Welcome to the New RBCommons!

April 26, 2025 Christian Hammond

The new, long-awaited update to RBCommons, our Review Board code review SaaS, is here! This is a huge update, featuring Dark Mode, multi-commit reviews, a new-and-improved review experience, dashboard improvements, better code safety, mobile support, image review in diffs, new integrations, and much more.

Along with that, we have new, simplified billing plans designed to better scale with your team, which we’ll cover near the end of this post.

Commit Histories / Multi-Commit Review

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 screenshot of the commit selection UI, showing columns “First” and “Last” (for selecting a range of commits), “Summary”, “ID”, and “Author”. This appears below the diff revision slider in the diff viewer.

Unified Review 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.

The new unified banner always sits at the top of the page, and collects all your work together in one place. You’ll never lose a draft again.

The new draft banner, showing a summary of drafts stating “Changes, review, and 1 reply”. Next to that is a “Publish All” button, and then a “Review” drop-down for creating or editing reviews. Below that is the “Describe your changes” text field for review request drafts.

With the banner, you can now publish all your drafts at once, generating a single e-mail notification. 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, possibly our most requested feature ever.

This also allows you to 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.

A screenshot of a review request with the "Review" menu expanded, showing options: "Create a new review," "Add a general comment," and "Ship 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.

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!

Dashboard Improvements

“Overview” Section

The new overview section of the dashboard is a combined view that shows both your incoming and outgoing review requests. This new view is now the default when you open the regular dashboard page.

Stale Ship-It Indicators

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.

A screenshot of the Dashboard showing Ship-It indicators. One is grey, indicating there are updates since the last Ship It.

Diff Viewer Improvements

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). And with Vibe Coding, you never quite know what you’re going to get.

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.

A file in the diff viewer with a banner warning about possible dangerous Unicode characters. It shows a description of how these could be used maliciously, and then shows the character codes for each invisible character below in the diff. A "Hide suspicious characters" button controls their display.

Current File Display / 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.

The diff viewer with a banner at the top showing the name and information on the currently-viewed file. A button on the right can be clicked to see the other files in the diff.

Binary Files (Images) 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 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

An image diff shown embedded in the diff viewer.

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.

The diff viewer in dark mode shown on a mobile device.

Other Improvements

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”. 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.

New Integrations

RBCommons includes new integrations:

Chat: Discord, Matrix, and Microsoft Teams

Continuous Integration: Jenkins.

You can configure these integrations in your Team Administration -> Integrations page.

New Pricing

Finally, we’d like to announce that we have simplified our pricing model based on feedback from both new and long-time users. Gone are the 4 tiers, each with their own feature sets and allowed user counts. Now, you can choose between 2 tiers of features, and pay a simple monthly fee based on how many users are in your team.

The Basic tier is priced at only $6/user/month, and contains all the feaures you’re used to on RBCommons, including code review, image review, unlimited repositories, and wide repository and integration support.

The Business tier is priced at $12/user/month, and includes up to 50 configured integrations, Document Review, Reports, and integrations with several enterprise-level source code management services (including Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Data Center, and ClearCase).

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.

Plans can be configured in your Team Administration -> Account & Billing page.

Questions?

See the RBCommons FAQ for some answers to (our anticipated) common questions.

And as always, reach out to us at support@beanbaginc.com or the “Need Help?” button in the bottom-right of any page (if you’ve opted into Intercom communication).

Get Ready for the New RBCommons

February 11, 2025April 22, 2025 Christian Hammond

Update: The upgrade is scheduled for Saturday, April 26th. We’ll have downtime throughout the day as we move to new servers and finalize the upgrade!

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

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.

The new Unified Review Banner, showing that there are changes, a review, and a reply ready to publish. Alongside that is a Publish button and a Review menu. Under that is a textbox saying "Describe your changes."

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.

The Dashboard, with stale Ship It indicators shown in grey instead of green.

All Sorts of Diff Viewer Features

Trojan Character Detection

These are CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694, and affect many tools on the market (code review tools, IDEs, repository browsers, and more).

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.

A warning block shown on a diff containing malicious trojan code. The warning explains the kind of attack, warns the user to review carefully, and provides a button for toggling the hidden malicious characters.

