Update: We’re postponing just a bit longer while we work through a last-minute bug. We’ll announce the new date soon!
We’re excited to announce that RBCommons will be getting a major update with tons of new features and more flexible pricing for teams of all sizes.
We want to show off what’s coming soon. There’s a lot!
Commit Histories
Previously, any code changes posted to RBCommons would show up as a squashed diff, merely showing the difference between the upstream code and the tip of your local branch. If your change was built with multiple commits, there was really no way to really dive into them individually. Until now.
When using Git, or Mercurial, or other DVCS solutions, RBTools will upload the complete commit history of your branch. You can look at the diff of the entire branch as a whole just as before, but also dig down into each individual commit, or even ranges of commits.
The New Unified Draft Banner
Until now, your draft review requests, reviews, and replies were all managed separately, each with their own green draft banner. While it was obvious when there was a draft review request update or a draft review, sometimes draft replies could get lost in long threads.
We’ve rebuilt this with a new unified banner that always sits at the top of the page, collecting all your work together in one place. You’ll never lose a draft again.
With the new banner, you can now publish all your drafts at once, generating a single e-mail. This means you can publish all of your replies to people’s reviews along with the updated version of your change with a single click. Fun fact, this was one of our most-requested features ever.
You can also add comments to your own diff before you publish it, which is handy for calling out parts of the diff to jump-start the conversation.
Dark Mode
There’s nothing worse than staying up late to review code and feeling blinded by your screen. With dark mode, you can reduce eye strain and work comfortably no matter the time of day.
Markdown Formatting Toolbar
Rich text editors throughout the product now include a new toolbar for common Markdown formatting options. Don’t remember how to make something italic or include a link? Just click a button!
An Improved Dashboard
The “Overview” section
The new Overview section of the Dashboard is a combined view that shows both your incoming and outgoing review requests. This is your new default view whenever you open the Dashboard.
Stale Ship Its!
The Ship It! indicator in the dashboard will now show as greyed out if there has been an update to the review request since the Ship It! was given.
If you don’t have this column added, click the pencil to the right of the columns and add it (or any other column you like!). Click and drag columns to place them in any order you prefer.
All Sorts of Diff Viewer Features
Trojan Character Detection
Trojan Source attacks employ special Unicode characters, such as bi-directional control characters, zero-width spaces, or confusable/homoglyph characters (which have the appearance of other common characters) to trick reviewers into approving possibly malicious code.
These are CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694, and affect many tools on the market (code review tools, IDEs, repository browsers, and more).
Review Board now detects characters that can be used in these attacks, and flags them in the diff viewer. When found, a helpful notice with examples and informative links will be shown at the top of the file, and the lines themselves will be flagged.
The Unicode characters will be highlighted and replaced with the Unicode codepoint, rendering the attack harmless. Reviewers can click a button to see how the code would have looked.
Current File Display and Quick Switch
When browsing through the diff, the list of files will now dock into the banner at the top of the screen. This will always show you the names of the files that are visible on the screen, so you always know what you’re looking at.
Clicking the menu at the side of this file list will pop open the full list, so you can quickly navigate to other files without having to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page.
Binary Files in Diffs
Review Board now supports displaying, reviewing, and diffing certain types of binary files included as part of your code diffs.
At the moment this is limited to image files, but support for additional file types (including PDFs) are in the works.
This requires posting your changes with RBTools 5.0+, and is supported for a limited set of version control systems:
- Git
- Mercurial
- Perforce
- Subversion
Mobile Diff Viewer
The diff viewer has been updated with a new responsive mode when viewing on mobile devices. This will change the display from the two-column view into a single column for content. This makes it much easier to read and interact with diffs on phones and other mobile devices.
New Integrations
RBCommons is adding new chat integrations with Discord, Matrix, and Microsoft Teams, as well as a new CI integration with Jenkins.
New Flexible Pricing
Finally, we’d like to announce that we’re going to be changing the pricing for RBCommons.
Our new pricing model has two tiers, Basic and Business. Both of these are priced per-user, so you don’t have to worry about a big price jump just because you need to add a 26th user.
All existing team accounts will continue to be grandfathered in on their current plan, so you don’t have to switch to the new plans unless you want to. If and when you’re ready, simply change your plan to take advantage of the new flexible pricing.
Plus…
There are many additional tweaks and polish that you’ll see, including:
- Draft indicators for file attachments that tell you whether an attachment is new, pending deletion, or has a new update within your current draft.
- Quick options to archive after publishing, and click the archive icon itself to toggle the archive state instead of having to wait for a drop-down menu to appear.
- We’ve been tweaking colors and spacing, and polishing down some rough edges to improve the look and feel, especially for reading diffs.
- Better support for mobile devices.
- Better accessibility support for screen readers, keyboard navigation, low contrast, and other accessibility tools.
- Renamed “submitted” to “completed” for review request states. The word “submitted” throughout the Review Board UI was a holdover from the very earliest days of the tool, when we adopted the Perforce naming convention for when changes were pushed to a central repository. This has long been a source of confusion, so we’ve renamed this state to “completed”.
- Clicking a text field on a review request now positions the cursor where you click.
- Too many bug fixes to count.
Coming Soon
We’re in the final stages of testing and building out new servers. We expect to announce a release date soon, and will include it in the announcement banner at the top of RBCommons.
For further updates on RBCommons and all things Review Board, you can follow us on:
Or join us on the new Review Board Discord.
