and fixes to use their changed/most recent API

Migration Steps

Database upgrades

  • This is a major release and includes a schema change.
  • For small instances simply leave/set SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions.
  • If you are running Spoke on Heroku and updating to version 11 or later, either remove SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" if it is set in config, or set SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS=false
  • For instances with a large message table, we recommend setting NO_INDEX_CHANGES=1 before running the migration, and then manually running two commands:
    • CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY cell_msgsvc_user_number_idx ON message (contact_number, messageservice_sid, user_number);
    • DROP INDEX cell_messageservice_sid_idx;

The schema changes include adding a new table organization_contact which will track contacts across campaigns in an organization -- for things like subscription_status (in future), whether the number is a landline or what number has been used to contact them in the past (for 'sticky' sending). We also add user_number at the end of already-indexed cell-messageservice, to make it easier to search for user_numbers (also for sticky sending features).

AWS Deployment changes

Instead of running a single 'claudia' command, You will need to tweak two things:

  • Add an environment variable ASSETS_DIR_PREBUILT and set it to the absolute directory of your deployment checkout directory + "/build/client" (or whatever you have your ASSETS_DIR var set to). For example, on a Mac it might be something like "/Users/Sky/spoke/build/client"
  • Instead of a single deployment command, you will first need to run
    1. ASSETS_DIR=./build/client/assets ASSETS_MAP_FILE=assets.json NODE_ENV=production yarn prod-build-client
    2. and then for your claudia update command you need to include your usual command line parameters and ADD --no-optional-dependencies

These steps remove the client-side libraries from the server-side build, which is necessary now that the client-side libraries are too large to 'fit' into an AWS Lambda server deploy file. This is documented in the AWS setup/deploy steps

Changes for Experimental Per-campaign phone numbers/message services

For those that used the experimental feature EXPERIMENTAL_CAMPAIGN_PHONE_NUMBERS, it has been moved and refactored into a or Service Manager extension -- for these experimental installs (ONLY!), change to setting SERVICE_MANAGERS=per-campaign-messageservices

EXPERIMENTAL_TWILIO_PER_CAMPAIGN_MESSAGING_SERVICE is no longer supported. Please create an issue if you still have a use-case for this -- there is tentative work to move its functionality into per-campaign-messageservices as well, but only if it still has users.

Appreciations

v10.2

April 2021: Version 10.2

This is another minor release bringing some small features while in the background we are doing some major plumbing work to support other message service vendors better. Some small improvements/bugfixes:

Improvements

  • Documentation improvements around some experimental service settings
  • Bulk Script Editor - Interaction Step / Canned Response (thanks to @bchrobot from Politics Rewired branch)
  • Un-started Campaigns with the word 'template' in their title will have the "[Copy Campaign]" button on the edit page
  • Bugfix: Admin show/close menu improved
  • Bugfix: Fix graphql error responses within DEBUG/SHOW_SERVER_ERRORS
  • Experimental: You can now enable an environment variable HOLD_ENTER_KEY which means texters can hold the enter key down to text sequential contacts.
  • Experimental: A new dynamicassignment-batches strategy called finished-replies-tz - this will only assign contacts to texters with currently in-texting-hours timezones. Especially for campaign contact lists that have varied timezones and when texters will return to jumping in the campaign in later hours when new timezones are allowed, then this might be better than 'finished-replies' (please report experiences, good/bad)

Appreciations

v10.1

April 2021: Version 10.1

The most significant change in this release is an upgrade to React and React-formal libraries -- this has little effect on the interface, but allows us to stay more current with the open-source libraries that this project depends on. This makes it easier to find current documentation and follow patterns that current developers expect to see. Much thanks to Stefan Hayden for this difficult work.

Looking to version 11, our next planned release, we will be focusing on abstracting our message service code so that we are not dependent as much on Twilio -- an important step as we navigate looming changes by phone carriers and message service providers.

Migration Notes

This is a minor point release, and so has no database migrations or other required configuration changes. If you deploy to AWS, we should note that we have tweaked the deploy code to use aws cli instead of s3cmd -- This is very likely to be installed already so nothing should need changing. If not, then do install the aws command line CLI and configure your credentials that you used for s3cmd into ~/.aws/config

Other Improvements

  • Performance improvements to the Texter Todos page
  • Feature: Add ability to suppress tags in Message Review
  • Bugfix: export contacts including those without assignment
  • Bugfix: Mobilize event shifter texter sidebox autofill
  • UI tweak: Remove yellow badges for 'skipped/past messages' to avoid texter confusion
  • UI fix: cursor position should go to end when editing existing scripts.
  • Allow passing of custom fields to mobilecommons-signup action handler (config w/ UMC_FIELDS)
  • UI: show contact loader load-info in campaign edit page after campaign starts (e.g. to see name of csv uploaded)

See links and notes from the 10.1 pull request for a list of all changes that were included.

Appreciations

v10.0

January 2021: Version 10.0

Post-election and License Change

This is the first release since after the Nov 2020 election. Spoke was used by more than 500 organizations sending millions of text messages over the year. It was used in everything from Movement for Black Lives, to local volunteer-run groups, to senatorial races. In the primaries it was used by at least four presidential candidates. This is a testament to the community that has built up here around progressive organizing.

Spoke is just one example of campaign and organizing software, and it's worth noting that open-source doesn't have to work on just one project -- open-source, or rather collaborative source, where organizations and volunteers believing in economic and racial justice can also collaborate around the code that helps run our organizations and communicate to our allies -- collaborative source is Organizing in code.

One thing we are doing to keep our community working closely together is changing our license. The previous license was "MIT" and did not have any restrictions on distribution. After many community discussions and universal consensus, we are moving to the GPL3 with a "share-alike" license requirement, meaning that to use our software, you have an obligation to share back improvements you've made with others. Interest in this requirement especially came from a growing ecosystem of Spoke commercial hosters, which are contributing to the community, but want to compete and differentiate themselves while fearlessly sharing their code back to the larger community, so everyone can benefit from progressive innovation each cycle.

We also wanted to embed our community's values in the license and in the Spoke application itself. It's not easy to distill progressive values into something short and sweet, and we do not claim to have done so. Nonetheless, we wanted to create a statement that should be a baseline for everyone in our community and I look forward to embedding more quotes from progressive leaders and in our documentation going forward.

The universally agreed statement to include in a few places where texters can see it and is required to be preserved by our new license terms is:

Spoke is developed and maintained by people committed to fighting oppressive systems and structures, including economic injustice, racism, patriarchy, and militarism.

Migration Notes

As usual, we try to avoid as much backwards incompatibility as possible -- people still successfully upgrade from very old releases and we will continue that community commitment so it's always as easy as possible to upgrade and stay up-to-date.

