Changes from Eastercon 2024

[aJanuary]

I made a bunch of changes for Eastercon 2024. I've made PRs for a few already, but as time went on and the pressure increased, I stopped trying to make things easy to upstream and started hardcoding more Eastercon 2024 specific config and assumptions.

Rather than spending the time to make a PR for each thing, I figured I'd start a discussion here about the changes, and we can decide which are worth making PRs for. Some things are going to be easier than others.

Fix rendering of participant images 8ae5fe0: Not sure if this was due to a misconfiguration of PHP on my end, but it was outputting whitespace at the start which broke the images. This explicitly clears the output so it is just the image data.

Replace pronoun dropdown with freetext input 7908e0b: Our preference was to always provide a freeform input rather than a dropdown with an "Other" as an option. This avoids people feeling railroaded into the more binary choices. It took a tiny bit more work to extract meaningful demographics data.

Don't error when doing admin on participants who are not in a session dd4c2ef: I forget the context for this. I think it was erroring if you tried to do certain admin operations of a participant. This was probably more often the case for us than other cons because we were automatically importing every member, rather than relying on people making an account if they want to participate.

Allow per-environment theming 8570bb0: We had a production and staging environment. This allowed us to tweak the styling for the staging environment to make it more obvious which we were looking at.

Add presentation name 24144fe and 12d74e0: A field for tech to keep track of slideshows for a session.

Use bootstrap 4 for session interests cf8271d and c6327c7: This makes it look like the rest of the UI, and I couldn't see any functionality that broke.

Make title in nav bar consistent width 18b8042 and 976c2d9: This prevents the navigation links from shifting around as you go from page to page.

Rename 'My schedule' to 'I am interested' 4dc3288: For Eastercon 2023 we found people were confused by the 'My schedule' checkbox, because the label doesn't quite communicate that checking it will add it to your schedule. So we renamed it to "I am interested" which I think communicates that more clearly. I believe Eastercon 2025 reverted to 'My schedule' and didn't have any problems though.

Use dropdown for interest level c6327c7 and 90ac5d2: Using a number input is not very clear. Swap to using a dropdown with more descriptive labels of what the levels mean.

Fix label 'for' attributes c6327c7: Fix some of the 'for' attributes on the forms

Add 'Create account' workflow 126d673: The current onboarding process seems to be to tell people to click "Forgot password" to set their initial password. This creates a new flow that functions the same, but uses language that talks about creating an account in order to be less confusing.

Add permissions for live stream and vod 1ef55c1: I think @lostcarpark has implemented these separately already?

Move personal details and photo onto profile page 741f498, d384f41, 4c3e6ad and d19edb9: Having it on a separate page felt unnecessary. To me it's all profile information. This is one of the bigger changes that hardcode some of our assumptions/config.

Make general interests page AJAX f64a26a: I'm sure I was just getting frustrated with the issues around reloading pages after submission.

Use GET for session search 69442b4: This removes an instance of the "Resend POST request" prompt

Automatically persist "I am interested" choices 69442b4, 73e362f and 17777fa: It confused people when you did or didn't have to save the whole page. Checking a checkbox in the search results, in the era of webapps, feels like something that should just save automatically.

More consistent notification layout b336305, 498bed5 and 473f34a: Misc changes to errors, warnings and notifications to make them more consistent

Make photo page more consistent 52de95c: I don't remember exactly what these changes do, but in general it is to make it more visually appealing and consistent.

Move 'change password' to it's own screen f33c6ad: Having it inline in the profile screen is a little nerve-wracking. Despite it saying "leave blank to not change", it feels dangerous. Instead have it on it's own screen, linked to from the profile screen.

Add implicit permission to share name 336cdb9: This makes an often unstated permission more explicit.

Rework availability screen ad78ccc and 17e0663: It feels a little clunky having a grid of dropdowns, and "deleting" a row is selecting the empty value in the dropdown. For a high-throughput task the existing UI is probably actually more efficient, but for someone who is interacting with it once or twice a year, it is more confusing than helpful. It is also unclear when you need to explicitly save. This change replaces the grid with a button to add a new row, and saves every change automatically. It is kind of a better layout on mobile, but it is a bit of a squeeze on small devices.

