Three Rings has always had it’s roots in Wales – Aberystwyth Nightline was the very first listening service to use the system, way back in 2002 – so we’ve always been aware of the issues surrounding bilingualism in our field: it can be hard for people to openly talk about their emotions anyway, without the extra complication of translating those feelings into a second language.
Accordingly, we’re very happy to be in a position to help publicise the new Welsh Language Service being offered by Bangor Samaritans to anyone wishing to seek confidential listening support through the medium of Welsh, regardless of where they live.
The new line has been operating for the last couple of weeks, and it is manned specifically between 7pm and 11pm, seven days a week throughout the year.
To contact Samaritans’ Welsh language service, ring 0300-123-3011.
And please, don’t hesitate to spread the word yourselves.
Right now, three members of the Three Rings team – Ruth, JTA, and I (Dan) – are at the Nightline Association conference at the University of Essex in Colchester. It’s always pleasant to get out and network with the volunteers from the Nightlines associated with the Nightline Association, because their volunteer turnover rate – comparatively rapid in the field of emotional support helplines, as a result of their use of student volunteers – means that there are always fresh ideas being presented to the team.
Dan & JTA in the Students Union bar
It’s also great to get in touch with Nightlines because they have the longest organisational experience of using the Three Rings rota management system. Nightlines have been using Three Rings for almost eight years, and some particularly-eager Nightlines have back-dated rota data going back as far as 1998, which affords them the opportunity to derive some fascinating statistics on volunteer composition and the changes in volunteering patterns over more than a decade.
The new Directory List view
It’s also great to be in an environment where the use of Three Rings is the norm, rather than the exception: virtually all Nightline services use Three Rings to manage their volunteer resources, plan shifts, and more, and being in a community of users gives us a great opportunity to show off and get feedback on new and upcoming features, like the new Directory List view, shown above.
Finally, it’s been really quite inspiring to be able to see some of the processes going on within the Nightline movement. As Three Rings started out by helping Nightlines, and all of the Three Rings developers are former Nightline volunteers, it’s been really motivational to see the progress that’s been made by Nightlines and the Nightline Association. There are a lot of exciting projects going on within Nightlines, right now, and it’s particularly good to get the chance to see plans come into fruition that we first saw discussed when we represented Three Rings at Nightline conferences years ago.
A big thank you to everybody who came up to our stand or came to our presentation. It was great to hear your feedback and to find out more about how Three Rings is working for you: so thanks for sharing!
One of the changes planned for Milestone Gallium – our next major upcoming release of Three Rings – will be a reduced level of support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. This follows announcements by YouTube, Google, and other major content providers that Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported for many of their services.
Internet Explorer 6 is almost a decade old – a lifetime in computer terms – and has, over the course of its use, been repeatedly and near-universally slated for its lack of adherence to web standards as well as the security problems associated with it. Users of Internet Explorer 6 can upgrade for free to a newer version of Internet Explorer or to one of a number of other browsers.
What’s changing?
From the launch of Milestone Gallium, near the end of March, Three Rings users with Internet Explorer 6 will be presented with a reasonably unobtrusive “yellow bar” – like the one pictured above – to remind them that their browser is now considered to be so far behind the times that it cannot be expected to work reliably on modern sites like Three Rings. If the user clicks on the bar, they’ll be taken to the Internet Explorer 8 download page, where they’ll receive instructions on updating their system.
If users don’t click on the bar, that’s fine – Three Rings will continue to work in Internet Explorer 6 for as long as we can possibly make it do so: this “warning bar” is just the advance warning – similar to the one now seen by Internet Explorer 6 users when they visit many other sites around the web – that the site may not work as intended and won’t look as good or run as fast as it would if they were using up-to-date software.
What does that actually mean?
What does this change actually mean for Three Rings? Not as much as you might think: we’ll still be writing code that obeys web standards, and we’ll still test the site in all of the most popular web browsers that are used to access the service, so nobody should have to suffer. But what it means is that if we ever come to develop new features which Internet Explorer 6 is simply to old to cope with; we won’t be downgrading the features to work in Internet Explorer 6 any more: instead, we’ll be requiring users to upgrade their browser. For the vast majority of Three Rings users, this means that we can provide better, more user-friendly features than ever before, without having to worry about how older web browsers cope with them.
