A Sneak Peak Into the New RBCommons

December 9, 2024 Christian Hammond

Our team’s been hard at work bringing RBCommons to the cutting-edge Review Board 7 platform. This is a massive update with tons of new features, and we think it’s time to give you a glimpse of what’s coming:

Multi-commit review requests for Git and Mercurial

In the past decade, DVCS has become the norm, and many people work in local branches with lots of individual commits. 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 the local branch.

When using DVCS systems like Git or Mercurial, RBTools will now upload the commit history of your branch. You can look at the diff of the branch as a whole, but also dig down into each individual commit.

A list of commits for a review request, with summaries for each and selectors for choosing a range to view.

An improved review experience

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.

The new unified banner always sits at the top of the page, and collects all your work together in one place. You can also use this to publish all your drafts at once with a single click and a single-email notification.

The new review banner, showing pending changes, one review, and one reply. A button saying "Publish All" to the right of that summary publishes all pending drafts. A "Review" drop-down to the right of the button controls the review. A "Describe your changes" field sits below it.

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.

And just so much more

There’s a lot more coming, but we wanted to keep this first message short. We’re working hard to make this transition as seamless as possible for you. Keep an eye out for more details about all the new features and a timeline for the rollout.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this e-mail.

Thanks for using RBCommons! We’re excited to bring Review Board 7 to you.

RBCommons: User Roles and Billing Updates

December 21, 2019 Christian Hammond 1 Comment

We’ve just gone live on a major update to the billing capabilities in RBCommons.

Try RBCommons without a credit card

With all the fraud and stolen credit card numbers out there, it’s no surprise that a lot of people wanted to try RBCommons to see if it was the right fit but weren’t comfortable providing their credit card information right away.

We’ve changed our trial so that you can sign up with only your name and e-mail address, and if you decide to keep using RBCommons, you can add your billing information later.

Separate administration and billing user roles

Many companies have a dedicated person for dealing with billing administration for services. Until now RBCommons has only had a single team administrator role, which provided access to both the billing information as well as everything else for the team. We’ve split up these responsibilities into new user roles:

A Technical Administrator can make changes to users, repositories, and other settings, but cannot change or see billing information.
A Billing Contact can see invoices and make changes to the billing information, as well as change which plan the team is on. They’ll also receive e-mails whenever we charge the attached card.
The Team Owner has access to all administration and billing capabilities. This is equivalent to the old team administrator role.

All team administrators have been updated to become Team Owners. To change a user’s roles, visit your Team Administration → Users page and click the pencil icon beside a user.

Improved invoices

Many countries require invoices to contain certain information, such as an official business name and address, or a tax ID. RBCommons now allows you to add this information in Team Admin → Account and Billing, and it will show up on your invoices.

If you’re a business located in the EU, you can put in your VAT ID and we’ll make sure that the generated invoices contain everything you need for your VAT filings.

If your country has invoice requirements that we haven’t met, please contact us.

Add billing e-mail recipients

You can now add additional e-mail addresses where you’d like any and all billing e-mails sent to. This is really useful if you have a purchasing department or some users who need to track receipts but don’t need access to RBCommons.

You can set these over in Team Admin → Account and Billing → Billing E-mails.

Update to the Privacy Policy

As part of this, we’ve made a small update to our Privacy Policy to list Quaderno as a third-party service used in our billing process. This is a good time to review your privacy choices under My Account → My Privacy Rights.

Feedback?

This has been in the works for a long time, and we’ll be iterating on it based on your feedback. So how’s it working for you? Let us know through the Need Help? button in the bottom-right of any page (opt in to Intercom in My Account → My Privacy Rights) or send us an e-mail at support@beanbaginc.com.

Connect RBCommons to Slack, Travis CI, Asana, and more

August 5, 2019August 6, 2019 Christian Hammond

All RBCommons plans now support integrating with third-party chat, continuous integration, and project management services, with more services to come.

You can connect with Slack or Mattermost and keep your team members notified whenever a review request is created or updated, or when any new discussions take place.

Slack Integration

Automatically trigger builds of uploaded changes on Travis CI or CircleCI, ensuring product builds still pass. You can even run automated code review tools and report status using RBTools.

