Happy New Year from RBCommons

January 1, 2014December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We hope you had a great 2013. We sure did, and 2014 looks to be even better. We have a number of new things coming in the next several months that we’re sure you’ll love.

First, let’s talk newsletters.

Up until now, all our announcements have taken place on our blog and on Twitter, but that’s not always the best way to keep you up-to-date.

We’ve just made it easier to keep current on the latest updates to RBCommons and to RBTools. You’ll now find an E-Mail Announcements section on your My Account page where you can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to our newsletters. These cover RBCommons and RBTools updates, as well as code review tips and tricks.

You’ll only hear from us when we have something that’s worth your time.

We are also not subscribing anyone by default. If you don’t choose to subscribe, you won’t receive any more e-mails from us unless it is truly important.

What’s coming in 2014

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be introducing support for two-factor authentication and PDF document review.

Two-factor authentication will help keep your account secure by making use of your mobile devices to verify that it’s actually you logging into your account.

PDF document review works much like code or image review. If you upload a PDF onto a review request, your team will be able to flip through the pages and make comments on sections of the document. Useful for specifications, manuals, or anything else.

We’re also working on a large update to our Review Board software, which RBCommons is based on. Among other things, this release will provide:

Markdown support for review requests and comments
Easy posting of review requests for changes already pushed to your repository
An improved diff viewer with better move detection, better interdiff support, an improved revision selector, and a fresher design
Faster loads and fewer reloads
Batch operations in the dashboard (useful when you want to close several review requests at once)
Full-text search of all your review requests and reviews
New API additions for matching review requests and commits
Much more. You can see our beta 1 announcement for some details, and keep watching for a beta 2 announcement.

We’re aiming to bring this to you by Summer this year. Sooner, if all goes well. We’ll keep you informed on our blog and newsletters.

Thanks for reading, and have a great year!

GitHub two-factor auth, and a new My Account page

November 25, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Tonight’s update introduces support for GitHub accounts protected with two-factor authentication, and a whole new My Account page.

GitHub’s two-factor authentication is a great way to protect your account, and we highly recommend it, especially since there have been a number of attempts made on GitHub accounts in recent weeks. Previously, administrators had to disable two-factor authentication before linking an account for the first time (when configuring a repository), but no longer. The first time you link an account, you’ll be prompted for your two-factor auth token.

If you already have a GitHub account linked for your repositories, you won’t have to do anything. If you’re not an administrator, same. You’re good.

We also rewrote the My Account page. The old page was a holdover from the early days, and was long overdue for a rewrite. You should find it a lot more organized, and we’ll be adding to it over the coming months.

Along with all that, some nice bug fixes and performance improvements. Enjoy!

Tonight’s round of improvements for teams

November 16, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We deployed an update tonight that makes some small but very useful changes throughout the site.

Your account menu at the top of every page has been tweaked to show your username, instead of your first name. We found that people sometimes forgot which username they registered with, which this should help a lot with. Inside the menu, you’ll see a little card showing your gravatar, name, and e-mail address, along with the usual menu items for changing your account profile and logging out.

Next to your account menu is your new Team menu. Here you’ll see your team and a menu item for creating new teams. If you’re an administrator, you’ll also be able to get to your Team Administration page from here. If you’re a member of more than one team on RBCommons, it also offers an easy way to switch between them.

This menu also gave us the opportunity to make another change. When you visit RBCommons.com, you’ll now be taken directly to your dashboard, skipping the old and shabby “home” screen altogether.

One last thing, for administrators. The interface for adding or editing review groups in the Team Administration page was not up to par. We’ve revamped this, and it’s much nicer, particularly for user selection.

And that’s it! Enjoy, and keep the great feedback coming.

Announcing new abilities for team administrators

November 9, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Nobody likes a cluttered dashboard. It makes it harder to see what’s left to review in a day, and can have an impact on how often people check for what needs a review.

Sometimes this happens because someone has left the company. Sometimes people forget.

One of the most frequent requests we’ve had is to give team administrators a way to manage the mess. Today, we’re happy to announce that this feature has finally arrived.

Team administrators now have the ability to modify, close or reopen any review request on their team. You can also leave a message in the close description saying, for example, that the original owner left the company, or that the change was committed to a certain branch.

When posting through RBTools, you’ll also be able to post changes on behalf of another user, by passing the --submit-as=<username> flag to rbt post (or post-review, if you’re still using that). This is very useful if you’re looking to automate creating review requests.

In the future, we plan to make it possible to grant these abilities to other members of your team without giving full administrator rights.

Announcing support for Beanstalk and Bitbucket Git

August 15, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for two heavily requested code hosting services: Beanstalk, and Bitbucket Git repositories.

Welcome, Beanstalk!

Beanstalk is a code hosting and development service with support for Git and Subversion. It integrates with a variety of services and offers easy deployment to servers. They offer a free 30 day trial, and have reasonably priced packages for teams and businesses of all sizes.

To add a Beanstalk repository to RBCommons, you first need to enable API support for your account. Log into Beanstalk and click Account on the top-right. Then scroll down to Developer API and enable it.

