2.25 22.Sep.2008
Many bug fixes for new-style paper views.
Comments: Now ALL comments are "tied to the reviews." Comment entry gives you three visibility choices, as radio buttons: "PC reviewers only," "PC and external reviewers," and "Authors and reviewers." Previous "tied to reviews" plan considered confusing, and external reviewers selection requested, by Benjamin Pierce.
Comment notifications: Limit emails to once every 3 hours, to avoid comment notification storms when people edit authors’ responses. Requested by Benjamin Pierce.
Ranks: "Calculate rank" tag action for chairs uses Schulze’s algorithm (a Condorcet method) to calculate a global rank tag from users’ local ranks. Code also supports the CIVS-Ranked Pairs algorithm developed by Andrew Myers for his CIVS (Condorcet Internet Voting Service), as well as range voting and IRV. Special thanks to Andrew Myers for answering questions and providing a useful test case.
Search for specific submission option values with "opt:name=value".
External reviewer request emails include "accept review" and "refuse review" links that, when clicked, record the reviewer’s choice. ("Accept review" marks a review as "in progress", rather than "not started"; "refuse review" refuses it.) Benjamin Pierce request.
Bug fixes and improvements to settings pages, search, review tokens, comment display, database interaction, "ASCII art" detection in reviews, wording.
Thanks also to Benjamin Pierce, Richard Gass, Michael Vrable, and others.
2.24 22.Aug.2008
Major changes
New paper display. Paper, review, and comment views are unified into a single display format. The paper view shows initial words of abstract and compressed author list; both are easily unfoldable. Tags, discussion leads, shepherds, review preferences, PC conflicts, and other PC-type information appear in a strip down the left hand side. Paper views summarize comment counts and comment authorship. I think this is a huge improvement.
Voting tags. Chairs can define tags used for voting, with vote allotments, as in "vote#20". PC members vote for papers by assigning the corresponding twiddle tag, as in "~vote#1". The system prevents users from going over their allotments, and automagically maintains a public "vote" tag that sums users’ votes.
Ranking tag. Preliminary support for paper rankings via the tags system.
Review ratings are searchable and gain more options. The current set of ratings is "Average, Very helpful, Not complete, Not convincing, Not constructive, Not correct." (Is this too many?) The home page reports a user’s rated reviews. Searching for "rate:+" finds positively rated reviews, "rate:-" negatively rated reviews, and e.g. "rate:convincing" finds "not convincing" rated reviews. Robbert van Renesse feedback was very helpful.
New features and new behavior
New search syntax: Support partial word matches, as in "foo*" or "bl*ah". Search for a tag in reverse order with "rorder:tag". Search within tag orders with, for instance, "tag:pcrating#2" or "tag:pcrating#>2" (Rich Draves request). Search for incomplete reviews with "ire:whatever" (Rich Draves request). Chairs and administrators can search other users’ twiddle tags, as in "tag:frank~vote".
Ordered tags: The "define ordered" and "add ordered" tag actions skip order steps; for example, they might assign order 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10. This hides information from conflicted PC members, since they can no longer infer conflicted papers’ positions by looking for gaps. New "Define sequential" and "Add sequential" actions do the old sequential style.
Search highlight improvements: Searching only highlights terms in the relevant fields; for example, "au:john" won’t highlight "john" in the title. Also automagically unfold any field that contains a highlight.
Offline reviewing improvements. Blank review forms ignored on upload, rather than causing warnings (Rebecca Isaacs request). Supposedly "ready" review forms that lack required fields are saved anyway, they’re just not marked as "ready" (Rebecca Isaacs request). The system detects and rejects attempts to upload an offline form after a review is edited online (Fred Douglis report). Clarify where numeric scores are entered (Benjamin Pierce request).
Paper assignment UI improvements. Reorder fields, make submission behavior clearer. Automatic assignment: can shift-click on PC member ranges. Show topic interest scores and preferences as "Txxx Pyyy". Automatic assignment can clear existing assignments. Bug fixes. (Benjamin Pierce and Jeff Mogul requests)
Comment visibility changes. Users can mark a comment as "tied to reviews," which means that PC members who haven’t read the reviews can’t see the comment either. This is more useful, arguably, than hiding comments from external reviewers. (Robbert van Renesse request)
A tweak to Minshall score improves its behavior when papers have different numbers of reviews (Terence Kelly report).
External reviewers can use review tokens, since owning a review token confers the right to view the corresponding paper.
