Milestone: Quinault is scheduled for release on 19 July 2025. Significant changes are as follows:
🔍 Searching for Content in Filestore Files
You can now use search on the content of certain types of Filestore files, as well as file names and descriptions. Searchable types are PDF files, spreadsheets (file types xls, xlsx, ods), documents (file types doc, docx, odt) and plain text files (file type txt).
The Filestore search button now contains a dropdown which allows you to select whether to search on file names and descriptions, file content, or both.
File contents are indexed when they are uploaded to Filestore . This may take a minute or so, especially if a large number of files are uploaded at the same time. If your search includes files which are not yet indexed, the search results will tell you. Simply wait a little while and then try again. All eligible files on the system at the time of the new release will be indexed as part of the release process.
📰 Paginated News Archive
Where there are many News Items, they are now paginated (broken into multiple pages), with the most-recent ones visible first. This keeps older news available if you need it without it cluttering up your archive, especially on smaller-screen devices.
🗝️ Authentication improvements
We’ve made a variety of small authentication-based improvements:
- Added SMS for 2FA: if you’re using two-factor authentication, you can now use SMS text messages as your primary or backup authentication mechanism.
- Keys ❤️ Google Accounts: it’s now possible to use keys when using a third-party authentication (e.g. your Google Account). Just select the key on the login page as usual, then log in using your Google Account (or whatever).
- Less-confusing Key behaviour for multi-organisation volunteers: previously, if you volunteered at two places in the same family of organisations, and had a key that permitted you to see news or events belonging to one organisations, you’d see those news and and events whichever of the two organisations you were looking at, which could be confusing.
- Easier logouts if your only organisation is disabled: previously, if you logged in but the only organisation you volunteered at was disabled, logging out required you to clear your Three Rings cookies or else wait for the 10-minute timeout, so we’ve fixed that.
🗓 Changes to Role Names and Details
Following user feedback, in the future, changing the name or description of a role will no longer reapply the role to volunteers who have it (which led to confusion because it reset the duration that they’d held the role).
🗃️ Additional Properties
We’ve added properties (which you can enable via Admin > Properties) for:
- Accessibility Requirements
- Support Workers or Carers
- Employment or Engagement details
📱 Added Voodoo as SMS provider
Voodoo SMS has been added as an SMS provider.
🐞 Bugfixes and Minor Improvements
- It’s now harder to accidentally delete “in use” rotas: deleting a rota with any significant number of shifts will prompt you for an additional confirmation during which you need to correctly answer how many shifts exactly are being deleted (the answer’s on the same page, but it’ll hopefully make you slow down and think before you delete!)
- Organisations that only operate for part of the year (e.g. homeless shelters) can now turn off Weekly Digests for the whole organisation during their ‘off period’ in Admin > Localisation.
- The Admin > Invoices panel now asks you to select the country your organisation is in from a drop-down: this’ll make it easier for us to post you any invoices (unless you receive them by email)…but also a Christmas card each year!
- Events borrowed from other organisations in your organisations’ family are now suffixed with the name of the organisation they came from, e.g. “Refresher Training @ Other Organisation”
- Shift with long titles, or on rotas with long names, no longer overlap with the number of points those shifts are worth
- Improved accessibility throughout the system
- When splitting a shift into two smaller shifts, additional settings (e.g. whether to send reminders) are preserved
- Our Privacy Policy now links to the most up-to-date version hosted on our main website
- Increased the frequency with which the virus scanner will re-scan files already uploaded to the Filestore, attached to Comms emails, or embedded (as images) in News Items and Wiki Pages
- Volunteers without an email address trying to access Comms caused an error- this has now been fixed.
- MacOS users can now also “copy” volunteers between shifts by using drag-and-drop: Windows and Linux users were already able to do this by holding the CTRL key; MacOS users can now use the CMD key to the same effect
We’re remain endlessly thankful for people who get in touch to suggest improvements to Three Rings.