  • This is a major release and includes a schema change. This is a minor schema change, which you can run before/during migration (either by leaving/disabling SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions. It includes adding a nullable "media" column to the message table, and adds a new table, "assignment_feedback"
  • Some timezone bugs were resolved, but part of the issue was found during an upgrade that we had incorrect defaults for the timezone -- if you have settings for either environment variable DST_REFERENCE_TIMEZONE or DEFAULT_TZ if it was e.g. "America/New_York" then you should change it to US/Eastern -- please lookup and adjust other timezones as appropriate. If you did not have these variables set, then you should keep them blank -- note that not including a DEFAULT_TZ (or TZ) will default to texting hours that most conservatively work for the continental US (12pm ET - 9pm ET)

Major Improvements

As the first release post-election, this mostly gathered together fixes and improvements that were made in the run-up to the election. While last year was a very active year, we have quite a bit planned for this year, as well.

  • Media responses: Texters can now see if there is a media (image/video/audio) response from a contact and click to open and see it. While this can be useful, media responses often include offensive content from hostile responses and can affect texters. Thus we also include a hide-media Texter Sidebox option you can enable organization-wide and/or set whether texters can see media per-campaign.
  • Texter Feedback setup: If you add texter-feedback to TEXTER_SIDEBOXES, when Admins click to 'review' a texter's campaign conversations, the admin can provide feedback on a number of axes -- this is great for training up new texters.
  • Cypress test suite - additional tests to make sure bugs don't show up in our user-interface were added and organized. We hope to expand these in the future.
  • Message Review: Unassigning -- it's been possible to assign conversations, but sometimes it's also useful to unassign conversations. This is especially useful when complemented with vetted-takeconversations Dynamic Assignment batch handler.
  • Phone number inventory: Numbers are now deleteable
  • Mobilize Event Shift texter sidebox: for integrations with Mobilize (needs enabling by setting some environment variables documented in the code and adding it to TEXTER_SIDEBOXES environment variable)
  • Canned Response search -- for larger lists of canned responses and survey responses, there's now a search bar on top for texters to narrow the list.
  • Re-orderable interaction steps

Bugfixes and Minor featuers

See links and notes from the 10.0 pull request for a list of all changes that were included.

Appreciations

v9.2

September 2020: Version 9.2

Spoke Project Status Update

As we are getting closer to the 2020 election, MoveOn is 'code-freezing' changes on our production instance. We believe campaigns and Spoke hosters would be well-advised to do the same and aim for stability over this time. The only releases before November 3rd, 2020 will be for security updates.

We will also continue to merge additions to documentation and integration test PRs directly into our main branch.

That said, other hosters and developers are continuing to make bug fixes and add important features for their own texting programs. Normally, MoveOn's release process involves first gathering a release candidate, then running QA on the changes, and finally running it in production for a day or two to shake out any bugs missed during QA and review and to evaluate the release 'at scale'. Without this final step, we can't make a strong commitment to release readiness.

However, we want to track these improvements, so we will be maintaining two 'experimental' PRs -- one more conservative with small changes and mostly bug fixes: stage-main-postelection2020-stable. The other with larger changes but riskier to deploy before the election: stage-main-postelection2020-unstable. If a hosting partner steps up to run one of these at any time and affirms its stability, we will mark that. Additionally, in the conservative PR, we will link to specific PRs that if you run into a particular bug in production you can cherry-pick that PR to fix that issue.

After the election, I'm sure there will be a lot of changes and diverged branches from different organizations. We will be here to try to gather those changes, but we'd like to note that will be significant work and can't happen without those organizations also making an effort to separate their 'hacks' to make something work vs. changes that will be maintainable and support the long-term architecture and stability of Spoke for the community. We recommend whenever possible, opening a PR on specific small changes -- these are more likely to be mergeable after the election. If that's not possible due to time/development constraints, we ask that you at least open a 'organization dev' PR that just includes all your changes -- then post-election we can at least sort out the features and the community can have a place to see what was done.

I'd like to take a moment to celebrate this amazing community -- so many progressive orgs and campaigns are using Spoke and contributing back to it -- along with a cadre of committed volunteer developers, designers and texters. Good luck with all your campaigns -- let's win!

New Features/Improvements

  • Throughout the admin on the People page, Message Review, and Campaign stats, there are little links to the texter's own Todos page view. This can be useful for admins to see what campaigns a texter is part of and debug any issues where seeing the texter view can help.
  • Experimental DB_READONLY_HOST variable which can connect to a replica/read-only instance for some specific queries. In the event of high database stress, setting this may help relieve IO on the 'writer' database instance.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a regression in 9.1 where /twilio-message-report Twilio validation would fail if TWILIO_MULTI_ORG=1 but TWILIO_MESSAGE_CALLBACK_URL was NOT set. We reverted that behavior, but recommend that you update your twilio config to /twilio-message-report/<org id> in this configuration and then set TWILIO_VALIDATION=1
  • Fixed a but in 9.1 on the superadmin organizations page where creating an organization did not work.
  • Fixed two minor security issues to restrict post-login redirect and hide errors on the front-end by-default. If you want to re-enable errors on the front-end, set SHOW_SERVER_ERROR=1
  • Fixed issue with Release Contacts texter sidebox where clicking "Done for the day" would not give feedback on the todos screen -- it now clears the 'send first messages' and 'replies' buttons where appropriate.

Appreciations

Thanks to jeffm2001 and schuyler1d

v9.1

September 2020: Version 9.1

  • Regression notice: When TWILIO_MULTI_ORG=1 is set but TWILIO_MESSAGE_CALLBACK_URL is not, /twilio-message-report fails. There is a fix that is also available in 9.2 (above).