Who will be affected?
We anticipate that fewer than 8% of Three Rings users will be affected by this change. And, of course, they still won’t have to upgrade their browser to continue using the service; they can simply dismiss or ignore the message, if they really want to, and carry on using Three Rings as normal, for now. We’d like to think that this is a welcome reminder to users who might otherwise have forgotten to take advantage of the opportunity to improve their Internet experience (even Microsoft are getting close to disowning Internet Explorer 6; by the end of the year, they’ll cease support for Windows 2000, the last Microsoft operating system to be incapable of upgrading to a newer version of the browser).
What isn’t changing?
Of course, our commitment to accessibility still stands: regardless of any special needs any particular user may have, Three Rings should be usable by everybody, all the time, without changing the way that you’re used to working. Three Rings is, and always will be, about working around the way you already work, not changing the way you do things.
While working on Three Rings the other day, one of our volunteers, Dan, was inspired to write a short article which I’ve submitted for consideration to be included in the next issue of the National Nightline magazine, Insomniac. In the UK & Ireland, most Nightlines benefit from Three Rings, and so the vast majority of potential readers of this short piece ought to be Three Rings users, and be able to appreciate it.
In case it doesn’t get published – or as a sneak peak for those of you who will get to read it later, if it does, I’ve reproduced the article in full, below. It’s titled “Never Forget How Great a Nightline is”:
NEVER FORGET HOW GREAT A NIGHTLINE IS
by Dan Q, former volunteer at Aberystwyth Nightline (1999-2004), current volunteer at Aberystwyth Samaritans, director of Three Rings Ltd.
As part of the ongoing task of developing new features for Three Rings, I recently had the serendipity to find myself with a little free time while a machine-intensive process ran on a backup copy of the Three Rings database.
My computer hummed as it made the calculations necessary to check that Nightline calendar data would be compatible with the new version of the system, due for release this coming winter. There are some exciting new features coming for the rota, and we want to make sure that these will work seamlessly with your current data, so we wrote a few programs to test it, first.
There’s a lot of data, these days – some Nightlines have data in Three Rings going back more than ten years! The program we’ve written produces rudimentary output as it goes along, so that if there are any potential problems (none so far!) that the Three Rings team needs to be aware of, we can trace what data might be affected. As it does this, it draws to the screen little plus signs, full stops, and other symbols. Each one of those little plus signs represent shifts at a Nightline, and each full stop represents a volunteer on duty on that shift. My screen quickly filled up with output:
On and on it scrolled – screenful after screenful of punctuation – and I was suddenly awestruck by the sheer magnitude of it all. Every single one of those full stops represents a student volunteer giving up their night to help their fellow students. As they scrolled by, I felt quite moved by the collective generosity that these punctuation marks represented: in the region of two-million hours of confidential student support, summarised in a string of dots.
I’m not sure that my words can really do justice to the beauty of what you’ve achieved, what you’re still achieving, and what you’re going on to achieve. The symbols that are flooding across my monitor certainly don’t cut it. But trust me when I say that your efforts are truly breathtaking. Let me put it at it’s tersest: keep up the good work, you unsung heroes.
If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at the promotional website for Three Rings, at www.threerings.org.uk.
We thought we’d take a few minutes to help explain the development process we use for Three Rings.
Three Rings typically receives three major updates per year. We call these Milestones, and we tend to organise them so that they take place around Christmas, around Easter, and in about September. Traditionally, these times were chosen because they coincided with the beginnings of University terms (at that time, the vast majority of Three Rings users were University Nightlines), and so by timing our releases strategically, we could minimise the disruption caused to our users. Nowadays we keep those release times because they’re pretty much equidistant throughout the year, and it suits us to develop on a four-month cycle.
Our current convention for naming milestones is based on the chemical elements and their isotopes, in an alphabetical order, so we’ve had Milestones Aluminium, Boron, Copper, Deuterium, Erbium, Fermium, and our current Milestone, Gallium (prior to these, we had a more mundane and boring policy of naming Milestones after the core features that they added).