Current File Display and Quick Switch

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.

The diff viewer showing the current file docked to the top of the page, with a menu for navigating to other files.

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

An image diff in the diff viewer, showing a split view between two versions of a game character.##

Mobile Diff Viewer

The diff viewer in mobile mode, showing inserted code, deleted code, and moved code, with comments filed.

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 April 26th

We’re scheduling downtime for April 26th, and the servers will be unavailable during this time. By Monday, everyone will get to use the new RBCommons! We’ll have a full announcement and a FAQ to help introduce you to some of the major highlights of this release.

For further updates on RBCommons and all things Review Board, you can follow us on:

Or join us on the new Review Board Discord.

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

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

An improved review experience

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.

RBTools 3.1.2, Power Pack 5.1.1

October 3, 2022October 3, 2022 Christian Hammond

Today, we’re bringing two new releases of RBTools and Power Pack, focusing on stability and feature improvements.

RBTools 3.1.2 Highlights

Now supports the upcoming Python 3.11.
Added back directory change information to diffs for ClearCase and VersionVault, and fixed problems posting symlinks.
Fixed several issues generating Perforce diffs, especially on Python 3.
Fixed applied patches on Subversion.

To learn more about this release, see the RBTools 3.1.2 release notes.

Power Pack 5.1.1 Highlights

Added support for showing changes to directories when using ClearCase or VersionVault
Fixed broken repository configuration forms when selecting Cliosoft SOS on Review Board 4.0.3 or older.

This upgrade is available for all existing Power Pack users.

To learn more about this release, see the Power Pack 5.1.1 release notes.

RBTools 2.0: Ready for Review Board 4.0

November 30, 2020November 30, 2020 Christian Hammond

RBTools 2.0 is out, bringing compatibility improvements and new features for all users. The biggest improvement is the support for Review Board 4.0’s upcoming multi-commit review requests.

Multi-Commit Review Requests

Review Board 4.0 beta 1 is coming in the next few weeks, and with RBTools 2.0, developers will be able to post a series of commits to a review request so that they can be reviewed individually or as one squashed change, depending on what the reviewer chooses to do.

Those changes can also be landed, preserving their history or squashing them back into a single commit.

To stay with the old behavior and squash the commits before posting to a review request, you can pass –squash to rbt post or rbt land (or set SQUASH_HISTORY = True or LAND_SQUASH = True, respectively, in .reviewboardrc).

This is available for both Git and Mercurial, and will require Review Board 4.0.

RBCommons users will receive multi-commit review request support in 2021.

Custom Certificate Authorities

If your Review Board server uses a self-signed certificate backed by an in-house Certificate Authority, you can now configure RBTools to recognize it through the --ca-certs, --client-key, and --client-cert options (or CA_CERTS, CLIENT_KEY, and CLIENT_CERT in .reviewboardrc).

Easier Repository Setup

rbt setup-repo has been redesigned to better help people configure their local repositories to connect to Review Board. It offers a more helpful guided setup, making it easier to find the right repository and generate your .reviewboardrc file.

Default Branches in Git

RBTools now understands the init.defaultBranch configuration for Git, helping you transition your primary branch from master to something like main.

Better Mercurial Integration

Compatibility issues are fixed, repository detection is faster, and custom scripts can benefit from performance improvements by connecting RBTools to the Mercurial command server.

And Better Perforce Integration

RBTools can work with a wider mix of configurations utilizing SSL and brokers.

There’s also a new reviewboard.repository_name Perforce counter that can tie a depot to a Review Board repository, which can be used if .reviewboardrc isn’t an option.

Plus…

Variety of improvements for Python 3 compatibility (including support for Python 3.9).
Additional Git arguments for fine-tuning rename detection.
Custom formatting for rbt status, which is useful for scripting.
rbt land and rbt patch now accept a review request URL, instead of just an ID.
rbt patch can print a patch from a review request without needing a local copy of the repository.

See the release notes for more information, or download RBTools 2.0 today.