Bug fixes and minor UI improvements
The "Reviewers can see decisions" setting also applies to the PC.
"Merge accounts" bug fixes.
PC members always count as reviewers, even if they haven’t had any reviews assigned yet (Laurel Krieger report).
Paper lists never show conflicted PC members counts of reviews (Fred Douglis report).
Mail tool: Include %COMMENTS% in mails even when sending mail before reviews are visible in the site. This is the same as the %REVIEWS% behavior. (Jeff Mogul report) Also, issue a warning about sending mail with %REVIEWS% or %COMMENTS% when reviews aren’t visible on the site.
Mail tool: If authors can see reviews only after finishing their own, then the mail tool will hide reviews and comments from authors who have not finished their own reviews. And include a warning.
Mail tool: JavaScript discourages users from clicking on the "Send" button too early (Robbert van Renesse, Rich Draves report).
Mail tool: Report how many emails remain to be sent.
Mail tool: Add "Discussion leads" and "Shepherds" recipient types (Jeff Mogul request).
Mail tool: The action log tracks sent mail (Jeff Mogul request).
"Refuse review" reason field is bigger (Benjamin Pierce report).
Search bug fix: "order:~privatetag" works (Rich Draves report).
Search: Add Download > Discussion leads and Download > Shepherds (Jeff Mogul request).
Search: Add Display options > Row numbers (Rich Draves request).
Search: Tag order searches gain an explicit search column heading so that the sort order can be reversed. Request and UI ideas from Rich Draves.
Settings: Validate XHTML, preventing cross-site scripting bugs.
Special thanks to Robbert van Renesse.
2.23 22.Jul.2008
Do not infinite loop when sending mail to non-ASCII names associated with long email addresses. Reported by Robbert van Renesse and Rich Draves.
Report correct number of reviews on the program committee page, even if review ratings are enabled. Reported by Robbert van Renesse.
Correct PHP warnings and make compatible with older PHPs. Reported by Jeonghee Shin.
2.22 15.Jul.2008
Appearance fixes: use default controls in most cases.
Aggregated information about review ratings are provided on the PC details page.
Allow searches of review fields and scores. For example, "ove-mer:2>=2" searches for papers that have at least 2 overall merit scores that are greater than or equal to 2. Requested by Rich Draves and Robbert van Renesse.
Support multiple-choice paper options (rather than checkbox). Requested by Jeff Mogul.
Improve some messages and help text.
2.21 11.May.2008
Further improve validation and Internet Explorer 6 compatibility.
2.20 11.May.2008
Improve Internet Explorer 6 compatibility. Reported by Terence Kelly. Includes Drew McLellan’s supersleight for transparent PNG support
(http://24ways.org/2007/supersleight-transparent-png-in-ie6).
Some validation fixes.
Set MySQL’s max_allowed_packet on a per-session basis based on PHP’s upload_max_filesize, rather than relying on users to set max_allowed_packet correctly. A problem was reported by Sourabh Jain.
Bug fixes to preference list, English, and createdb script.
2.19 6.May.2008
Provide visible feedback on Ajax forms.
Improve manual assignments page with better conflict listings (Rebecca Isaacs).
2.18 5.May.2008
Record PC feedback about whether reviews were helpful. PC members and, optionally, external reviewers can rate one another’s reviews. Hopefully
this will help improve the quality of reviews. "Was this review helpful
for you?" appears above each visible review. HotCRP reports the number
of ratings for each review and how many of those ratings were
positive. It does not report who gave the ratings, and it never shows
rating counts to authors.
The $Opt["emailSender"] option lets you set the envelope sender in sent mail (Robbert van Renesse).
Add review tokens, which allow reviewers to edit reviews anonymously.
Prettier styles.
Bug fix: Correct commenter identities in comment emails.
Finish (?) information exposure fixes (David Andersen).
Banal works with pdftohtml 0.36 (Robbert van Renesse).
When a paper is withdrawn, its reviewers no longer need to complete their reviews (Stefan Savage).
2.17 23.Apr.2008
IMPORTANT: Continue reviewer identity leak fix via search rewrite.
Rewrite search again. Search now works like Google search. "-word" excludes "word" matches from the search. "word1 OR word2" searches for either "word1" or "word2" (the OR must be uppercase). The default search box returns papers that match ALL the words. Searches in title, abstract, and authors match whole words, not portions of words. The process of building up and executing a query is cleaner and comes closer to the ideal of returning all visible information.
