Today, the Engineering Office is proud to announce the release of BFMS v4.2, which includes a number of quality-of-life enhancements geared at continuing to improve the member and staff experience. Central to this release are a new user activity feed, significant updates to the user dossier, reworks to staff management and task force assets, along with numerous other quality-of-life changes, all of which are detailed in the patch notes below.
For the rare individual carefully tracking BFMS version numbers, one might realize that this announcement jumps straight from v4.0 to v4.2. This is not an oversight, and there was actually a BFMS v4.1 in-between, but because it was a backend structural upgrade, we decided to avoid bombarding the news feeds with it. The patch notes for this release may also be found below.
A common theme across both of these releases is that they are as much about the long-term maintainability, reliability and security of the BFMS platform as they are about member-facing features. BFMS v4.1 was principally a major version upgrade for PHP, and BFMS v4.2 included a number of performance improvements, new system alerting capabilities, and other changes to support the continued growth of the fleet.
As it relates to these releases, I would like to extend my thanks to:
- Fleet Captain Mamof, our Deputy Engineering Officer, who muscled through the PHP upgrade on v4.1 and then reenvisioned staff management, the administrative tools, and a number of other features in v4.2;
- Commodore Ryoko Takato, our Staff Assistant for Quality Assurance, who conducted a full regression test across the entire system for the PHP upgrade in v4.1 and then put all the features in v4.2 through his usual rigorous QA regiment; and
- the Bravo Fleet Senior Staff, who collaborated on the staff management tooling and then carefully tested that the tools were appropriately provisioning and deprovisioning across all roles within their departments.
And now, without further ado, the patch notes for two releases of BFMS…
BFMS v4.2 Patch Notes
Users
- An activity feed has been added to the user dossier that lists recent activity including command purchases/refunds, awards, story posts, new characters, and new missions.
- The awards list on the user dossier now shows award nomination details on the page without navigating to a separate page.
- The rank history on the user dossier now shows rank nomination details on the page without navigating to a separate page.
- The awards display has been rearranged, including interface changes for usability and academy badges now separated out as their own section.
- Performance for user dossier initial load improved by up to 90% with asynchronous loading for the characters, missions and awards tabs only when those are opened.
- Characters, missions and awards data load times on the user dossier improved by up to 60% versus equivalent calls on the old synchronous loaded version of the dossier.
- All user dropdowns in the system have been updated to consistently show the member ID and primary character, replacing other renditions that used to exist in some places.
- Users can mark that they are following Bluesky in their activity monitor.
Assets
- The task unit data model has been updated to support attached task force assets.
- The task force page has been updated to show attached task force assets.
- The registry has been updated to show purchase price for unassigned assets, the owner for member commands, and the task force of a command attached to a task force.
- The registry layout has been improved, and the ability to search for a specific name has been added to the filter form for the registry.
- Slow-running marketplace queries have been optimized, improving performance on the marketplace page by up to 60%.
- To align with policy, civilian ships are now explicitly prevented from being added as a flag or additional command on a command unit.
Writing
- Stories can no longer be reverted from publish status back to draft status even if a window with the post in pending status was still open from one of the authors.
- Command manifest editing now strictly prevents saving an unnamed department.
- Missions attached to events will now show up consistently in all types of events.
- If a mission is a child of an event mission, the child mission will no longer allow publishing into it until the event mission has started.
Administrative
- The backend for staff management has been completely overhauled, including a new interface and automation of most permission provisioning.
- A frontend has been introduced for the posting and management of announcements.
- A user statistics report has been added to replace the old dashboard stats widgets for site administrators.
- A commands report has been introduced for the Logistics Office.
- A batch prestige issuance tool has been introduced for the Logistics Office.
Other
- The staff page has been completely reworked.
- Users can edit draft competition proposals.
- Several bugs caused by the PHP upgrade in BFMS 4.1 have been fixed.
- The error page has been updated to conform more closely with the rest of BFMS.
- Errors now trigger a live alert with debug info for the Engineering Office.
- Cleaned up and removed all legacy ribbons from the database.
- A full test suite has been rolled out for the BFMS codebase.
- Fixed announcements display on mobile.
- Fixed users rank history display on mobile.
BFMS v4.1 Patch Notes
Core
- Codebase upgrades for compatibility with PHP 8.x, including changes to 77 core files.
- PHP upgrade on the server host bringing BFMS to a modern PHP version.
- Aligned local Docker development environment to be consistent with production.
- Fixed meta tags for search indexes throughout the system.
Other
- Added unit-level awards and promotions report.
- Added Bolty hook that checks new server joins for existing member accounts.
- Resolved logged warnings and non-fatal errors coming from Bolty integration.