ChangeLog: May 21, 2020 — Trial Limit Increases, New Releases, Student Wrap-Up

May 21, 2020May 21, 2020 Christian Hammond

If you’re a regular follower of ChangeLog, you’ll notice we’ve gone from weekly to semi-monthly, and may be wondering what’s going on. Don’t worry, we’ll return to our regularly-scheduled ChangeLog in time.

We’ve been focusing heavily on wrapping up Review Board 4.0 development, testing things internally, and helping many of our support customers get out from under a backlog of internal support requests within their companies.

And just taking care of ourselves during a global pandemic.

So here’s some of what we’ve been busy with lately:

Increasing Power Pack and RBCommons trials
Several new releases (RBTools, kgb, and introducing babel-plugin-django-gettext)
Review Board 3.0.18 release preparation
Review Board 4.0 beta and RBTools 2.0 beta preparation
Wrapping up our semester with CANOSP students

Higher Power Pack/RBCommons Trial Lengths

We’ve increased the amount of time you have to give Power Pack or RBCommons a try. Now, when you download a Power Pack license, or sign up for a team on RBCommons, you have two full months to fully explore and use the products.

We’ve applied the new trial period to all existing RBCommons customers who are still in their trial.

If you’re a Power Pack user, and have a trial license, come talk to us for an extension.

New Releases

RBTools 1.0.3

Last month, we released RBTools 1.0.3, which was long overdue. We’re going to try to release RBTools releases more frequently going forward, and we have some good stuff prepared for 1.0.4 for Perforce users coming up soon.

We also have two new releases for some tools we use to help build Review Board: kgb, and introducing babel-plugin-django-gettext.

kgb 5.0

kgb is a Python module that helps with writing unit tests, adding support for function spies. This lets you spy on any function or method, whether in your own code or elsewhere, and track all calls made to the function and inspect the results of those calls.

It’s also used to override what happens when a function is called, mocking results or behavior. This goes far beyond the capabilities of Python’s own mock patching, and instead alters things at a bytecode level. Super useful when you want to fake results from urlopen, for example.

kgb 5.0 introduces support for:

Python 3.8
New spy assertion methods, providing detailed output when they fail
Support for spying on “slippery” functions (functions generated dynamically when referencing the function itself — common in some API-wrapping Python libraries, like Stripe)

babel-plugin-django-gettext 1.0

We use Babel to let us build modern JavaScript and export it to older browsers. Something Babel allows for is custom plugins to transform JavaScript, and we’ve introduced a new plugin to help us write better localized text.

babel-plugin-django-gettext lets us mark up strings using modern JavaScript tagged template literals (backtick strings) and convert them to use Django’s gettext localization methods.

When using the standard gettext support, lines are not allowed to wrap, meaning you end up with some very long lines of text to maintain, and if you want to include the contents of variables in the text, you have to wrap in this interpolate() call, which is a pain.

This plugin takes all the annoyance out of this. Instead of writing:

var s = interpolate(
    gettext('This is localizated text, and we can freely wrap lines how we want, or include variables like %(foo)s.'),
    {'foo': foo},
    true);

We get to write:

const s = _`
    This is localizated text, and we can freely wrap
    lines how we want, or include variables like ${foo}.
`;

Better, right?

If you use Babel and Django, give this plugin a try.

We’ll be releasing a new version soon with even better support for ngettext (used for strings that are based on singular/plural values) and combining with other tagged templates (like dedent).

Review Board 3.0.18 Release Prep

We’re getting close to a new Review Board 3.0.18 release. There’s a lot going into this one, but some highlights will include:

Preparation for GitHub and Bitbucket API/feature deprecations
Compatibility fixes for GitLab, Subversion, and Perforce
Improved API support for working with repositories
Faster SSH communication
Faster condensediffs for large MySQL databases
Lots of bug fixes

Expect 3.0.18 within the next two weeks.

Review Board 4.0 Release Prep

Work continues. We’ve had some people test 4.0 early, and found some regressions that pertain to extensions. We don’t want to release with those regressions in place, so we’re still iterating, but the good news is that the core product is looking pretty good now.

Remember, this release is a major architectural rewrite of the product, with equally major dependency updates, so there’s a lot to get right.

Meanwhile, we’re getting RBTools 2.0 ready for beta. This is meant to be used with Review Board 4.0, and features all the multi-commit review support, from posting changes to landing them. We’ll be shipping both at the same time.

