Multiple Quality of Life Improvements
In recent updates to FlowStack, we have made a numerous variant of quality of life upgrades we would like to share.
Broadly speaking, these cover four categories:
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Improved Rich-Text Editor
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Explicit Timezones
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Bible Experience Improvements
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Family Members & Event Registration improvements.
Let's go one at a time and dive into each of these interesting changes below.
1. Improved Rich Text Editor
The Rich-Text Editor we currently use for editing legal notices has improved. Its context menu has been given more quality of life options for cut/copy/paste when previously the right-click menu was lacking those, you can now integrate and embed your FlowStack images directly into your text content, you can explicitly set the background color of your Rich Text, and you can more easily apply and edit your various styles in your text documents.
Currently, as stated this is only implemented in legal notices, but we hope to be able to leverage this editor in many more ways in the future, which is why enhancing the quality of life and power of this feature was important.
2. Explicit Timezones
Previously, when you created an Event or scheduled a Notification, our server essentially inferred you were talking about scheduling an event relative to our Pacific Timezone.
This may result in negative or confusing experiences for administrators traveling outside of their timezone, scheduling an event that takes place in another timezone, or someone that is located outside of California.
By asking you directly, "Which timezone are you referring to?" for each scheduled event or notification, this ambiguity and possible frustration is removed, allowing you to have an easy and predictable experience each time.
3. Bible Experience Improvements
Previously, your Bible Notes were scoped on a per-flowstack-experience basis. We felt that this was inconvenient to the user and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to take your notes with you everywhere you go, so now your bible notes are global across all of FlowStack, allowing you to take them wherever you go.
In addition, while the Bible was able to be read offline, it wasn't possible to be able to track your Bible Reading Plan progress in an offline state easily. To help mitigate this, we have made it possible for you to download your reading plans, so you can now update your progress even when you are offline and have your online-sync changes published when you regain connectivity.
To improve accessibility with churches who have a multilingual community, we have added explicit localized plan names, where you can select a user-facing name for any supported language you need. For additional admin-convenience, the bible plans also have internal names and descriptions, so you can keep track of the purpose of each plan internally to a much easier degree.
4. Family Members & Event Registration Improvements
This is something we have improved upon both for our end-users and administrators managing their FlowStack site.
The first thing we would like to mention is privacy improvements. At FlowStack, we are working towards improving our site so you only have to disclose the minimum amount of necessary data you need in order to experience FlowStack. As such, you no longer are forced into providing gender or date of birth data for a family member, unless you are trying to register them for an event that is gender or age gated.
Another thing that's important is data durability and the ability for us to document and track changes to a greater extent.
Previously, when you deleted or edited a family member who had event registrations, it was difficult to understand all the remaining data and it was impossible for that family member to keep their event registrations.
Now, each event registration gives a record that records the registrant's state of their name, date of birth, and gender. This is important for a variety of reasons, but the big key is durability against event registrants being edited or deleted.
First, consider if a family member was deleted. If an admin was viewing an old event in the history they would see "Unknown Name" because the data for the participant was lost, you viewing your transaction history would be unable to know that an event you paid for was for a particular family member. These problems are no longer issues.
Because the family members data on-registration is recorded and directly attached to an event and transactions relating to it, if you delete a family member now
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If they were registered for an event already, you don't have to automatically unregister them, this is now optional. The event saves the data associated with them so now you can at any point view your registration that still includes them and decide either to allow them to continue with going to the event or unregistering them at any point that allows for an unregistration
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If an event is concluded or even ongoing and the family member gets deleted, an administrator viewing your ticket or overall event particpants doesn't have to worry about the identity of who actually attended in their records, because each record has its own durable mirror of this data.
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If you want to remove a family member from your account for whatever reason, but you still want your financial history that involves them to be clear about payments made for them, now even if you delete them that record is clear in your My Transactions history.
A second key thing to consider is if a family member was updated. There is a balance to understand between allowing for flexibility, and being open for possible abuse. We want family members and user data to be editable at any time because we understand at FlowStack that sometimes, genuine mistakes are made. Names are mispelled, birthdates mis-entered, etc.
However, we want to also protect fairness in event registration, consider if somebody changes their age and gender arbitrarily to fit event registration requirements. This history is now much easier to be tracked by administrators.
Because there is a record made on-registration, any discrepancy in a user altering their information will be instantly reviewable and alert the administrator as soon as their ticket is scanned or registration is viewed by an admin. This makes it so abuse in this regard now has a chain that alerts event administrators and allows them to decide how to act on a particular piece of information like this without being left in the dark.
A third and final improvement was made:
Because each event has a record duplicated to the event, an administrator can themselves add a one-time-participant at the gate if necessary. Previously, an admin-force registration could only allow for family members that already exist on their account being added. Now, that is no longer the case. An Administrator can enter the details of who they want to let in, and sign them up for an event without any worry about if the end-user configured their account to include them or not.
Each of these improvements are only possible due to the new-found durability of these event registrants, and we believe this in of itself is a change of major consequences and will improve upon your FlowStack experience greatly.