New Features/Improvements

  • New UI for adding organizations to your instance: There is now a page only accessible for users with is_superadmin set for adding orgs in a Spoke instance. You can access this screen through the user menu under "superadmin tools." We've gated this feature to only users with that privilege to keep any roles you already have on your instances from suddenly gaining the ability to add orgs. You can only change a user's is_superadmin status with a direct DB query at this time. The first user on new instances will be a superadmin by default now
  • Past campaign contact loader: Creates a contact loader that allows someone to select contacts from a past campaign and filter optionally for a particular question response (or no response) by entering a message review query into the contact loader. The contact loader has instructions inline.
  • ActionNetwork action handler: syncs TAGS and EVENT RSVPs back to ActionNetwork when linked to a question answer in an interaction script.
  • Two new custom fields to track contact by id: We're including contactId and contactIdBase62 as custom fields to help with use cases around tracking link clicks. At MoveOn we have been using these fields as url params in our scripts for our data exports -- e.g. Hi will you rsvp to an event at someeventlink.com/source={contactIdBase62} the base62 variant is to keep the size of the text messages down.
  • Downtime configuration: new env vars DOWNTIME and DOWNTIME_NO_DB (see reference) put Spoke in a downtime state that renders a downtime page to serve as a "kill switch" if there are problems with an instance. This is a useful tool for dealing with bugs, scaling issues or deployments that require manual intervention.
  • Sqs batching and dispatchProcesses improvements: improvements to the SQS functionality in Spoke to help set up AWS SQS queueing. Check out this Twilio blog post for more information.
  • Add importing of response tags to google docs import: You can now use italics to include tags your google script import templating. Check the default template in the Google script import doc for details.
  • "Convos" and "Stats" buttons on the campaign edit page for live campaigns: The "stats" button will take you to the campaign stats page, the "convos" button will take you to message review pre-filtered to only show messages from that campaign. These changes make it easier to navigate back and forth between Campaign Edit/Stats pages.
  • Job to update optouts regularly: In case the update fails or in the case of autoupdates where it does not update by default you can get this job running to keep opt outs staying updated. For more information on how to run jobs in your build, check the Heroku (worker dynos), AWS (cron jobs) or your infra of choices's docs on running jobs.
  • To reduce the information sent to the texter, we filter out fields that aren't used in scripts or canned responses.
  • Speed up deduplication query

Bug Fixes

  • Allow admins and supervols to see organization settings
  • fixes allContactsCount: it should not always be 1
  • datawarehouse contact-loaders fixes

Appreciations

Thanks to lperson, bdatkins, hiemanshu, dcCoder9, kelwen-p, lesia-liao, abp5fn and schuyler1d

v9.0

August 2020: Version 9.0

This is a major release and therefore requires a schema change. This is a minor schema change, which you can run before/during migration (either by leaving/disabling SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions

We just (stealth) released 8.1 -- why the quick second release? Well, we deployed 8.1 at MoveOn on production and it was doing great for two days. On the third day there was a final set of tweaks and thus we cut the release for 8.1 on Wednesday 8/26. Well, Murphy's law -- two hours after we finished up the release we started hitting production issues. We have not yet scaled up for our "hockeystick" (where the participation graph looks like a hockey stick and surges) period and to prepare @schuyler1d asked the campaigners to "try to break Spoke this week." The team sent 1 million messages with 70K sent in a 5 minute period and our database started failing.

We will be upgrading this weekend and the great thing about Spoke is it scales "linearly" -- if you double the resources, then you can roughly double the contacts/texters-per-day metrics.

But because of the timing it was ambiguous whether we 'just' hit scaling issues yesterday or whether there were bugs in Spoke 8.1. @schuyler1d spent the day tracking everything that went wrong and determined that it was scaling. This prompted some urgent improvements to make our queries more efficient with increased focus on more improvements so the application can do its part in keeping scaling costs as low as possible. But these last set are pretty impactful -- even without upgrading our system with almost the same texting volume as yesterday we are seeing half the database load.

9.0 Changes

  • Schema change on the opt_out table (please see instructions for migrating)
  • Drastically improves the query efficiency for the Texter Todos page
  • Removes some liability of thrashing with auto-optout updating.

8.1 Highlights

8.1 still makes up the bulk of 9.0's featureset, so here's what to look out for and check out the 8.1 section for the full list of awesome changes

  • Tagging: The tags feature is no longer experimental! This release includes a few adjustments to tags that finish the tagging story:
    • Resolve tags: tags can now be resolved in message review by clicking the 'x' in their upper right corner.
    • Canned response tagging: you can apply 1 or more tags to a canned response which will automatically apply that tags when a texter uses that canned response.
  • Addressable message review queries: message review now has "addressable urls" meaning that the url is changed whenever you make a query. This now allows you to directly link to a specific query. Because of this, there are now links in the texter stats section of the campaign page that link to a filter for that specific texter and a new "convos" button that takes you directly to a view that filters down to only messages within the campaign.
  • Allow search terms to be excluded from the campaign search: If a search starts with "-", it filters out campaigns that match the rest of the search term.
  • Documentation microsite: our docs now exist on an external microsite to help our docs
  • Documentation now exists for all of the extensions!

Appreciations

Thanks for quick and impactful work from schuyler1d to get 8.1 to a better more stable 9.0! Thank you so much to the 11 community contributors that made all the features and bug fixes possible: inorvig, oburbank, aschneit, jeffm2001, lperson, ibrand, bdatkins, JeremyParker, tekkamanendless , sharonsolomon, nke5ka

v8.1

August 2020: Version 8.1

Note: we highly recommend upgrading to v9.0 if you're on v8.1 since 9.0 helps a lot with election time scaling

New Features/Improvements

  • Tagging: The tags feature is no longer experimental! This release includes a few adjustments to tags that finish the tagging story:
    • Resolve tags: tags can now be resolved in message review by clicking the 'x' in their upper right corner.
    • Canned response tagging: you can apply 1 or more tags to a canned response which will automatically apply that tags when a texter uses that canned response.
  • Remove the Opt Outs sidebar menu: this menu did not scale well and wasn't being used by many orgs. All it did was print a long list of all of the phone numbers that had opted out across the organization. You can easily query the database to get that same list of numbers.
  • Addressable message review queries: message review now has "addressable urls" meaning that the url is changed whenever you make a query. This now allows you to directly link to a specific query. Because of this, there are now links in the texter stats section of the campaign page that link to a filter for that specific texter and a new "convos" button that takes you directly to a view that filters down to only messages within the campaign.
  • UI button in the settings page for clearing the organization and extension cache. If an admin uses a SQL client to modify organization.features or metadata changes in an external resource, such as NGP VAN (the use cases in VAN is that a saved list was added or survey questions or activists code were modified; Spoke's VAN integration won't go back to VAN through the API if those metadata are present in the cache)
  • Allow search terms to be excluded from the campaign search. If a search starts with "-", it filters out campaigns that match the rest of the search term.
  • Foundation for a documentation microsite to help our docs stay readable and accessible to devs and admin
  • New Freshworks Freshdesk texter-sidebox for anyone using Freshdesk as a help hub for texters! Enable it by adding freshworks-widget to the texter-sideboxes env var list
  • Add support for Twilio error 21408 which happens when you try to send a message to a phone number outside of your "Geo-Permissions" settings
  • More clarity to the Redis docs
  • Receive Twilio messages from behind a proxy using TWILIO_MESSAGE_CALLBACK_URL
  • Dynamic Assignment Batch strategy can be chosen per-campaign
  • You can now search for error codes in message review!
  • Documentation now exists for all of the extensions!