CANOSP Student Wrap-Ups

We’ve talked before about the CANOSP student program we work with in Canada. Well, we’ve wrapped up our semester, and I can speak for the team when I say we’re going to miss working with this group.

By the way, if you’re looking to hire some strong developers coming out of college, we have plenty we can refer.

To wrap up their semester, they’ve put together some final demos of the work they’ve done, and we’d like to show them off.

Hannah Lin

Hannah worked this semester on a prototype for a new first-time setup guide for administrators, and some keyboard accessibility improvements in the diff viewer and modal dialogs, amongst other improvements. She’s also continuing on after the semester, working on a formatting toolbar for input fields.

Katherine Patenio

Katherine worked away on RBTools for most of the semester, fixing some bugs that shipped in RBTools 1.0.3, and completely reworking the rbt setup-repo experience (which we hope to ship in RBTools 2.0).

She also did a lot of work on investigating improvements to supporting users with different kinds of color-blindness, which she covers in this demo.

Monica Bui

Monica focused primarily this semester on keyboard navigation improvements in the New Review Request page (part of a big effort toward improved accessibility), and prototyping new guidance for filling in fields on a blank review request. We think that will pair nicely with work planned for Review Board 5.0.

Xiaohui Liu

Xiaohui worked on standardizing how we handle keyboard shortcuts, introducing a new registry on the page that anything can plug into to register shortcuts. This even offers a handy help screen, giving users an overview of all the keys can happily press to get their work done faster.

Xiaole Zeng

Xiaole’s projects covered help and accessibility improvements, such as adding a new Help menu to the top-right of every page (which could provide access to useful, relevant documentation), and making the review request infoboxes on the Dashboard less annoying and more keyboard-friendly. We’re looking to ship some of this in 4.0.

And that’s it for the moment

We’ll be back to a weekly format once we’ve gotten some of these releases wrapped up, and of course any time we have something pretty exciting to talk about.

In the meantime, if we can help with anything, reach out. You can also follow us on the community forum, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube if you want other ways to keep up with Review Board and Beanbag.

RBTools 1.0.3: Mercurial Features, Commit Editing, Python 3 Fixes

April 14, 2020April 14, 2020 Christian Hammond

Today’s release of RBTools 1.0.3 is a big one, featuring enhancements for Mercurial support, a vastly improved commit editing experience when landing changes, and several compatibility fixes for Python 3 and various types of repositories.

Landing Commits on Mercurial

rbt land now supports landing commits on Mercurial repositories.

You can land a local change from a Mercurial branch or bookmark, or a remote change from a review request. This will first verify that the change has been approved on Review Board before allowing it to land. Once approved, a new merge commit containing the information and URL of the review request will be placed on your destination branch.

This can also close the branch/bookmark being merged in on your behalf. See the documentation for details.

Improved Commit Editing

Patching a commit with rbt patch -c, or landing a commit with rbt land -e has always let you edit the message for the commit, but the experience was sub-par.

Now RBTools will mimic Git or Mercurial’s standard editing environment, helping your editor show the syntax highlighting or line length limits it would normally show.

Deleting all text in the editor and saving will cancel the patch/land operation.

You can also set a custom editor when working with RBTools by setting the new $RBTOOLS_EDITOR environment variable.

Compatibility Fixes

We’ve fixed a number of Python 3 compatibility issues. These largely centered around:

Changes in Python 3.8
Windows environment differences
Editing or processing commits containing non-ASCII characters
Normalizing URLs and paths for Subversion
Loading in Perforce metadata
Passing --help as the last argument

There’s also a fix for looking up available Git remotes for a branch when a tracking branch isn’t set. Thanks to Joshua Olson for this fix!

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

ChangeLog: April 2, 2020 — Catching Up

April 2, 2020 Christian Hammond 1 Comment

This is our first ChangeLog in several weeks. As you all know, the current pandemic has resulted in a lot of changes and hardships in the world. We’re doing fine here, and our team has stayed healthy and safe, if a little less productive than we’d like as we adjust and take care of our families.

