votesUP is constantly being developed and improved. On this page you can find an overview of all the latest news and changes.
Legend / Explanation
A11Y
Accessibility
BUGFIX
Bugfix
DESIGN
User interface & appearance
FEATURE
New functionality
I18N
Internationalisation and translations
SECURITY
Security improvements
STABILITY
General code maintenance
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 61 400 entries.
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I18N: votesUP is now available in six additional languages: Albanian, Armenian, Catalan, Croatian, Georgian, and Serbian. Not everything has been fully translated yet. Missing content will be added bit by bit. We welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement.
The Terms of Use have been revised and now replace those from October 2024. The following changes have been made:
It is now specified more specifically what compensation will be paid in the event of system unavailability if fee-based events were agreed during this period.
The obligation to enter larger events in the capacity planner has been removed, as server resources are managed automatically via the limit increases.
Free cancellation for standby service is now only possible up to two weeks before the agreed date (previously: one week).
Addition to free cancellation options for live support, unless individual agreements have been made.
Heading for ‘5) Liability’ has been rephrased as ‘Responsibility for content’.
In ‘10) Compatibility with user devices’, the last sentence has been reworded to make it clearer.
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INFO: Voting weights above 100 per account are now subject to a fee. Voting weights of up to 7500 per account are possible.
BUGFIX: When creating tokens, the voting weight was accidentally set as 0 instead of 1. The same problem occured for batch admissions of participants. Both problems, which had been introduced by an update on February 1st, have now been fixed for future occasions.
BUGFIX: The email delays that occurred since yesterday evening have been resolved.
I18N: Numerous improvements to the translations.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 61 100 entries.
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FEATURE: Efficiency and general code improvements for email handling.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 61 000 entries.
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BUGFIX: When transferring voting rights from an eligible voter to a guest, the guest voter received one vote too many. This error has been corrected for future cases.
FEATURE: The recognition of email bounces has been improved.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 60 800 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 60 500 entries.
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STABILITY: Logins based on email addresses that contain a ‘+’ are now also supported in the mixed mail/token event mode. Before that they were only allowed in the ‘email addresses only’ variant.
SECURITY: Improved protection against bots.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 60 000 entries.
STABILITY: The duplication function for free events has been made a little more permissive. It now allows further duplications of an event if previously made copies have been deleted.
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FEATURE: Once their event has been automatically deleted after 90 days of inactivity, organisers will receive confirmation of deletion by email.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 59 500 entries.
I18N: Several translations have been improved, especially the Lithuanian one.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 59 400 entries.
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In the past, votesUP sent a notification email to the organiser one week before an event was due to be deleted automatically. However, we received numerous responses indicating that this lead time was too short. Therefore, votesUP now sends a notification email two weeks before the deletion date.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 59 100 entries.
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FEATURE: A new role, ‘Without voting rights’, has been introduced, which differs from ‘Guests’. Participants ‘without voting rights’ have the same access rights as those with voting rights, but cannot vote.
FEATURE: New features for individual editing of participants (direct change of roles).
SECURITY: Minor improvements to the participants manager.
I18N: Improvements and additions to several language versions.
SECURITY: Improved protection against bots.
STABILITY: Extended logging when editing of participants.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 59 000 entries.
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FEATURE: Improved detection of email bounces: votesUP now also informs the organiser if the receiving server has classified incoming emails as spam.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 58 500 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 58 200 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 58 000 entries.
STABILITY: Various efficiency improvements.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 57 400 entries.
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BUGFIX: Due to an error, emails to web.de could not be sent over the past few days. This issue has now been fixed.
STABILITY: Progress indicators for organisers slightly accelerated in several places (voting, presentation).
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 57 200 entries.
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SECURITY: Improved verification process against invalid email domains.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 56 800 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 56 700 entries.
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BUGFIX: In a list voting, if 1 was specified as the minimum selection amount and 0 (= all) as the maximum selection instead of a specific maximum number, the ballot could not be submitted. This issue has now been resolved.
FEATURE: When editing individual participants directly, the organiser can call up the internet address for an email domain directly, switch to an external email app or write a direct message in votesUP.
BUGFIX: The display of list votings sorted by results could not be activated. This error has now been fixed.