Bug Fixes

  • Copy all relevant campaign properties when copying a campaign (the whole campaign is now copied over and the interaction steps are copied in the right order)
  • Show a pop up when the copy campaign button is clicked to let you know it was copied
  • fix message sending where additional context info needs to be sent for service.sendMessage than previously -- e.g. for TWILIO auth, etc
  • Small phone inventory improvements
  • Small message aesthetic touch ups
  • Remove the scrollbars in every cell in the admin and people pages
  • Ensure that interactions are copied deterministically

Appreciations

Thanks to inorvig, oburbank, aschneit, jeffm2001, lperson, ibrand, bdatkins, JeremyParker, tekkamanendless , sharonsolomon, nke5ka and schuyler1d

v8.0

August 2020: Version 8.0 Note: Dynamic assignment is changing! Pay special attention to the write up. This new and improved dynamic assignment should make the dynamic assignment flow friendlier to coaching new texters, and assist the reassignment flow.

This is a major release and therefore requires a schema change which you can run before/during migration (either by leaving/disabling SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions. Anything marked as experimental has not yet been tested on a production texting campaign. We're marking this as a major version update 8.0 because there are several backwards-incompatible changes that we believe are important and valuable.

Backwards incompatible Changes

  • Dynamic Assignment is changing: After a lot of feedback and some great inspiration from the Warren Spoke we're modifying dynamic assign. Texters will now request batch sizes instead of getting an endless stream of texts. The admin can customize the batch size and who is allowed to click request after their first batch. There is more documentation on this feature here.This feature is also optionally complemented by the new "release texts" feature which is mentioned under "New Features/Improvements"
  • Old Texter UI is no longer supported: We removed the DEPRECATED_TEXTERUI env variable and the old Texter UI is officially phased out
  • Texter Sideboxes are now off by default: You now need to enable options in organization Settings tab (they previously were just automatically enabled from the variable)
    • If your previously set TEXTER_SIDEBOXES, then you must add default-dynamicassignment (and we recommend adding other new ones listed in new features) for dynamic assignment to work.
    • If you are not using additional/experimental sideboxes, we recommend removing this environment variable entirely, so new texter sideboxes in later versions will automatically be available.
    • HOLD_ENTER_KEY no longer exists as an option (it was deprecated in our last major version)
  • For non-US or subscriber-only mode users ONLY -- if you enabled ALLOW_SEND_ALL=1 (if you did not, then DO not do this), then you'll need to check to enable that feature in the Settings panel of your organization (as a is_superadmin user)
  • Initial text messages are editable -- we recommend allowing the (default) TEXTER_SIDEBOXES= to include default-editinitial to make this option more muted.
  • the src/integrations/ directory is renamed src/extensions/ to indicate that it's not just integrations with 3rd parties but also components that extend the system itself (message-handlers, texter-sideboxes, dynamicassignment-batches, job-runners). If you added your own src/integrations/ items make sure they are moved, and relevant imports are changed.
  • There is a small migration to the campaign table which needs to be run before/during migration (either by leaving/disabling SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions

New Features/Improvements

  • Use of Spoke is subject to legal restrictions which each organization should review and understand, including recent guidance from an FCC ruling. We recommend system administrators review the settings outlined here along with consulting your own legal advice.
  • Experimental Phone number management for campaigns: A much requested feature for scaling past the 400 phone numbers limit.
    • turn this on with EXPERIMENTAL_CAMPAIGN_NUMBERS
  • Experimental Release Texts: Dynamic Assignment will also include a way for texters to release texts! That way when a texter is done for the day they can release texts without admin needing to go in and reassign them.
    • Toggle this on and off in the organization settings menu
  • texter-sidebox extension improvements: (SummaryComponent, Empty context)
  • new message-handler to-ascii: converts smart quotes and special dash characters to ascii. That way unicode wont surprisingly enlarge the message size.
  • VAN action handler improvements
  • Allow for action handlers to be included in google doc imports
  • Better docs for developer onboarding
  • Ctrl-z and Ctrl-Enter to Send (and any letter key/Enter sends on initial texting page)
  • For phone number purchase interface, entering "800" will buy toll-free numbers (instead of by-areacode)
  • Admins can visit app/:organizationId/todos/other/:userId to look at another user's todos page.
  • Additional organization settings available from the Settings section (If you have an existing instance, enable this with OWNER_CONFIGURABLE=ALL
  • Phone number buying and Twilio multi org enabled by default for new installs --
  • Phone number buying can purchase toll-free numbers with "800"
  • Campaign "response window" defaults to 48 hours and can be changed per campaign and then queries in Message Review to find who hasn't responded past the window. A default can be set in Organization Settings page (overriding defaults)

Bug Fixes

  • Fix VAN action handler with warehouse loader
  • Block blank message sending
  • Fixes needsResponseCount out of sync with optouts (auto and no message)
  • fix GSScriptEditor for Safari browsers that auto-focus

Appreciations

Thanks to jasterix, ibrand, jeffm2001, lperson, matteosb, tekkamanendless , and schuyler1d

v7.1

July 2020: Release 7.1 is a testament to the community working together -- several organizations using Spoke contributed features along with several open-source progressive volunteers (several as their first contribution)! Thank you to all who contributed. At the top in "Significant for deployments" there are top-lines for what to know before or during upgrade. As usual, please let us know if you have any issues.

Significant for deployments:

  • After changing the texter send keyboard shortcut to Ctrl-X we have moved it (again) to Ctrl-Enter (to avoid conflict with OS 'cut' shortcuts)
  • There is a small migration to the user table which needs to be run before/during migration (either by leaving/disabling SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" or for AWS Lambda, see the db migration instructions
  • If you are running on lambda, you might consider setting JOB_RUNNER="lambda-async" for better scaling/performance

New Features

  • Suspending texters: marking a texter Suspended in the People page immediately stops them from being able to text - @JeremyParker
  • Zapier action handler support for triggering when contact tags are updated - @lperson (enable with adding zapier-action in your ACTION_HANDLERS env var)
  • Extra Profile Fields -- by setting an organization features variable in the database, additional profile fields can be added during signup, which can be required even for existing users to complete. - @jeffm2001
  • Slack Authentication (alternative to Auth0 or local) - @matteosb
  • Tag data in campaign export files - @jeffm2001
  • DataWarehouse contact loader bugfixes (actually works now) - @jeffm2001
  • Edit canned responses (you used to just be able to add/remove -- now you can edit) - @aschneit
  • Reduced 'flash' while sending initial text messages -- now the Send button just blinks instead of the whole screen for reduced visual strain - @eamouzou
  • Character and segment counts in the Script Editor - @hiemanshu
  • Timezone sorting on the Campaign Admin List - @alliejones
  • "Needs Response" count on Campaign Admin List, when Redis is configured - @schuyler1d
  • Improved NGP VAN cell selection from lists - @lperson
  • More experimental message-handler extensions: "auto-optout" allows automatic optout based on certain text coming in from a contact. and "profanity-tagger" gains an option to block a message on-send based on content. - @schuyler1d
  • An exciting new "dispatch" framework to send jobs and tasks asynchronously for tracking which can differ by framework -- especially supporting AWS Lambda, but there is also an experimental "bull" implementation using Redis that we may want to default on Heroku deployments. Please tell us of your experience here. This should resolve a large number of bugs and improve performance in many places. - @matteosb
  • Documenting Progressive Hacknight - @ibrand