Then, on RBCommons, simply add a repository and choose Beanstalk as the hosting service. Enter your Beanstalk account domain (the mydomain part of mydomain.beanstalkapp.com), your repository name, and save. You’re set up!

Bitbucket Git is finally here

As of today, you’ll be able to use Git repositories hosted on Bitbucket. Before today, Bitbucket was only usable with Mercurial. You can simply add your repository like any other repository. Just choose Bitbucket as the hosting service, and Git for the repository type.

You will need to install RBTools 0.5.2 and use rbt post in order to post your diffs for Bitbucket Git repositories. Unfortunately, due to some limitations in the Bitbucket APIs, you cannot use git diff or older versions of RBTools.

To all new users

We have guides for helping you get set up quickly. Please see our Getting Started guide, and Posting Patches for Review.

If you’re signing up for Beanstalk or Bitbucket Git support, let us know! You can tell us where you came from when creating your team.

Site Update: New goodies and speedups

June 29, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’ve deployed some new updates to RBCommons that should please many of you. Let’s go through the highlights.

New “Depends On” field

When you’re working with several inter-dependent changes, it’s helpful to give your fellow teammates a heads up on what depends on what. That helps them prioritize what to review, and gives them some context on what they’re looking at.

We’ve added a Depends On field to review requests for listing the review request IDs your change depends on. Each listed review request will then show that they block your change. A small change, but one we’re sure will be helpful to many of you.

Performance Improvements

We’ve worked hard to improve performance for uploading new diffs. From here on, as you begin to upload and view more diffs, we collect more information on what files and revisions we know exist, and which we know don’t exist. We use this to avoid some of the lookups we used to do before against your repositories.

For those of you who are very active and use GitHub, this drastically reduces the API lookups we have to do, speeding up diffs, and making it even harder to hit the dreaded GitHub API rate limits.

Nicer dashboard refreshing

The dashboard used to do a full-page reload every so often to refresh your view, which was.. noticeable. It was also pretty nasty when your connection to the server was interrupted, or when it tried to refresh during an RBCommons server upgrade, as you would come back to an error page.

You won’t see these issues anymore. The dashboard intelligently refreshes itself without a full page reload, and is resistant to temporary outages.

And more

There’s also a handful of bug fixes and some interface polish, particularly around issue tracking. We hope you like this update.

Making RBCommons more inviting

May 9, 2013December 28, 2017 David Trowbridge

We’ve just deployed a change that makes it much easier to get your team set up on RBCommons. Until now, if you wanted to add a new user, you’d have to register an account first, and then add the username in your team administration dashboard.

Going forward, instead of registering an account first, you can just add the email addresses of each of your teammates. They’ll get an email with a special sign-up link, and once they create their account, they’ll be automatically added to your team.

admin-users

As usual, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch.

RBCommons: New and Improved

April 7, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Tonight, we deployed a major update to RBCommons that brings with it an improved look and feel and an assortment of new features.

RBCommons, as you may know, is powered by Review Board. Historically, we’ve used Review Board 1.6 under the hood, but now we’re on 1.7, the latest and greatest.

Shiny!

The first thing you should notice when you next log in is that there’s a cleaner, smoother feel to the site. Fewer sharp edges. More consistent font sizes. We’ve strived to bring more consistency and to shed a lot of our older warts. This will only get better from here on out.

As an example, look at how a review request used to look:

Compared to how it now looks:

Improved Issue Tracking

It can be hard to keep track of all the issues your teammates want you to fix, especially if there’s a lot of reviews. Sometimes things just get missed. That would happen to us, at least, so we decided to fix it.

A summary of all opened issues is now shown right on the review request, making it easy to see how much work you have to do. You can filter the list or jump down to the relevant comments with one click.

Moved Files in Diffs

If you’re using RBCommons with Git or Perforce, we’ll now show your moved files intelligently, instead of one big delete and one big add. That means you can move a file, make some changes, post it for review, and you’ll see those changes show up. Much easier to review!

Better File Attachments

We used to support uploading both screenshots and arbitrary file attachments, and you had to tell us which it was. Pretty ugly. It’s much simpler now. Just drag-and-drop your file onto the review request, and it’ll be attached. We’ll even show a preview of the file if we can (currently this supports images, MarkDown files, ReStructured Text files, and generic text-based files).

Just like before, you can review images, just like diffs. We’re going to be adding this ability for other types of files in the future.

Like it? Hate it? Have questions?

Let us know!

Scheduled downtime tonight for a major upgrade

April 6, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’re going to be taking RBCommons down tonight at 11PM PST for a major upgrade. This upgrade will improve the look and feel of the site, add some new handy features, and increase performance. At the same time, we’re moving onto new, more resilient servers.

This upgrade may take up to an hour. There will be an announcement when we’re back up.

Adding Multiple Team Admins

February 25, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We always had the ability for your team to have multiple administrators, but that’s been something that we’d have to set for you. This has been one of our more common requests as of late. So we’ve made it easy for you to assign new administrators to your team.

In your Team Admin page, you’ll now see a little pencil next to each of your users. Click the pencil and you’ll see a dropdown with an Administrator checkbox.

Guess what happens when you check it?