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DESIGN: The banner display for the organisers regarding persons in the waiting room can now be clicked individually to switch directly to editing the corresponding person.
STABILITY: Improvements to the mail bounce recognition.
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STABILITY: Minor improvements to the participants manager, including status notifications and handling of email addresses containing underscores.
STABILITY: Improvement to the filter for gender recognition
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 56 500 entries.
SECURITY: The organisers no longer have access to draft proposals and can no longer accidentally publish them. However, the organisers can still see the title of a proposal in the draft stage.
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DESIGN: The layout of proposals received in proposal rounds has been improved so that participants and organisers can keep track of things more easily.
DESIGN: The time for invitations scheduled to be sent later is now also displayed when the «Check queue» button is clicked.
STABILITY: Significant improvements to gender recognition, especially when the sequence of first and last names changes.
STABILITY/BUGFIX: Several improvements to cancellation confirmations. For example, limit increases for digital absentee votings were not represented correctly in cancellation notifications.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 56 300 entries.
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FEATURE: Organisers and election board may check which eligible voters have cast their votes, even after the voting has been completed.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 55 800 entries.
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FEATURE: You can now also set the date and time at which the personalised email invitations should start being sent out.
STABILITY: Improved processing of dates and times.
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BUGFIX: If a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 1 allowed vote were specified in a list voting, the ballot could not be submitted. This error has now been fixed.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 55 600 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 55 400 entries.
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FEATURE: The organisers can prohibit participants from changing their registered email address. They can do this in the event settings.
STABILITY: Minor code corrections and improvements to translations.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 55 200 entries.
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FEATURE: The participant manager has been made slightly more flexible: the organisers can now also assign guest status to a person entitled to vote by setting their voting rights to 0.
BUGFIX: When participants transferred their voting rights to someone else, the success or error message was not displayed in the preferred language. This has now been fixed.
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FEATURE: When preparing ballots, the organiser can now specify whether the minimum and maximum number of options to be selected applies only to ‘yes’ votes or also to ‘no’ votes and abstentions, if applicable.
STABILITY: If a ballot paper is filled out incorrectly, the submit button now turns red in all cases. Previously, only the submission was prevented; now the invalidity is also visually indicated at all times.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 55 000 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 54 900 entries.
A11Y: Updates to the Accessibility Statement.
BUGFIX: When re-editing voting templates, previously selected quickvote options were not selected correctly. This has now been fixed.
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FEATURE: The inclusion or exclusion of participant groups can now also be applied to brainstorming sessions and agenda items.
SECURITY: If an event is created with the ‘digital absentee vote’ setting, email verification for participants is now set as mandatory by default.
DESIGN: Improved display when managing a participants group.
STABILITY: The auto-activation of limits increases has been enabled for additional scenarios. In addition, in many cases it is now faster by several minutes.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 54 600 entries.
FEATURE: The organisers can also change the language setting for the event for all existing participants in one go.
FEATURE: If the voting result has been withdrawn, the organiser may still copy the voting template or redo the voting at a later date.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 54 300 entries.
BUGFIX: If more than one participant account per event refused further use during email verification, the refusal resulted in a blank page instead of the refusal being carried out. This has now been fixed.
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A11Y: votesUP now respects settings in users' devices and browsers to reduce or minimise motion (animations).
FEATURE: Typical typing or spelling mistakes such as ‘seperate’ are automatically corrected when saving event titles, agenda items, group names and similar fields.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 54 200 entries.
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FEATURE: Participant groups can now be created and assigned automatically if the ‘Organisation/Group’ field is filled in for participants. Assignment to multiple groups is possible using the separator ‘|’.
DESIGN: When editing a participants group, votesUP now also displays the organisational background information of a participant, if filled out.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 53 900 entries.
STABILITY: Efficiency improvements, especially for database queries.
SECURITY: Improved uniqueness of email matching.
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FEATURE: More flexibility when resetting an event: Participants can now be deleted in one go without also deleting the voting templates.
DESIGN: The joint deletion of all inactive tokens has been migrated from participant management to the ‘Reset event’ section.
BUGFIX: The CSV template optimised for Microsoft Excel had a separation error. This has now been fixed.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 53 600 entries.
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STABILITY: When deleting all inactive tokens, consideration is given to whether they have already been eligible in a voting.
