Some user facing changes not present in release notes
Hi everyone,
I work with a few legacy customers who are very cautious not to introduce any new changes onto their site and read the release notes super carefully, these can vary, but largely My Fitness Pal, College Confidential and EA Games.
In the last few releases, there have been a couple changes that don’t seem to appear (or aren’t clear enough for laypeople to understand) in the release notes, but represent changes for users, many of whom are diehards and notice things immediately and are very vocal about.
Of course we are not going to hold back releases to suit legacy customers who don’t like a thing, but they are asking why these items are not included in the release notes. They are happy to test things out on staging, but if there is no clear reference in the release notes, they may not test a certain feature and be caught off guard when it hits production.
I'd like to start a conversation about how we can handle this, and if it's possible to try and get end user facing changes into the release notes more consistently.
For example, in the second to last release (https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/128-release-2019-016)
Fulltext now in notifications
College Confidential, EA, and MFP reached out, noticed that the full text of posts appeared in notifications, though this does not appear in the release notes.
And in the most recent release (https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/132-release-2019-017)
Change to Warnings
There are 2 references to warnings, but neither call out the user facing change (it used to quote the verbiage, but now provides a URL). It also added some text “You are being warned for the following post” while this seems innocuous, it was noticed and flagged by clients.
I believe this is due to some custom work we did for MSE (who have requested the verbiage and not the URL now FWIW)
This was brought to my attention by College Confidential, EA, and MFP immediately. They all prefer the old way.
Changes to Quoting
MFP noted:
>One of the bigger small things we noticed was that quoted text is now grey vs. black, and the quoted text boxes just get darker and darker with each nested quote to the point where you can barely read the quote, and then if you continue to quote it the text ends up being lighter than the box.
EA also brought this up on our call this morning as well.
Changes to max image size
I know the this will be reversed in 2019.018, but it should still be noted that this should have appeared in the release notes for 2019.017
I'll be sure to submit their feedback on these changes to product, of course, but wanted to discuss how we could make sure that these (seemingly to us small) changes make their way into the notes going forward.