Our November release focuses on iterations and improvements to our existing services to you. These aren't the most glamorous of changes, but they are important for making your experience with our software, and us as a company, even better. And, of course, we squashed a few bugs in the process. These changes will be live in your sites the morning of Thursday, November 2.
Featured Updates
Form Mobile Carrier Field
With our release of mobile-friendly forms last month, we included the ability to capture mobile carrier information on a form. For a lot of churches, this was an exciting addition, however, we also heard from a lot of you that you wanted the ability to exclude this mobile carrier field on some of your forms. With this release, the Mobile Carrier field is now optional, and you can choose whether or not to include it on your form, and whether or not you want that information to be required.
We applied some logic to make sure that this field is showing appropriately for your existing forms:
- If you have an existing form that already includes the Mobile Phone field, and you have at least one response submitted for that form, the Mobile Carrier field will be shown on that form, but will be kept optional. (You can still go in and edit that form to not display the Mobile Carrier field).
- If you have an existing form that already includes the Mobile Phone field, but that form does not have any responses submitted, the Mobile Carrier field will not show on that form. (But you can choose to edit the form and include the Mobile Carrier field if you want to).
- If you have an existing form that does not have the Mobile Phone field, we will continue to not include the Mobile Carrier field on that form.
Updated Terms of Service
We have made a minor change to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy related to 'Customer Proprietary Data Rights.' We have included language that allows us to disclose limited amounts of church partner data, to reflect enhancements to the user login experience for the benefit of churches, organizations, customers, and individual users.
So how does this affect you? Before, our Terms of Service restricted us from exposing that a specific church was a partner of ours. This change allows us to expose that information, as long as it is in the interest of helping your users find your church's Church Community Builder site. You are going to see this change put to good use soon in the LEAD app, where a user will be able to use a location search or name search to find their church, rather than having to know the subdomain to log in. This new 'find my church' function will be going to our Lead beta testers soon.
Your privacy and data security are extremely important to us. As in the past, we’re transparent in how we use certain data to your benefit. While we use data to continually improve our products and services, diagnose issues, improve security features, and improve the relevancy of search queries, be assured the overarching purpose is to improve your experience!
Discontinuing Support of IE 11
Effective November 8, 2017, we will be discontinuing support for the Internet Explorer 11 browser. As an older browser, we are unable to ensure the security and usability of our software on that platform. While there are not any known major issues with IE 11, once we discontinue support, any issues that do arise will not be fixed by our team.
This was a tough call to make. While we don't want to impede people who are actively using this older browser, we also recognized we were spending a lot of development resources fixing problems that only arose in IE 11. We determined it would be a better use of our time, and better benefit all of our churches, to focus these efforts on new development and improving experiences in current browsers.
If you currently use Internet Explorer 11, we encourage you to download a different browser to access the Church Community Builder software. You can find a complete list of supported browsers and how to download them on this Help Article.
TLS 1.2 Security Update
In order to maintain the most data security for our software, effective November 8, 2017, our software will only work on browsers compatible with TLS 1.2. What this means in non-geek speak: there are some really old versions of browsers that aren't compatible with the most up-to-date security practices. If you try to visit your Church Community Builder site from one of these very old browsers, you will see an error message that says the site cannot be found.
This update does not change our list of supported browsers; in fact, we had already discontinued support of these older browser versions a long time ago.
You can find a complete list of our supported browsers and how to download them on this Help Article, and if you're interested in all the geek-speak, you can learn more about TLS 1.2 and what browsers are incompatible here.
Maintenance
Account
- Your church's Billing Contact will now be able to access the Account page of the software, allowing them to renew the church contract from within the software.
- You can now see and set your church's billing contacts from the Account page. The Master Administrator, Support Contacts, and current Billing Contacts will be able to add or remove Billing Contacts.
- Billing Contacts will now also be able to change the church's Master Administrator from the Account page.
Calendar & Events
- We fixed the search icon (magnifying glass) on the Calendar page so it actually does something again.
- Editing an event no longer inadvertently deletes the event's photo.
Check-In
- We fixed a Check-In bug that was suggesting the event that a kid was in previously rather than the event for the group they were just promoted to. Now, with suggested events in Check-In will always favor the group a person is currently in over any of their previous attendance history.
Financial
- You can now fully disable a COA category that is no longer in use for your church.
Forms
- When filling out a form on a tablet or desktop, the confirmation page is now the same width as the rest of the form, rather than being smaller.
- When filling out a form on IE 11, there is a delay between what you type and when it appears on screen. We reduced that delay, but have not completely eliminated it, and due to our discontinued support of the IE 11 browser, we will not be able to improve this experience further.
- We fixed a rare scenario where a logged in user was not able to enter their email address into a form, even when that field was required.
- We fixed a problem where deleting a page break in the form was sometimes affecting the order of the rest of the form's questions.
Mail Merge
- We fixed an issue where minor text edits to a Mail Merge were not being saved.
- We are no longer incorrectly stretching small images that are uploaded in Mail Merges, the Welcome Message, or the Login Text areas.
Process Queues
- We are no longer incorrectly sending notifications to queue managers that a person is unassigned if that setting is turned off for that specific queue.
- A process or queue manager can now only add a person to an additional queue if it is one that they manage. Before, if they were adding someone to an additional queue from the 'Family' tab, they were incorrectly seeing a list of all processes and queues.
Profiles
- We fixed a problem in the Mobile Preview where the keyboard was covering the Allergies field on Android devices.
- In the Mobile Preview, we are now respecting the right privacy levels and privileges for determining what social networks can be seen on a person's profile.
- In the Mobile Preview, we have changed the 'Service(s) You Usually Attend' field to instead be 'Preferred Service'. Where, in the desktop version, you could have multiple services selected for this field, in the Mobile Preview, you can only select one. When you edit a profile in Mobile Preview that has multiple services selected, it will save with only one service selected.
Schedules
- We are no longer sending out 'Schedule Not Full' emails for a schedule week that has no services.
Hot Fixes
Sometimes we become aware of issues in the software that are so important, they can’t wait for the next scheduled software release to be fixed. We call those ‘Hot Fixes’. Here is a list of all of those Hot Fixes that have already been resolved since the last release.
Forms
- (Oct 17) We no longer require payment options to be set up for a form if all of the product/ticket items are free.
- (Oct 23) We fixed a problem where a form response that automates to a position was sometimes not saving correctly when being matched to a person.
- (Oct 26) On iOS 11, the cursor no longer jumps around into the wrong field when filling a form or typing in fields in the Mobile Preview.
Metrics
- (Oct 26) Metrics now display correctly for churches with an Engagement Week that starts on Monday.
Profiles
- (Oct 26) When a person changes status in a group, we are now correctly showing an 'end date' to their old status on the group history table.