Paper lists report "0" reviews for papers that never got a review (rather than "0/1").
2.16 21.Apr.2008
IMPORTANT: Reviewer identity leak fix.
Improve usability with tooltips and appearance improvements (inspired by John Wilkes).
2.15 9.Apr.2008
Improve homepage with a right-hand sidebar.
PC members can download any PDF that is "ready for review," even if the submission period has not closed. A warning informs them that authors can still update.
Show SHA-1 checksums for paper submissions (Dave Andersen).
Download: Review forms (zip) returns a .zip with a separate review form file for each form (Jeff Mogul).
Display "Your discussion leads" link even before "PC can view all reviews" is set (Brad Beckmann).
Bug fix: Fix manual chair assignment page (Mark Gebhart).
Bug fix: Fix review form download from the review page (Mark Gebhart).
Bug fix: Do not reveal author names to reviewers when authors withdraw a paper already under review (Stefan Savage).
Bug fix: "Reviewers" user search returns reviewers that completed reviews for papers that have since been withdrawn.
Bug fix: Authors can see review form guidance.
Bug fix: Searching for "cre:>0", etc. works.
2.14 12.Mar.2008
Review field options can take lettered values, such as A-D or X-Z, as well as numeric values.
Add support for bulk upload of review assignments, PC or external (requested by Matthew Frank).
Review preference UI improvements, including uploadable preference files (requested by Greg Minshall).
Add "private" and "secret" review fields.
Review table UI improvements.
Fix installations that set zlib.output_compression by default (Elliott Karpilovsky).
Soft limit on the number of concurrent paper format checker processes should reduce system load at submission time.
Add a setting where PC members can see reviews but not reviewer identities (requested by Matthew Frank).
Other bug fixes, UI improvements (particularly for paper submission), and documentation improvements.
Thanks to Michael Vrable, Stefan Savage, and Scott Rose.
2.13 22.Jan.2008
Add support for paper format checking with Geoff Voelker’s banal script. Thanks to Geoff for the script and debugging support, and to Harald
Schiöberg for providing an initial implementation.
Fix "Monitor external reviews" (requested by Matthew Frank).
Add two more textual review fields (requested by Matthew Frank).
Set the message used to invite external reviewers via the UI (requested by Matthew Frank).
Hide comments from reviewers that should not be seen by reviewers.
URL improvements. Remove .php suffix with mod_rewrite; replace "paperId=" with "p=", "reviewId=" with "r=", "commentId=" with "c=".
Bug fixes and memory reduction fixes. Especially speed up first-time loads by reporting the correct Content-Length for gzipped content (problem reported by Elliott Karpilovsky).
Thanks also to Matthew Frank, Joseph Tucek, and Bernhard Ager.
2.12 30.Dec.2007
Introduce "twiddle tags", such as "~tag", which are visible only to the PC members that created them. Based on a request from Matthew Frank.
Add an optional note to the reviewer that PC members can supply with review requests.
Support completely anonymous reviewers.
Automatic paper assignment can avoid assigning two PC members to the same paper. Based on a request from Matthew Frank.
Add %SHEPHERD%, etc. to the mail tool (Jon Crowcroft).
UI improvements. Especially including a one-page signin process that allows people who haven’t yet logged in to see public conference information such as deadlines and PC members.
Mail improvements to MIME encoding.
Bug fixes.
Thanks to Matthew Frank, Mike Colagrasso, David Black-Schaffer, Ken Birman, and Jon Crowcroft.
2.11 27.Oct.2007
Mail tool allows sending mail to contact authors or reviewers for selected papers.
UI fixes for conflict of interest wording and home page (thanks, Matthew Frank), autoassignment page, search help, search page.
Some fixes to MIME support, PHP uninitialized variable warnings, and paper downloads when submissions are closed (bug report from V. Arun).
2.10 24.Oct.2007
Add some support for MIME extensions; message bodies are marked UTF-8, and message headers containing UTF-8 characters are quoted according to
RFC2047.
Fix a couple bugs in 2.9 having to do with sending email, entering unrequested reviews, and other things.
2.9 20.Oct.2007
Add a setting allowing PC members to see tags even for conflicted papers.
Tag names generally link to the corresponding search.
Multiple independent paper lists will improve quicklink navigation.
Add "notag:" searches.
Setting description improvements.
2.8 11.Oct.2007
Bug fix: Do not reveal authors’ identities via responses.
