Kitsune release notes 2021-04-21

[leo (Leo McArdle)]

Full changes since our last set of release notes.

It’s been a little while since our last set of release notes, as we’ve been hard at work removing (almost) every trace of ElasticSearch 2.x from Kitsune. All the following no longer have a dependency on it:

• “My Questions” link, and “questions” and “answers” contribution links on user profiles. These now use dedicated pages, rather than advanced search:
  • https://support.mozilla.org/user/<username>/questions
  • https://support.mozilla.org/user/<username>/answers
• The “See also” section on questions
• The “Top Contributors” knowledge base and localization leaderboards (we already migrated the question one in a previous release):
  • https://support.mozilla.org/community/top-contributors/kb
  • https://support.mozilla.org/community/top-contributors/l10n
• The KB document listings for products and topics:
  • e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/products/firefox/basic-browsing-firefox

We’ve also added:

• Dedicated forum search, which can be seen at the top of each forum, to prepare for the removal of advanced search.
• A server-side rendered version of search v2, currently accessible at a dedicated url:
  • https://support.mozilla.org/search/v2/
  • This will be moved to simply /search/ when we remove the very last elements of ES 2.x
• Pagination to community search

We’ve made a couple of improvements to searching itself:

• Quoted strings will no longer be matched against synonyms, so for example:
  • a search for addons will match against addons, extensions, and themes
  • whereas a search for "addons" will only match against addons
  • stemming and other non-synonym analysis will still happen for quoted strings, e.g. "addons" will still match addon
• Administration knowledge base articles will no longer appear in searches
• Very generic searches like * (match anything) or -firefox (match anything but firefox) should now work across all locales

One non-search-related bug fix:

• Date modified after a question is edited is not correct in some cases

And some far less interesting (but necessary) changes:

• Updating project libraries
• Removing of customercare app (Army of Awesome)
• Reformatting of some localized strings containing HTML, and establishing a format for these going forward
• Removing the non-functional topic section from the question metrics dashboard
• Removing the unused /api/v2/topcontributors/ route
• Removing ES 2.x from the update_question_vote_chunk task
• Consolidating cache timeout settings
• Updating route construction in forums app
• Removing outdated e2e tests
• Increasing ES refresh interval
• Increasing take question API timeout