A11Y: Improvements to the document structure of the of the data processing agreements so that they can be rendered correctly by screen readers.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 53 400 entries.
I18N: Improvements to the French translation.
SECURITY: Improved verification when an organiser deletes a user account.
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STABILITY: Several improvements to the general code and email system.
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STABILITY: Improvements to gender/name recognition.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 53 000 entries.
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STABILITY: Votings with a large number of voting options were sometimes cut off in the automatic minutes log. This has been fixed for new votings.
BUGFIX: Secret ballots with a large number of voting options were not fully displayed in the recountable digital ballot box. This has been fixed for new ballots.
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STABILITY: The option to create event IDs with long hyphens has been removed due to confusion among participants. Only a minus sign is now permitted as a dash.
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STABILITY: The CSV import of participants has become a bit more tolerant towards errors.
PRIVACY: The privacy policy has been supplemented with information that web server log files are deleted after 24 hours.
PRIVACY: The privacy policy has been translated into five additional languages and is now available in all 29 language versions.
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STABILITY: Improvements to the algorithm for gender/name recognition.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 900 entries.
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A11Y: Several minor updates to the accessibility statement.
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BUGFIX: If the organiser changed multiple-choice questions in motions and nominations after proposals had already been submitted, this could led to minor display errors. These have now been fixed.
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STABILITY: Improvements to the internal password reset workflow and handling of exceptions.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 800 entries.
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BUGFIX: Proposals published in proposal rounds were only visible to organisers and proposers, even though they should also be displayed to voters and guests. This error has now been fixed.
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BUGFIX: Two-factor-authentication via the organiser login was not possible. This has been fixed.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 600 entries.
STABILITY: Several improvements to the code and email system.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 500 entries.
I18N: Improvements to the email templates in several languages.
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STABILITY: Improved information about email bounces and general code maintenance.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 400 entries.
BUGFIX: The display of messages was broken yesterday. The problem is now solved.
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BUGFIX: Since the last update, the display whether a user is online or not had not functioned properly in the messaging centre. This is now fixed.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 200 entries.
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FEATURE/SECURITY: One-time email verification for participants can now be set as mandatory.
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DESIGN / SECURITY: The shared waiting room only shows participants who have not been explicitly excluded by the organisers from being contacted by others.
STABILITY: Improved recognition of email bounces.
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FEATURE: Organisers can configure the minimum length requirement of passwords for participants.
SECURITY: Passwords can now be up to 80 characters long instead of 60.
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FEATURE: Participants who have uploaded files to the agenda can now also remove them even after event-wide publication by the organisers.
DESIGN: Participants who have uploaded files to the agenda can now check whether their files have already been scanned for viruses.
SECURITY: Files in the agenda will not be displayed (except for the uploading account) until the virus scan has been performed.
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STABILITY: Efficiency improvements to the application code that handles accounts.
I18N: Improvements to several translations.
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DESIGN: The participants manager shows more clearly whether email addresses have been confirmed.
DESIGN: The display of token accounts in the participant management has been slightly improved to differentiate them from email-based accounts.
SECURITY: For newly created events, (optional) email confirmation for participants is now enabled by default.
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DESIGN: Participants are now more clearly reminded when the organiser requests the verification of their email address.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 100 entries.
STABILITY: Email verification for initial logins are now also available for events that mix token and email accounts.
DESIGN: Minor layout improvements.
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I18N: Improvements to the translations, especially regarding the brainstorming sessions feature.
STABILITY: Character limitations for brainstorming sessions are now more strictly enforced.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 52 000 entries.
STABILITY: The main organiser of an event will now be informed more reliably and quickly if an email to a participant could not be delivered.
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SECURITY: The password reset feature has been revised to prevent misuse.
I18N: Improvements to the translations, especially regarding the brainstorming sessions feature.
STABILITY: Several improvements to the email system.
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SECURITY: Protection from XSS attacks by malicious files during CSV import has been improved.
DESIGN: Minor improvements to the brainstorming sessions.
STABILITY: Submitted chat messages that exceed the allowed limit of 2000 characters, are now correctly cut off.
BUGFIX: Fixed visual glitch in the message inbox/outbox regarding voting transfer requests.