Bug fix: Avoid losing the "open for responses" setting when updating other setting groups.
Authors’ responses are hidden from the PC until they are ready.
Improve review pretty printing for tabular-like text.
Add a setting allowing comments even if reviewing is closed.
Final copy display improvements.
Correlate soft and hard deadlines: if a hard deadline is set, but not a soft deadline, show the hard deadline to relevant users.
Other behavior improvements.
2.7 23.Aug.2007
Email notification for comments. Authors, reviewers, and PC members can request email notification when comments are added to a paper they are
interested in. The system tracks a global preference and per-paper
preferences, so one can say "no notifications in general, but notify me
about paper 4". Notification is on by default. Requires schema changes;
see the file ’Code/updateschema.sql’.
PC members and reviewers can view a paper’s comments before they finish their own reviews for that paper.
Reviews have a "The review is ready for others to see." checkbox, instead of "Submit" vs. "Save changes" pushbuttons. The checkbox is a better UI.
Offline reviewing improvements and text review download fixes.
Support "External reviewers" mail class (Jim Larus).
Add ’Code/updateschema.sql’.
Fix database-creation bugs introduced in Version 2.4 (!), plus some old bugs.
2.6 20.Aug.2007
New way to collect author information. Author information is entered using separate text fields for Name, Email, and Affiliation. If a user’s
email is listed in the Email field of a paper’s author information, that
user becomes a contact author for the paper and can edit the paper.
XHTML 1.0 Strict conformance.
Performance improvements: better cacheability for images, gzip JavaScript and CSS.
Style changes, especially on settings pages.
2.5 12.Aug.2007
Optionally collect users’ addresses and phone numbers.
2.4 12.Aug.2007
Allow setting an info message that appears on the homepage.
Add an "Abstracts" display option to search screens, filled in by Ajax.
Fix several IE problems, "Authors" checkbox on search display, "withdraw" popup dialog, and others.
Style changes.
2.3 16.Jul.2007
New action log display includes search.
Validate XHTML.
Other fixes.
2.2 11.Jul.2007
Download a text file with reviewer names and emails (Frans).
Better offline reviewing.
2.1 10.Jul.2007
IE compatibility.
2.0 9.Jul.2007
New mail system.
Popup help on review scores.
A secondary reviewer, having delegated her own review, can view other reviews as soon as the delegatee submits HER review.
Visual improvements, especially to the front page.
Other fixes.
Thanks to Akos Ledeczi.
2.0b9 16.Jun.2007
More Ajax.
Make images, JavaScript, and CSS cacheable.
Allow updates to a submitted paper without first unsubmitting the paper.
Optionally allow authors to update their submissions until the submission deadline.
Add "system administrator" role.
Tags are optionally visible on paper lists.
Email template improvements.
Visual improvements, including the search page.
Combine "View" and "Edit" paper tabs into a single "Paper" tab.
Other fixes.
Thanks to Bernhard Ager, Frans Kaashoek, and Fernando Pereira.
2.0b8 11.Mar.2007
Fix policy leak: Do not reveal reviewer identities if reviews are always anonymous!
Other fixes.
Thanks to Jeff Chase.
2.0b7 3.Mar.2007
Fix policy leak: When sending email, include only information the recipient can see.
Selectable score diagrams and score-based sort orders in paper lists.
Add "PC members can see all registered papers until submission deadline" setting.
Account list improvements.
Allow submitting a paper in one step.
Improve help.
Other fixes.
Thanks to Bernhard Ager, Jeff Chase, Frans Kaashoek, and Andrew Myers.
2.0b6 1.Feb.2007
Fix policy leak: PC members cannot see PC-only fields on review forms for their authored papers.
Fix policy leak: External reviewers can’t see reviewer identities unless the policy allows it.
Other fixes.
2.0b5 27.Jan.2007
Improve tags and help.
Ajax review preferences.
Line numbers for uploaded review form error messages.
Other fixes.
2.0b4 13.Jan.2007
Add automatic assignments.
Add review form templates.
Add paper options.
Improve IE compatibility.
Fix login from email links.
Fix grace period.
Other fixes.
2.0b3 10.Dec.2006
Move to Conference Settings pages from deadline settings.
New search settings, such as "re:<4".
More help.
Remove database abstraction layer.
Other fixes.
2.0b2 1.Dec.2006
Internal updates.
2.0b1 28.Nov.2006
Initial release.