[deploy 31-05-2022] Various minor enhancements

Background

A change was deployed on Monday 23rd May to help alleviate the time-outs that result in CloudFlare 504 or sometimes 502 errors. We know that email delivery processing is a bottleneck in Beacon and this change sought to reduce the time the database table that records email despatch and delivery is kept busy (locked).

If there are no issues with the update we intend to deploy some of the enhancements relating to Beacon functionality that have been on hold while Beacon performance was stabilised.

E-mail characters and "from" address

Some characters in the subject line of emails that were being escaped or dropped, specifically & < > ' and ", are now treated as normal characters. Also the issue of the pipe character | causing content to be lost when saved as a standard message has been fixed.

If a user has more that one email address, i.e. a personal and "officer" address, it now remembers the last address used (for 90 days as long as cookies are accepted). This worked before Beacon was upgraded to the latest version of SQL.

Ledger Sorting

Ledger (by Account) and Ledger (by Category) can now be sorted by columns “Mem No”, “Detail”, “Payment Ref” and “Method”.

Data Exports

Columns have been added to the Data Export & Backup downloads to make it easier and less ambiguous to match data between worksheets. Details can be found here 9.5 Data Export and Backup.

An example of the full download with Demotown data is attached to the bottom of this article (attachment corrected 31-05-2022 apologies).

Change of Membership year

If you request the Beacon Team change the month of your membership year then the renewal dates of Current members will be automatically changed to the new month.