Kitsune release notes 2021-03-16

[leo (Leo McArdle)]

Full changes since last release.

Search

Many thanks to everyone who tested and provided feedback about the new version of search we soft-launched last release. We’ll begin slowly rolling this new version in instant search over the next few days.

This release we focused on improving search given that feedback, fixing bugs in instant search, and getting ready for the general release of new search.

New in this release:

• Support for using the browser’s back, forward and refresh buttons in instant search
• Properly handle search and highlighting for “add ons”, “add-ons”, and similar queries
• Set up support for synonyms, including locale-specific synonyms, and migrate the en-US synonyms in use on the old version of search

Instant search fixes:

• Render out of order responses correctly
• Localisation:
  • Use localised product names in filters
  • Fix our JS localisations, fixing localisations in instant search as well
• Filtering and pagination:
  • Show upper dots in pagination
  • Fix users getting stuck in the “Help Articles Only” filter after performing a second search
  • Show filters when a search has zero results
  • Go back to first page when changing query or filter

Other fixes:

• Tweak community search parameters
  • https://support.mozilla.org/community/search
  • More results will be shown
  • Members of the contributor group will rank higher
• Filter the AAQ top contributors page by the contributors group
  • “Top Contributors - Support Forum” page
  • Only members of the contributors group will show
  • Overall count should match number of cards shown
• Improve search performance:
  • Split search query per-index
  • Remove dfs_query_then_fetch

Other notable changes

• Redirect Fenix to Firefox for Android AAQ

Spam filter improvements:

• Send email notifications as normal if a moderator rejects a flag
• Exclude question author from the filter
• Exclude KB and locale groups from the filter

Non-Search Bugfixes:

• Don’t hide topics in the contributor product
• Allow users with obscure, but valid, email addresses to create accounts and use the site
• Expose Firefox Accounts help text to localisers

[plwt (Paul Wright)]

That is a massive amount of work, thank you so much.

One question - the Fenix redirect. This is just a AAQ redirect - there will still be two forums?

(To clarify - I hope they can be joined with no loss of questions and contributor data at some point.)

[leo (Leo McArdle)]

@plwt

One question - the Fenix redirect. This is just a AAQ redirect - there will still be two forums?

Yep, for now this is just an update of the existing redirect for Fenix users to /questions/new/mobile rather than /questions/new/firefox-preview.

We’re yet to decide what to do with the existing questions, though agreed: it would be great if we can merge the forums without losing users’ contributions.