Bugs fixed

  • weird [Object object] when tabbing into canned response text issue - @eamouzou
  • simplified docker-compose file - @matteosb
  • fix action handler select menu in Campaign Admin Interactions section - @matteosb

Appreciations

Thanks to alliejones, aschneit, eamouzou, hiemanshu, ibrand, jeffm2001, JeremyParker, lperson, matteosb, and schuyler1d.

Also to AFL-CIO, MoveOn, NYCET, Scale to Win, and Working Families Party for sending their contributions and giving early feedback/debugging time.

Coming up

In our next release, we're hoping to have even more VAN support in message handlers, some timezone config flexibility, some changes and features related to the recent FCC court decision, and hopefully a new dynamic assignment model. -- of course, along with a whole lot more -- send us your changes now, so we can bring it in to the next version!

v7.0

June 2020: Version 7.0 (or 6.19 in honor of Juneteenth!) Note: This is a major release and therefore requires a schema change. See the deploy steps section for details. Anything marked as experimental has not yet been tested on a production texting campaign. We're marking this as a major version update: 7.0 because there are several backwards-incompatible changes that we believe are important and valuable.

Backwards incompatibilities:

  • This change has schema changes on the campaign table which you should make sure to update -- it should be a fast and painless upgrade (automatic if you have it setup). See the deploy steps section for details of how to migrate.
  • There are many Texter UI accessibility improvements, but they do come at the expense of changing how the Enter key behaves for texters. You should communicate this to your texting team and update and training materials. (to revert this functionality, you can enable the env var HOLD_ENTER_KEY=1)
  • SuperVolunteer roles now have access to all MessageReview operations.

Improvements

  • There is now further support for VAN -- a robust action handler that can be enabled by adding ACTION_HANDLERS=ngpvan-action to your environment variables will enable this.

  • We have a new framework for extending the Texter UI interface called "sideboxes". Enabled with environment variable TEXTER_SIDEBOXES which works similarly to action handlers, where it should be a comma separated list of enabled sideboxes. Developers can add sidebox functionality, and admins can set defaults in the organization Settings section and changes per-campaign -- enabling/disabling sideboxes. Two so-far are:

    • contact-reference which is a link the texter can click and/or share with an admin for direct access to that conversation later
    • tag-contact which if you have EXPERIMENTAL_TAGS=1 enabled and create tags, a texter will have an interface to mark them. They can then be filtered for in Message Review.

    There will be more work here going forward -- feedback is welcome as this is still a feature in active development.

  • There is another new experimental framework: Message Handlers which can intercept a message pre and post-save with a sample message handler that can tag profanity -- you can experiment with this by setting MESSAGE_HANDLERS=profanity-tagger

  • Texter UI Accessibility improvements -- previously we captured the Enter key to send a message. This was inaccessible because the Enter key is used when navigating with the keyboard in order to 'click' a button. Sending is now possible with Ctrl-x (and skip is Ctrl-y).

  • We have now disabled by default the ability to hold down the Enter key -- for sending you can now press any letter key (or Enter) to send a message. If you want this functionality back set HOLD_ENTER_KEY=1

  • There is now a campaign 'sending errors' report which summarizes how many sending errors have been reported by Twilio. Carrier Violation error messages are especially useful (and important) to track.

  • A new contact-loader that allows upload into S3 to make larger uploads possible if you have deployed on AWS.

  • A new environment or organization.features variable MAX_TEXTERS_PER_CAMPAIGN which can block more texters from joining a campaign with dynamic assignment.

Bug fixes

There are too many bug fixes to mention -- please see the full list of linked changes

Deploy Steps:

Instructions for migrating you database

  • Make sure SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" (not 0!) in your environment
  • If you're using AWS Lambda, check out the deploy instructions here

Appreciations!

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: @ibrand @lperson @matteosb @schuyler1d

Also special shout outs to Working Families Party and Movement For Black Lives for staging some of these changes and giving feedback (along with MoveOn, too) -- Thank you to the Spoke teams there that drove great campaigns while providing technical bug reports so we could make this a better release ❤️

Onward

Our next release, we're expecting some more great features -- ability to suspend texters, improving the dynamic assignment workflow, and more improvements around tags. Devs and orgs, please send your PRs in now, so we can test your work out and get it in the next release.

v6.1

June 2020: Version 6.1

6.1 is mostly focused on technical improvements. We upgraded to the 2.x versions of apollo-client and react-apollo and removed the dependency on redux. This allowed us to fix some long-standing bugs and should improve the developer experience for Spoke contributors.

Improvements

  • Data loading errors are displayed to the user rather than causing blank screens or infinite loading animations
  • Enhanced the action handler framework with better error handling and caching to improve performance, and added the ability for administrators to optionally select extra information on a per-question-response basis to be sent to the remote system when a texter selects the response.

Changes

  • Removed the threeClickEnabled organization feature

Bug fixes

  • Resolved numerous issues related to cache collisions in the Apollo store
  • Job progress updates more reliably on the campaign creation screen
  • Fixed select all on the campaign archive screen
  • Closing the user edit modal now takes you back to the person list
  • Fixed an issue that allowed campaigns to start before all jobs completed

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: ibrand, lperson, matteosb, schuyler1d

v6.0

May 2020: Version 6.0 Note: This is a major release and therefore requires a schema change. See the deploy steps section for details. Anything marked as experimental has not yet been tested on a production texting campaign. We're marking this as a major version update: 6.0 because there are several backwards-incompatible changes that we think you will love:

  • Experimental Phone number inventory management -- Adds functionality to buy Twilio phone numbers directly through the Admin interface. Organizations using their own Messaging Service, i.e. those that have TWILIO_MESSAGE_SERVICE set in organization features rather than through the global env var, can add the numbers directly to their Messaging Service and use them for texting. Additionally, phone numbers purchased through Spoke can be configured to use a custom voice response by setting the TWILIO_VOICE_URL setting. A typical use case would be to use TwiML Bins to re-route calls or to play a custom voicemails. To configure:
    • Set EXPERIMENTAL_PHONE_INVENTORY to enable the feature
    • Set TWILIO_VOICE_URL for a custom voice response
  • Experimental Per-campaign Twilio Messaging Services -- This feature lays the foundation for scaling Spoke on Twilio by allowing campaigns to use their own Messaging Services. When enabled, the campaign edit screen will allow admins to either supply a Messaging Service for the campaign to use or to have Spoke create one for them. Note that numbers will have to be added to the Messaging Service manually. This feature will be integrated with the phone number inventory in a future release. To configure:
    • Set EXPERIMENTAL_TWILIO_PER_CAMPAIGN_MESSAGING_SERVICE to enable
    • Set TWILIO_BASE_CALLBACK_URL to configure webhooks for Messaging Services created by Spoke. Required if this feature is enabled.
  • New Texting UI -- in version 5.6 it was enableable with EXPERIMENTAL_TEXTERUI ahead of time. It is now the default! For this version, we allow you to preserve the old texter UI by setting the environment variable DEPRECATED_TEXTERUI=GONE_SOON. Also note that with the new UI we have removed user-created Canned Responses -- there's consensus that it causes more problems than it helps. We've also long had the Super Volunteer role which most campaigns use for a group of texters that can update canned responses when needed.
  • Action Handler developers: Through the great work of @lperson for improved VAN support, our action handler api used to return a true/false value for the available() call -- it should now return an object with two keys: { result: , expiresSeconds: <how long to cache the result, 0 by default>} There are several schema changes -- only adding fields, so migration should be easy/fast. However, if you have SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS enabled, then you will need to manually migrate the database ( Heroku, AWS Lambda )

In addition to those changes, we've improved the Admin People page (@lperson ) and made some tweaks to the Campaign Edit page (@matteosb , @higgyCodes ), and the Texter Todo list (@larkinds ).

Deploy Steps:

Instructions for migrating you database

  1. Make sure SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS="" (not 0!) in your environment
  2. If you're using AWS Lambda, check out the deploy instructions here

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: hiemanshu, higgyCodes, JeremyParker, larkinds, lperson, matteosb, schuyler1d

v5.5

May 2020: Version 5.5

  • Campaign List Admin changes (@lperson, @schuyler1d)
  • Twilio Auth per organization (@jeffm2001 ) -- Now if you enable TWILIO_MULTI_ORG environment variable, each organization can use a different Twilio account that they can setup in the Settings Admin tab. This also allows per-organization message services. There is more work coming to allow message services per-campaign and in-app phone number management
  • This release has several developing features -- you might say it's a 'preview' release of things to come. You can turn on these features with environment variables
    • EXPERIMENTAL_TEXTERUI: After some amazing design work by @arena with multiple iterations and two user testing rounds by @ibrand, We are planning to make this the DEFAULT texter interface in the next Spoke release. We know that this has some challenges for current deployments -- updating documentation and training materials for texters. Just like you switch ON this new version in this release, for one release (and no more), we intend that you will be able to set a different environment variable in order to keep the old interface. That should allow you to control the switch to the new interface gracefully.
      • We put a lot of work into this interface to accomodate upcoming features, radically improve the mobile (and generally cross-screen support) and address some issues that regularly come up for texters.
      • Please send your experience reports in testing
      • More context can be seen at RFC: New Texter UI
    • EXPERIMENTAL_TAGS: Tagging users instead of just saving question responses is a very common request, and we have a great volunteer team developing these features. This first step is creating an admin interface to create the tags. There will be more to come, but you can preview and test this development by enabling the environment variable. Thanks to @aschneit and @filafb!

(a cypress stub was also merged into main for e2e tests recently)

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: aschneit, filafb, jasmosez, lperson, schuyler1d, tmc

v5.4

April 2020: Version 5.4 This release includes the following improvements:

  • Experimental A new contact loader for loading contacts in straight from NGP VAN (not yet tested on a production campaign)
  • Scaling improvements
  • Allow contact loaders to be toggled on a per-organization level
  • Improvements to the contact loaders framework
  • Upgrades node version to 10.x and twilio
  • Account view has a more streamlined UI
  • Various bug fixes

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: aschneit, lperson, schuyler1d, ibrand,

v5.3

March 2020: Version 5.3 This release includes the following improvements:

  • Allow texters to send messages using an alias. If there is no alias for that texter, the message will include texter's first name when the interactions is { texterAliasOrFirstName }
  • Scaling improvements
  • Add organization as an argument to getConfig so config can come from organization.features json column OR global context
  • Refactor AssignmentTexterContact to create new demo screens for the texter UI in prep for a texter UI redesign and to help with training
  • Reduces memory and write pressure in the database through removing superfluous indexes from campaign-contact
  • Adds functionality to the Contact Loaders ingest framework for persistence and some api/integration use-cases
  • New component tests
  • Server change to allow admins to opt out any contact, even those not assigned to them.
  • Fix send button alignment

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: filafb, lperson, schuyler1d, ibrand, rahatarmanahmed

v5.2

February 2020: Version 5.2 This release includes the following improvements:

  • Allow a user to specify multiple campaigns in message review
  • Adds addServerEndpoint to make ingest loaders fully work
  • Creates a local .prettierrc file so that our styles are consistent in new PRs
  • Retries sending Twilio messages with error_code < 0 5 times

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: lperson, schuyler1d, ibrand

v5.1

February 2020: Version 5.1 This release includes the following improvements:

  • Accepts and correctly handles contacts csv files with first_name instead of firstName and last_name instead of lastName for their respective column headers
  • Creates a new contact loader ingest framework allowing for new methods of importing and ingesting contacts to be implemented.
  • Re-enables the sqlite test suite and fixes errors surfaced by doing so
  • Bug fixes around switching from Auth0 to local auth
  • Fixes the spelling of "Optouts" to Opt-outs in admin dashboard nav

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: lperson, schuyler1d, ibrand, dannytatom

v5.0

January 2020: Version 5.0 Note: This is a major release and therefore requires a schema change. See the deploy steps section for details.

This release includes the following improvements:

  • Upgrades react-formal, which gets rid of browser-console warnings related to prop-types
  • Fixes a bug for interaction step selection in safari
  • Fixes a bug that was causing the people page to not allow you to edit users
  • Adds smart color contrasting for the color picker in the campaign creation flow so that you can read the name of your campaign name no matter which color you make it
  • Adds an option to allow sharing a single postgres database across multiple Spoke instances, but keep data separate, e.g. using heroku addons:attach
  • Schema changes paving the way for scaling improvements
  • Fixes editing files in emacs by avoiding using unicode
  • Allows the Google Script Import feature to be deployed on AWS Lambda

Deploy Steps:

Instructions for migrating large database instances (>1million messages/contacts)

  1. Make sure SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS=1 in your environment
  2. Before deploying the code, you will want to do most of these changes (manually) beforehand, ideally while the system is down. If you are planning to do these migrations before deploying the new code, we strongly recommend merging this PR separate from the schema changes BEFORE these steps to your production instance. It removes a few bugs which caused postgres to deadlock on message table updates. Instructions below assume Postgres.