Link your Asana or Trello tasks with your review requests, and add all your code review work to your status report automatically using I Done This.

Asana Integration

Each integration configuration can specify the rules under which the integration will run. For instance, when a build should take place or which Slack teams/channels should be used for which repositories or review groups.

Configuring Condition Rules

You can define as many integration configurations as you like, up to your plan’s limit:

Starter: 1
Medium: 10
Large: 25
Enterprise: 50

See our integration guides to get started today.

RBCommons 3.0 is Live!

April 1, 2018 Christian Hammond

Over the weekend, we deployed a new major version of RBCommons, offering many new features and laying the groundwork for additional ones we’ll be bringing you soon.

New code review capabilities, including revokable Ship-Its, general comments not tied to code or file attachments, and the ability to require verification before issues are resolved.

Discussions are now easier to follow. New updates, reviews, and replies are highlighted in blue, helping them stand out. Desktop notifications let your browser notify you when there’s new updates to the page. Images can be dropped into text fields to provide some visuals with your comment. Emoji shortcodes can be used.

New repository support for Bitbucket Server, AWS CodeCommit, and Gerrit. Host your code there, review it here.

Feature improvements are everywhere. Custom avatar images can be set on your account. There are handy buttons for quickly navigating between file attachments. High-DPI image attachments are scale to fit on your screen. Review requests can be re-assigned to other team members.

RBCommons is faster. Along with optimizations in the new version, we’ve also begun moving parts of our architecture onto new servers, with more coming this week. You should start seeing those benefits soon.

See all the new features available today!

Coming soon, we’ll be bringing integrations with Slack and Mattermost chat, continuous integration with Travis CI and CircleCI, support for searching review requests, and new billing improvements (separate billing contact and administrative roles, and CC’ing invoices to an address of your choosing). We’re still testing these internally, and plan to start rolling these out in stages over the next couple months.

We hope you like the new RBCommons! As always, if you have any questions or hit any problems, we’re only a chat message away 🙂

RBCommons updates have moved to the Beanbag Blog

December 29, 2017 Christian Hammond

For years, we’ve been maintaining three separate blogs for our products: the RBCommons Blog, Review Board News, and the Beanbag Blog. It made sense at the time to keep these separate, but these days it’s usually more confusing than it needs to be, with release announcements and helpful guides scattered across the blogs.

We began the process of consolidating these last night, and started with merging the RBCommons Blog into the Beanbag Blog. Unfortunately, due to a glitch with our mailing list provider, an e-mail went out today covering last February’s CloudFlare-related security issue. If you received this, we’re very sorry — that shouldn’t have happened, and you don’t need to worry about some new problem affecting RBCommons.

We’ll be posting more articles here going forward, along with RBCommons updates and RBTools release announcements. We recently started a series of articles on new Review Board features that will soon make its way to RBCommons as part of a major update we’re gearing up for.

We’re also planning to move the Review Board release announcements here, so there’s exactly one place to look for everything we’re working on.

And with that, we’d like to thank you all for being such wonderful customers. Have a Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to a great 2018 🙂

RBCommons and Cloudflare: Don’t worry, be happy!

February 24, 2017December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

There was a major security breach announced this week by Cloudflare, a popular service used by millions of sites. This security breach affected customers around the world, causing passwords, API tokens, private conversations, and more to be leaked into search engines and people’s browser sessions.

You probably have a lot of passwords you’ll need to change this week, but don’t worry, RBCommons does not use Cloudflare, nor do the services RBCommons depends on. Your information is safe!

We recommend that you take the time to ensure you’re using strong, unique passwords (ideally stored in a password manager like 1Password or LastPass), and enable two-factor authentication on RBCommons to make your account even more secure.

To learn more about the Cloudflare security breach, and how it affects you, read their disclosure and see the list of sites using Cloudflare to see if you may be at risk.

The New RBCommons is Live!

June 10, 2016December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’ve been hard at work these past few months on a major update to RBCommons. This update brings all the many improvements found in the latest version of Review Board.