David building a playground for the kids

Still, work never ceases, and it’s time to start keeping you all up-to-date again. Here’s a breakdown of what we’ll be covering today.

Support options for Review Board
Upcoming increases to RBCommons and Power Pack trial lengths
Upcoming releases of RBTools 1.0.3 and KGB 5.0.
Review Board 4.0 progress
New student demo videos

Getting Support for Review Board

More companies than ever are in full-on work-from-home mode, and this brings with it a lot of new work challenges that are, right now, often mixed with personal-life stresses.

We can help with at least some of that.

Our company offers support contracts for Review Board, which can be tailored to meet your company’s needs. We help with anything from basic Q&A and troubleshooting to custom builds and assistance with developing in-house integrations.

If you’re managing Review Board at your company, and are feeling a bit overwhelmed right now, please reach out. We can help. And we take support seriously.

Basic Support

Basic Support is pretty well-suited for smaller companies that need general troubleshooting, installation/upgrade assistance, or may have other questions.

We guarantee a response by the following day, but always aim for same-day (just depends on the support load).

Unlike our community support forum, all your support requests are handled privately on a dedicated support tracker, where you can manage tickets, provide confidential attachments, and more.

We don’t farm out our support to some outside party. We, the developers of Review Board, will handle your support. You’ll probably hear from me personally quite a bit.

Premium Support

This is a better option for the larger companies.

Or if you’re working on any in-house integrations or need priority bug fixes or need to use an older version of Review Board but may need some custom builds with fixes on occasion.

Or have some terrible emergency that needs to be resolved quick.

With Premium, there’s a same-day guarantee, 24/7/365. We’ll usually respond within an hour, especially if it’s an emergency. I will personally wake up and take care of your issue at 4AM if you need something.

So again, if things are crazy right now and you need a hand, contact us and we’ll talk options with you.

Increases to Trial Lengths

Since things are slower-moving right now (again, with the work-from-home status of so many companies), we want to make sure that you’re not in as much of a rush to evaluate either RBCommons and Power Pack.

So we’re going to be increasing the trial lengths of both from 30 days to 60.

This isn’t done yet, as we’re still preparing the codebases to change this over. In the meantime, if you’re a trial user of either, we’ll try to make sure to be proactive and increase your trial period manually.

If you’re already trialing either of this, contact us for a trial extension.

Upcoming Releases

RBTools 1.0.3

We’re finishing up this release now. It’s a big feature and bug fix release that we’ve been ironing out for a while.

The highlights are:

rbt land support for Mercurial
A much better commit editing experience (for rbt land and rbt patch)
Several bug fixes for various source code management systems and for Python 3 environments

We should have this release out next week.

KGB 5.0

KGB is our Python module for using function spies in unit tests. This lets you track when a function is called, with what arguments and results, and to even override what happens when that function is called.

It’s extremely powerful, and is a big part of how we maintain our large test suites.

We’re preparing a 5.0 release, which adds:

Python 3.8 support, with positional-only arguments
Workarounds for very corner-casey situations with method decorator that generate a new function every time it’s accessed (what we’re calling “slippery functions,” because they’re hard to hold on to)
Probably some new helpers for asserting the results of calls (TBD)

This should be released in the coming weeks. If you’re a Python user, I highly suggest giving KGB a try.

Review Board 4.0 Progress

Almost there.

We were going to get 4.0 in beta form by end of March. That was the goal. We hinted at this last time, and we were feeling good about it, but the impact from the pandemic changed some priorities.

So it’s delayed… I’m not going to give a new date at this point, but nearly everything is ready for beta. We just want to hammer on it some more first, make sure we’re pushing out a solid beta. Pretty much everything, including our extension ecosystem, is ready to go.

Student Demos

As you may know by now, we work with CS students every semester, mentoring them and helping them learn to contribute to real-world code bases through Review Board development.

They recently completed their second demo videos for the semester, showing off what they’ve built. Please take a look. I’m sure they’d love to hear some positive feedback on their videos:

Stay Safe, and Wash Your Hands

(Definitely the catch phrase of 2020, but it’s important!)

Again, if we can help with anything, reach out, or follow us on the community forum, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube if you want other ways to keep up with Review Board and Beanbag.