2.1 Create the additional columns:

ALTER TABLE message ADD COLUMN campaign_contact_id integer NULL REFERENCES campaign_contact(id);
ALTER TABLE message ADD COLUMN messageservice_sid text NULL;
ALTER TABLE message ALTER COLUMN assignment_id DROP NOT NULL;

These should be non-blocking and 'quick' -- i.e. downtime is probably unnecessary.

2.2 Once those complete, you will want to create the campaign_contact_id INDEX:

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY message_campaign_contact_id_index ON message (campaign_contact_id)

The CONCURRENTLY adverb should make this possible without downtime, but sometimes caution is best.

2.3 (LOCKING: Best with system unstressed/down) Next you want to start filling in the campaign_contact_id. You may want to prioritize live or recent campaigns with additional qualifications or do this in batches with a command similar to:

UPDATE message
SET campaign_contact_id = campaign_contact.id
FROM campaign_contact
WHERE message.assignment_id = campaign_contact.assignment_id
  AND message.contact_number = campaign_contact.cell
  AND message.id IN (
    SELECT id
    FROM message
    WHERE campaign_contact_id IS NULL
    LIMIT 1000000
  )

Note the "LIMIT 100000" is doing it in batches of 1 million. Another strategy would be to find the lowest campaign_contact_id value for your live campaigns and add a WHERE campaign_contact.id > XXX where XXX is that value (or do the same thing for message.id > XXX).

This WILL LOCK the MESSAGE table -- and thus stop processing of events, so you will want to do this off-hours, ideally with the system down.

Once you have done this with the majority of messages, especially messages for live campaigns, you should now be ready for real downtime.

2.4 (LOCKING: Requires downtime) The final step is to definitely take the system down if you haven't already. Complete updates to messageservice_sid and campaign_contact_id, there are some final steps:

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY cell_messageservice_sid_idx ON message (contact_number, messageservice_sid);
DROP INDEX message_contact_number_index;
INSERT INTO knex_migrations (name, batch, migration_time) VALUES
  ( '20191217125726_add_message_campaign_contact_id.js', 3, now()),
  ( '20191217130355_change_message_indexes.js', 3, now()),
  ('20191217130000_message_migrate_data.js', 3, now());

2.5 Deploy the new code! 2.6 As soon as possible (after system is working) then run:

DROP INDEX message_assignment_id_index;

NOTES:

  • One of the main challenges besides migrating and indexing a large table is that many indexes on the message table with so many inserts, can tax the insertions too much and slow the system down. So, while we are indexing both assignment_id AND contact_number AND contact_number+messageservice_sid AND campaign_contact_id, the system is likely to be over stressed. This is why we stagger the index creation and then drop the unnecessary indexes as soon as we have the system up again. Obviously if ALL these steps are done during a single downtime, event, then that would work too -- but staggering them can allow shorter and stepped periods of downtime or migration.

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: lperson, jeffm2001, SAnschutz, schuyler1d

v4.1

January 2019: Version 4.1

This release includes the following improvements:

  • Fixes twilio bugs for incoming text spam and message duplicate tests
  • Fixes bug in which Spoke was not scrubbing opt outs from larger organizations

Thanks to @schuyler1d and @strangeways for these critical fixes. This patch will be required in order to successfully update to v5.0

v4.0

December 2019: Version 4.0 Note: This is a major release and therefore requires a schema change. See the deploy steps section for details.

This release includes the following improvements:

  • Adds better error logging to Spoke allowing visibility into errors that twilio and other messaging services are sending rather than them getting "lost"
  • Fixes bulk send, which is used outside the USA to send more than one initial message with a single button click making it usable again!
  • Multiple documentation fixes including better documentation on how to run the test suite
  • Adds 2 React component tests
  • Fixes bugs that wouldn't let you exit out of adding a new script, that made reassigning contacts often not work, that would often cause the skip reply button not to appear
  • Updates the google-libphonenumber library to allow phone numbers using newer area codes (e.g. 463) to be validated.

Deploy Steps:

  • Warning: This migration removes the message.service_response column which tracks responses to/from the Twilio API. This data is not needed for the application to function, but e.g. some users have queried it to keep the MediaUrl values (i.e. images sent to the texter, even though they aren't displayed). After the migration, they will still be queryable for new texts (only POST-migration texts) in the log table. If you're not sure, then before deploying, make sure you backup the message table--at least the message.service_response column.
  • For the speediest migration, we recommend DELETING all past log rows with TRUNCATE TABLE LOG. Before doing so, consider backing up the log table -- though no data there is needed for running the application (and it takes up considerable space).
  • For smaller instances (less than 1 million texts/contacts), the migration should complete automatically.
  • For larger instances, it's better to enable the environment variable SUPPRESS_MIGRATIONS=1 and then follow the relevant steps of your platform to upgrade ( Heroku, AWS Lambda )

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: ibrand, lperson, jeffm2001, SAnschutz, schuyler1d, briantam23, tstickles

v3.2

November 2019: Version 3.2.0

This release includes the following improvements:

  • Fixed bug that was not allowing texts to be reassigned in message review
  • Multiple documentation fixes and copy adjustments in the UI
  • Fixes bug that made deployment fail for AWS Lambda
  • Adds redis into the testing suite for more reliable tests

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: stevenfranks, ibrand, lperson, schuyler1d, zhaluza, WSINTRA joemcl

v3.1

September 2019: Version 3.1.0

This release includes the following improvements:

  • Adds prettier as a way to encourage code consistency across the project
  • Adds documentation for our Code of Conduct
  • Fixes some bugs around copying campaigns
  • Fixes bugs for new instances deployed to Heroku

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: filafb, ibrand, lperson, schuyler1d, shakalee14, strangeways

v3.0

August 2019: Version 3.0.0

This release includes the following improvements:

  • Knex Migration Configuration (see note below)
  • An upgrade to Node 10
  • A new feature - Google Doc Imports for Interactions / Campaign Scripts
  • Additions to the caching layer
  • More texter tests
  • Improvements and standardization on the developer experience
  • Improvements in documentation, including the README.md
  • Addition of a favicon
  • Adding automatic capitalization to new user names
  • New Upland Mobile Commons Action Handler / Integration with documentation
  • New documentation "how to" guide for deciding to adopt Spoke

Note on Knex Migration: Anyone that is upgrading from a version released earlier than March 2018 should see this issue comment: StateVoicesNational#1154 (comment)

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: AnuradhaNaik, azuzunaga, filafb, harpojaeger, ibrand, joemcl, lperson, mathemagica, rcackermanCC, schuyler1d, shakalee14

v2.0

April 2019: Version 2.0.0

This release includes an improvement to message sending speeds, many usability improvements to the Admin Message Review panel, bug fixes for different features, improved data warehouse querying for audiences, Docker support/documentation, Local Authentication, etc. We also have switched to using yarn dev and install commands versus npm. To see an updated feature list, please visit opensource.moveon.org/spoke.