The cycle looks like this:
The Three Rings development cycle
Development
Most of our time is spent in the box at the top of the cycle – development. This is when we’re writing code to implement the new features that are due to be deployed at the next upcoming Milestone. As far as possible, we implement a policy of test-driven development: this means that first, we write a computerised test that, when a feature is completed, will “pass”, but right now, it “fails”. We then write the program code that makes that feature work, so that the test passes. We also run all of the other tests we’ve ever written so we know that the new code we’ve just written won’t have any unwanted knock-on effects on any other parts of the system. We’re able to do this because we write the tests in a way that allows them to be automated: we can click a button, and our test suite will go off and it will try to do everything that it is possible to do in Three Rings, and it’ll report back to us if anything didn’t work as expected.
This belt-and-braces approach minimises the risk that any bugs can creep into the code. And if a bug does somehow slip through because a test wasn’t as complete as it could be, we can extend that test so that it will pick up on that particular issue in future, to help ensure that it can’t happen again.
Testing
For two weeks prior to the actual release of a new Milestone of Three Rings, we launch a special version of it to our test team. These volunteers – who are all current or former volunteers at organisations that use Three Rings – dedicate their time during these two weeks into testing all of the new features (and many of the old ones) to ensure that everything works like it should. If they find any problems, we take those bits back into the development process and fix them, then put them back onto the test system so that our testers can have a chance to break them again.
Some of our testers are particularly thorough, and will try to do things with Three Rings that we never even thought of, and thanks to them we’re able to find sneaky little bugs without exposing regular users to them. Often these bugs are related to things just not “looking right” on particular kinds of computers or when using particular web browsers: it’s really valuable to have such a large team of people, all with different computer systems and different ways of working, trying out each new release of Three Rings.
(the test team’s always in need of new volunteers, by the way – if you’re interested in volunteering, get in touch)
Deployment
It’s always exciting when the big day comes for a new Milestone of Three Rings to be deployed. Earlier in the day, we always do a “dry run” of the deployment, checking that all of the new data that has been added by volunteers since the testing period started is going to work perfectly with the new release, before we put the new code on the server. Then, at around midnight (so as not to disrupt organisations who might be using the system any more than is necessary, we schedule deployments for “quiet times”), we “turn off” the site: volunteers using the site at this time will just see a page apologising for the inconvenience and asking them to check back later.
We always schedule an hour or two’s potential downtime in which to deploy the new version, although in practice, it always takes a lot less time than that (the Milestone: Erbium release took a record 12 minutes). Once we’re sure that the deployment has been completed successfully, we enable access to the server again.
In recent years, we’ve attracted a hard-core following of volunteers who, it seems, will wait up until the small hours of the morning to try to be the first people at their organisation to try out the new version. Sometimes we’ll get e-mails from these people to say “congratulations” or “thanks for the new release”, which can be a real pick-me-up after a late night’s work and a real pick-me-up for the tired volunteers of the Three Rings team!
Planning
Shortly after the deployment, the Three Rings team gets together and sits down to discuss what features are going to make it into the next Milestone. There are some tough decisions to be made, because there’s only so much time and there’s always so much that we’d like to do. We have a procedure for deciding which features are to be developed next, based on the number of organisations that they will help, how difficult it is to implement, how flexible the new feature could be made to be relevant to different organisations, and so on: we’ll try to write another article on a later date to describe the process.
After this, we begin development again! Sometimes – rarely – a bug or two will be found in the “live” system, and we’ll have to write a fix (which then has to be tested and peer-reviewed in the live branch, before it can be deployed to the live server, and it has to be merged into the current development process), but for the most part, the Three Rings server “runs itself”, needing only minimal intervention by the Three Rings team: which allows us to spend as much time as possible on working on new features and supporting our users.
Thanks for visiting the new Three Rings blog. Here, the Three Rings team will post non-critical announcements about what’s new and exciting in the world of Three Rings, and periodically keep you updated about the latest exciting things happening at Three Rings HQ.
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