ChangeLog: February 20, 2020 — Accessibility, Student Demos

February 20, 2020 Christian Hammond

Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s ChangeLog. This week, we want to talk about accessibility improvements for Review Board 4.0, and show you what this semester’s students are working on.

If you want to watch some videos instead of reading a bunch of stuff, jump down to Student Demo Videos!

Accessibility in Review Board

As we revise parts of our UI, introducing new features and designing new CSS Components, we have a goal of improving accessibility. We’re aiming to better support screen readers, improve keyboard navigation, and help people with visual impairments.

This will not be 100% implemented by 4.0, since we do plan to release sometime soon, but we will have laid the groundwork, working toward eventually being fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

There’s a lot that goes into accessibility on the web, but there’s two key areas that are important to get right, and are becoming a core part of our design and CSS component specifications: ARIA attributes and keyboard navigation.

ARIA attributes help screen readers and other assistive technologies understand, navigate, and communicate parts of the UI. They can communicate the intent of a UI component, provide more suitable labels or hints to screen readers, notify as important content updates, and more. They’re important, and we haven’t been good at using them, but they’re now being baked in to the design of any new UI we write.

Keyboard navigation is also very important. Not everyone can or wants to use a pointing device to navigate the UI, and we’ve identified several places where keyboard navigation (and focus presentation) is subpar or flat-out broken. So we’re making this a first-class citizen in new UIs, adding new keyboard shortcuts for important content areas or operations, and fixing cases where navigation is just busted.

To be clear, these aren’t the only focuses — there’s a lot more to the accessibility work than this. Improving accessibility is a long-term goal, and Review Board is a big product. We aren’t holding up 4.0 for this, but rather expect to spend time throughout the 4.0.x release cycle to gradually work on this.

And it’s a current focus of some of our student projects.

Student Demo Videos

In an earlier ChangeLog, we announced our new team of students working on Review Board. The big focuses this semester are on keyboard accessibility and first-time setup improvements.

They’ve been working hard for a month now, and have just completed their first (of three) demo videos. We’d like to show them off.

All videos are uploaded to our YouTube channel. Subscribe to keep up with content as we upload it.

Hannah Lin

Hannah’s been working on implementing keyboard navigation for file attachments, letting users focus on the attachments and control the pop-up menu (for reviewing, updating attachments, deleting, and downloading). That was her first warm-up project.

Her main project for the semester is working on a first-time setup guide, for new Review Board administrators. The goal is to help them get a new server up-and-running fast by walking them through the main setup steps as they progress through the administration UI.

Katherine Patenio

Katherine’s first demo covers some initial bug fixing work for RBTools on Python 3, addressing a problem where --help didn’t always work. She’s fixed this up and added a new layer of unit tests we can build upon.

Her main project for the semester isn’t covered here, but she’s going to be working on the rbt setup-repo command, helping streamline getting a new repository set up with Review Board.

Monica Bui

Monica’s also working on keyboard accessibility. Her focus in this demo is improving the New Review Request page, making sure that all elements can be tabbed to and navigated entirely by keyboard.

Xiaohui Liu

Xiaohui’s first project fixes up tab key navigation in the review request page. Previously, tabbing to fields would prioritize the fields on the right-hand side of review requests (Branch, Bugs, etc.) before the main fields (Description, Testing Done), which wasn’t really intuitive. His fix brings some sanity back to tab orders.

His second project is to implement common support in the UI for keyboard shortcuts, making it much easier for us to bake in better keyboard support on every page with less code to worry about.

Xiaole Zeng

Xiaole’s working on improving help within the product, giving users both a single place to go to when needing to find documentation or other useful information, and finding places within the UI where we can offer better inline guidance. For the latter, she’s working on adding helpful descriptions and documentation links when configuring repositories, based on the selected hosting service or repository type.

Next Week

We’re getting a new RBTools release ready to ship, so you’ll see that soon. We’re also testing 4.0 beta 1, and are getting that beta release on the calendar.

If you want to know more, have any questions, or are curious about anything else, please reach out on our community forum.

We’re also on Reddit (/r/reviewboard), Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube if you want other ways to keep up with Review Board and Beanbag.

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.