Add cache busting 9f28470: This is more of an issue with our hosting. I couldn't get it to change the cache headers, so I added cache busting by appending a checksum. This is quite an expensive way of doing it, but running PlanZ on modern hardware it barely touches the sides.

Make contact info readonly dc8f8e0: The authoritative source of contact info for us is conreg, so we don't want them thinking that updating it in PlanZ is enough. This change makes it readonly. This should probably be behind a config option.

Fix deleting the last schedule constraint a9e8d59: I have to assume this was a bug I hit that I fixed.

Move General interests later 499d704: We want to encourage people to pick specific sessions rather than tell us about general interests, so we moved the tab to later in the order. I don't know if this is an acceptable change for everyone, or if this would need to be configurable.

Show link to session search if they've not picked any c8be69a: Rather than showing a blank page if they've not selected any sessions, give them a link to the session search so they can find some they might be interested in.

Change 'Accessibility requirements/issues' to 'Accessibility needs' 38603e9 I think this was a request from either our head of access or our chair. This can be changed through the i18n stuff but we might want to update the defaults as I think 'needs' is a better term.

Fix issue when saving demographic details for a new user 38a84f8: I assume this is a bug I hit and fixed.

Reduce number of sessions they can express interest in 710ccd5: This was a request from our head of programme. If adopted, should probably be a configuration option.

Add search box to top of session search dfff92e, 9a3807a, 1cdd2e7 and 8d1d196: Previously you had to fill in the search form (with an empty search term if you wanted everything) and click a button to search. This makes it so it shows you everything by default, and then on the same screen type a search query at the top. This makes the search page more of a filter, which is more suitable to our use case. Most people are going to want to scan the list first, before iterating to find things with different search terms.

Make search results more mobile friendly d82835c: The table layout meant you had really narrow columns on smaller screens,
making it impossible to read. Change to a more vertical layout. This does mean you end up with items taking up more vertical space, but that is preferable to not being able to read it.

Use cards on the session interest page 18ef893: iirc this just makes the UI feel more consistent with the other pages

Remove double margins 1989d70: This makes the UI feel more consistent and fit better on smaller screens

Add icon to display what is visible to participants f1944be: We found people were using the wrong fields for internal notes, meaning things like "Don't put so and so on this item" were showing up to users. Partly that should be fixed by better field naming. But in addition this adds an icon to show what fields will be visible to participants.

Add location e235aa0, b05fe3b, 264a8fe and a5663b5: For a hybrid con (where participants can be in-person or remote), it's important for them to be able to let us know where they are available, and keep track of whether they are in-person or remote for each item. We have had people that are on site for a day or two, and remote for the rest, so they need to be able to mix and match.

Change gap between items to 30 mins af95006: I don't know if we can parameterize the report, but different cons are going to have different gaps between items they need to warn about.

Disable 'I am interested' buttons fc025df: At some point we had locked in our programme, but we still wanted people to be able to search the sessions. Would be good to encode this, maybe as a part of the "stages" feature or whatever it's called?

Add live schedule 84e2994: This was used to drive interstitial slides with "coming up". Would be good to decide on a standard format for this so the integrations can be re-used between cons.

Add tech report page d6a1128: This generates a zip of CSVs for the tech reports. This was useful for tech to be able to download a bunch of different reports and post-process them to generate their shift schedules etc. This hardcodes the report query, but it would be good to be able to select multiple standard reports and download them as a zip of CSVs.

Add publish mechanism b1ce671: We had a workflow where, after the initial import to a 3rd party system (RingCentral Events), any further changes needed to be manually applied through their UI. This made it important to have a manual, explicit "Publish" step to generate the json for conclar, and to show the differences from the previous publish so they could be manually copied across. Even without the need to manually copy stuff to a third party, having a publish step that shows you the differences seems like it would be useful for prog ops.

[bcholmes]

Wow. Sounds like a lot of really great work.