A more refined look

RBCommons has a new improved look. We’ve modernized the look, polishing things here and there, bringing a much fresher feel to the service. Don’t worry, though, you won’t have to relearn anything. We’ve kept everything familiar.

Along with the new look is support for mobile! You can now use RBCommons from the phone, letting you catch up on reviews and new changes while on the go. Mobile diff review isn’t there yet, but is something we hope to bring down the road.

Archiving/muting review requests

It’s easier now to stay on top of the review requests that really need your attention. By archiving/muting review requests, you can take control over your dashboard and help you get to Inbox Zero (or maybe Dashboard Zero).

Review requests can be archived, hiding them from the dashboard until there’s new activity. They can also be muted, hiding them completely from the dashboard until you opt into seeing them.

Learn more about archiving and muting.

Trivial publishes for review requests and reviews

When you’re making a small change on a review request or clarifying something small on a reply, sometimes you don’t want another e-mail to go out to your team. We’re all busy, and every e-mail we add is one more thing to look at.

RBCommons allows for trivial publishes of review requests and replies. The green draft banner for review requests and replies contains a “Send E-Mail” checkbox, checked by default. To prevent sending an e-mail to your team, just uncheck it before hitting “Publish”.

Learn more about trivial publishing.

Expandable diffs in reviews

Inline Diff Expansion

Ever want to see just a bit more of a diff when reading a review, without having to jump into the diff viewer? Now you can! Just hover over the little snippet of the diff to see the new expansion controls. From there, you can start exploring more of the diff, without ever having to leave the page.

Live HD thumbnails for file attachments

Thumbnails now show more of the content you want to see. They’re no longer just tiny previews of a file. Now they’re big and vibrant, and come to life when you hover the mouse over them, scrolling through the file to show you even more.

Learn more about Live HD thumbnails.

Revisioned file attachments

RBCommons now tracks every revision of a file you upload. Make a change to a graphic, or a PDF document? Simply update the existing file attachment by hovering over the thumbnail and choosing “Update.” Reviewers will be able to go view any revision, and for some files, they can even diff between them!

Diffs for text-based and image-based file attachments

Hey, we were just talking about this!

Image and text file attachments with multiple revisions can now be diffed. You’re seeing one example of this here, with a split diff of two images.

Image diffs make it easy to see how a graphic has changed over the revisions. You can view this in several different modes: Two-Up, Difference, Split, or Onion Skin modes.

Text files can be diffed as well, and this works exactly like the diff viewer.

Working with Markdown? Now only can we diff the source text, but the rendered output as well!

Learn more about diffing file attachments.

New review group setting to auto-add new users

Got a review group or two that you’d like everyone to be a part of, automatically? We’ve got a new option for that! Pull up the settings for a review group and toggle “Add new users by default.” Any new user you invite to your team will be automatically added to the group.

Browsing and posting Bitbucket commits for review on the New Review Request page

Bitbucket users, rejoice! You can now browse for commits in the New Review Request page. If you work in a “post-commit” model, where you push commits and then post for review, you’ll find your workflow’s just gotten a lot easier.

WebHooks for integrating with other services

RBCommons can now talk to third-party services and scripts through WebHooks.

WebHooks are used to notify HTTP services on certain actions (new review requests or updates, new reviews, new replies, etc.). You can use this to interface with in-house tools in response to new diffs or discussions, forwarding them on to other services or automating code reviews.

Learn more about WebHooks.

API Tokens for safer authentication

If you’re working with scripts or services that need to talk to Review Board, you can now create API Tokens and hand those out, instead of handing out a password. These are safer, and have the added benefit of letting you limit what can be done in that API session.

Learn more about API Tokens.

There’s a lot more, but those are the main feature updates. We hope you’ll like the new RBCommons. We know we’ve been looking forward to using it for a long time now.

If you have any questions or hit any problems, you can reach out to us through the “Need help?” button (bottom-right of any page on RBCommons), or e-mail us at support@beanbaginc.com.

Introducing new special user permissions

September 14, 2015December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

As a team grows, it often becomes the case that more developers need to assume more specialized roles in the code review process. Not just that of developer and reviewer, but also that of a manager of sorts, helping to keep the review process going and to keep the process tidy.