Migrations:

  • Texting hour related columns to the Campaign table.
  • Send_before column to the Message table.
  • Creator_id column to the Campaign table.

Heroku:

The Heroku deployment method has been migrated to the container runtime. When upgrading an existing Heroku app, these migration steps will need to be performed.

Lambda:

This version includes an update for the Node runtime environment. For current AWS Lambda Users - you can update your Node runtime to 8.10 by either visiting the Function code Section and moving the drop down to 8.10 or by running the following script: claudia update --runtime nodejs8.10. For new Lambda deployments, Claudia.js will default to Node 8.10.

Thanks to all the contributors part of this release including: anasauceda, azuzunaga, bchrobot, benhiller, harpojaeger, jlegrone, joemcl, jparkrr, lperson, sandramchung, schuyler1d, shakalee14

v1.4.1

August 2018: Version 1.4.1

  • This version fixes bugs found in 1.4 including a deployment bug.

v1.4

This release includes many optimizations, new features and more tests! We've fixed outstanding bugs, added more administrative functionality and worked on the texter experience. We've also introduced a new testing suite and redis caching capabilities. Over the next couple months, we intend to add more testing and continue to work on scaling.

Note - we will have a new release in the next few weeks and switch to a shorter release cycle in the next few months. Please upgrade your instance and let us know if you find any bugs or have questions!

July 2018: Version 1.4

  • A 'Skipped Messages' section for texters to allow access to previously skipped conversations. Skipped conversations can be 'reopened' and filter back into the 'replies' view.
  • A 'Message Review' board for administrators to allow message reassignment to different texters. Administrators also have the ability to see more incoming messages than previous.
  • The ability to mark contacts as opted out without sending a message.
  • Selenium end to end testing with Sauce Labs integration.
  • Redis caching capabilities including caching user's authentication status.
  • Updates to documentation for AK integration, popular queries, and email and data exporting integration.
  • Bug fixes around owner, admin and superadmin permissions when attempting to text, timezone handling, permission issues on admin dashboard.
  • Update to our community guidelines.

Thanks go to all our contributors for this release including: azuzunaga, bchrobot, bdatkins, cp4r3z, codygordon, eXrump, harpojaeger, joemcl, lperson, mathemagica, shakalee14

v1.3

Two major themes that we are focusing on this year are improving integrations and scaling. This release begins that work with support for MailGun notifications and Revere subscriptions. In order to scale work-flows, we have added a new SuperVolunteer position and now allow texters to update their own information.

Over the next couple months, we intend to integrate with more outside systems and we will also be adding significant work around scaling the system to support much larger volumes and participants. We will also be continuing to add more automated tests to scale participation. All of that is to make sure that the growing community can keep adding enhancements yourself -- please jump in on our issues page to either implement something or file an issue on something you want Spoke to do!

Please upgrade your instance and let us know if you encounter any issues!

April 2018: Version 1.3

  • A 'Past Messages' section for Texters to allow access to previous conversations before a reply comes back. This feature helps cases where someone accidentally clicked a button or wants to follow-up with requested information.
  • Texters can update their name, email and other information from the menu. Admins can update texter info from the console
  • A new SuperVolunteer role, which allows a non-admin to update assignments, and some other tasks
  • Added MailGun support
  • Frontend React tests!
  • Added an action handler to automatically subscribe to a Revere SMS list -- see Revere integration instructions
  • Fixed some bugs:
    • The texter menu now has a home button
    • The zipcode table was too big to fit in a free Heroku database
    • Some login issues were fixed and documentation was improved
    • Improved contact load times for texter screen

Thanks go to all our contributors for this release including: ben-pr-p, harpojaeger, lperson, shakalee14, schuyler1d, zluo16, jparkrr, JeremyParker, hiemanshu, Dayologic, hi0ctane, sandramchung, sreynen, mathemagica

v1.2

January 2018: Version 1.2 is our second release since MoveOn has adopted Spoke. We are committed to fixing bugs, adding new features and making this project as nimble as possible. For this release, we've included changes from GetUp, updated certain dependencies, updated Auth0 integration, added user editing capabilities for texters and admins and continued to add outside integration points with outside CRMs. Please continue to add and work on our growing issues list. We have also switched from master => main as a new naming convention for the most stable/default branch.

We've worked on a lot, but some critical developments to highlight include:

  • Adds dynamic assignment functionality for texters
  • Adds user editing capabilities for texters and administrators
  • Adds support for customized styling for campaigns
  • Adds ActionKit integration for event sign up and documentation
  • Adds support for multi-media images in outgoing texts (mms)
  • Adds support for campaign script editing on live campaigns
  • Moved to Prop-Types library, upgraded Webpack and other development dependencies
  • Adds Code Climate test integration to monitor test coverage
  • Adds opt out count for a campaign to admin dashboard stats
  • Adds free Heroku deployment setup
  • Adds more automated tests

Thanks go to to all our contributors for this release including: jmcarp, hiemanshu, lperson, jparkrr, jamesr2323, benmort, ben-pr-p, lady3bean, schuyler1d, shakalee14, sreynen, mathemagica

v1.1

October 2017: Version 1.1 is our first release since MoveOn has been using Spoke successfully in production. We are committed to making this an open-source project used and developed by the wider progressive tech community to advance our political goals. Part of our work has been to make that transparent. Besides this public repository, please help with our growing issues list, including those marked easy.

But of course, we've also done some actual development work! We've fixed a ton of bugs, but here are some highlights for this release:

  • Adds a passing test framework
  • Resolves many bugs related to saving and updating a Campaign for admins
  • Improves the Texter interface (better reply visibility, especially on mobile) along with sending on <Enter>
  • Adds a Deploy to Heroku button for easier first-time deployments
  • Documented how to deploy on Amazon AWS Lambda
  • Migrated from a RethinkDB backend to a Knex.js backend (we recommend use with postgresql database)
  • Improved Spoke's security

Thanks go to to all our contributors including: anasauce, hiemanshu, mathemagica, sandramchung, schuyler1d, shakalee14, sreynen