We’re introducing a few new special user permissions, designed to give users a subset of an administrator’s abilities. These can all be set in the Team Administration page by clicking the pencil icon next to team member.

The first permission, “Can close or reopen review requests from other users,” enables a user to help keep the list of review requests tidy by toggling whether a review request is currently open. If you’re not auto-closing review requests, if you have review requests open from former team members, or if you’re managing an open source project on RBCommons, this can be quite handy.

The second permission, “Can edit review requests from other users,” allows a user to modify a review request on someone else’s behalf. They can upload diffs, edit fields, and so on. The changes currently appear as if they’re from the owner of the review request.

The final permission, “Can post review requests as other users,” is most useful for scripts. In cooperation with RBTools (using rbt post –submit-as), a script can post a review request on another user’s behalf, perhaps when a change is committed to a special branch, or after a sandbox operation passes.

We’ve been piloting these permissions with some projects for a while now. Please let us know how they work for you, and if you have any questions or problems.

A new batch of feature and performance improvements

January 3, 2015December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Tonight, we’ve released a huge set of bug fixes and feature improvements for RBCommons that should improve your code review experience.

Faster performance

We’ve fine-tuned many parts of RBCommons to give you a faster experience.

Editing Markdown text should now feel as fast as editing plain text. The lag that would sometimes appear has been fixed.

The dashboard now loads a lot faster when using the People, Groups, or To Me columns.

We’ve also improved performance in our API. RBTools and various operations on the site should be much faster now.

Markdown improvements

Markdown is now completely optional. By default, all text fields on review requests and comments on reviews will be in Markdown mode, as before. However, you’ll now be able to turn off Markdown while editing, saving as plain text.

You can also choose to disable Markdown by default for all fields in your My Account page. Simply uncheck “Always use Markdown for text fields.”

Note that if Markdown is enabled by default, then all fields will start off editing in Markdown mode. Any plain text will be escaped first.

Along with this, we’ve fixed a number of escaping and rendering problems with Markdown text, particularly for text coming from a commit.

Better clipboard support in the diff viewer

The diff viewer now supports selecting and copying the text within either column in the diff viewer, without that selection covering code from the other column.

Previously, selecting worked like it did for any table in a web page, in that the selection would span both columns, making it impossible to get the text out cleanly. With this new support, you can safely copy a block of text from the original or modified file and paste it into your editor.

Better e-mail control

We’ve reduced how much e-mail you’ll receive in certain cases. For instance, if a review request is updated to add new reviewers, without altering any other fields or introducing a new diff, only the new reviewers will be notified of the update.

We’ve also introduced an option to let you opt out of any e-mails triggered by your own actions. To opt out, head over to the My Account page and uncheck “Get e-mail notifications for my own activity.”

Numerous bug fixes

We’ve fixed nearly 40 bugs across the site, covering issues with repository compatibility, diff generation, usability, e-mail notifications, and more.

Auto-closing review requests when pushing changes

September 29, 2014December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’ve launched a new feature today for simplifying your code review workflow.

If you’re using GitHub, Bitbucket, or Google Code, RBCommons can now automatically close your review requests when you push your commits to your repository, making use of the service’s “post-commit” hooks. You’ll no longer need to click Close -> Submitted, saving time and keeping your dashboard clean.

Usage is simple

Once you’re set up (and we’ll go into that in a minute), all you need to do is include the following in your commit message:

Reviewed at https://rbcommons.com/s/<your-team>/r/<id>/

Or:

Review Request #<id>

Just commit, and your review request will be automatically closed, along with a message containing the commit revision and which branch it was committed to.

Setting this up

Setup depends on which service you’re using for your repositories, but we’ve worked to make it pretty simple.

We’ve added some new buttons to your Team Administration -> Repositories page. You’ll see a “Hooks” button next to any supported repository. Click that, and you’ll see instructions on turning this feature on for your repository. In just seconds, your repository will be set up!

This feature is still new, but has been undergoing testing for several weeks. If you hit any snags, let us know and we’ll help get you going.