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DESIGN: If a minimum number of selected options (e.g. candidates) is required in a list vote and the required minimum has not yet been selected, votesUP now displays the ‘Cast Vote’ button in red colour. Previously, this was only the case when too many options were selected.
FEATURE: During an ongoing vote, the organiser will be informed with a time estimate if high voting weights are expected to prolong the voting process.
SECURITY: For new events, the minimum password length for regular participants has been increased from 5 to 6 characters.
SECURITY: When changing the password on the profile page, at least 6 characters are now required for regular participants and at least 10 characters for organisers (equal to when creating an event).
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FEATURE: Voting weights up to 7,500 are possible now (previously the maximum was 5,000).
SECURITY: In token-based events, authorised voters were able to gain insight into unused tokens if they knew the correct path name. This access issue is now fixed.
SECURITY: Organisers of an event were able to change already verified email addresses of their participants (by removing the read-only attribute in the web form). This possibility for manipulation has been removed.
SECURITY: Eligible voters were able to gain access to the duplication feature of the current event, if they knew the correct path name. However, the duplication feature should only be accessible for organisers. The access issue is now fixed.
SECURITY: Participants could send messages to participants who had never logged in before if they guessed their internal ID. The ability to send messages to such unused accounts is now restricted to the organising team.
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I18N: Better explanation of CSV import feature in various translations.
STABILITY: General code maintenance.
FEATURE: In events with a very high number of voting weights, the approximate duration of vote transmission is displayed to the organising team.
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I18N: The translation of the legal notice/contact page has been completed in all languages.
SECURITY: The public PGP key to support@votesup.eu can now also be found on keys.openpgp.org.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 51 800 entries.
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DESIGN: If there was only one entry in a list ballot, voters could only cancel an accidental selection by reloading the page before the submission. This has now been changed: You can also undo the approval tick directly by clicking on it.
Note: Existing votings must be saved again to perform the conversion.
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I18N: Improvements to various translations.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 51 500 entries.
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BUGFIX: When starting a vote, higher voting weights were not counted correctly to the full list of entitled voters. This bug had been introduced with the new participant groups and is now fixed. Unfortunately, ongoing votings that encompass users with higher voting weights need to be restarted.
FEATURE: Proposals in Motions & Candidacies can be saved in a confidential draft version, in case they are not ready for publication yet.
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FEATURE: Emails containing a proposal also lists the submitters and the submission date.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 51 300 entries.
I18N: Improvements to various translations.
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SECURITY: Javascript security improved by extending verifications.
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FEATURE: When duplicating events, autostart settings for votings are also transferred if these are in the future.
BUGFIX: Connection errors when editing individual accounts have been fixed.
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BUGFIX: Group memberships were not displayed in the profile correctly. This error has now been fixed.
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I18N: Improvements to various translations.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 51 000 entries.
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FEATURE: The organiser can optionally set up ‘participant groups’. Individual votings can thus explicitly include or exclude eligible voters from an entire group. Participant groups can be used in addition to gender restrictions in votings. Participants can see on their profile page whether they are assigned to one or more groups.
FEATURE: Improvements for the election committee: Even while voting is underway, election observers can now access information about potential problems or restrictions affecting voters.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 50 700 entries.
FEATURE: Participants can request an email containing the proposal from a proposals round by a single click. Such e-mail contains replies to questions/sections, but no file attachments.
FEATURE: The voting weight of participants can now be changed by the organiser not only via the full pax list, but also in the individual view of an account.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 50 500 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 50 000 entries.
STABILITY: Changing the event title before the registered end of the event will also update the invoice title for an ongoing limit increase.
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FEATURE: The feature « Reset Event » has received two additional options: you can now remove the entire agenda and reset gender attributions of all participants.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 49 500 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 49 000 entries.
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STABILITY: Improvements to the recognition of unisex given names.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 48 600 entries.
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SECURITY: The one-time security token for two-factor-authentication is now only valid for 15 instead of 30 minutes.
FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 48 400 entries.
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FEATURE: The dictionary for gender/name recognition now comprises over 48 200 entries.
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FEATURE: Before sending out personalised email invitations to all participants, votesUP shows a preview of the mail.
STABILITY: Correction of smaller inconsistencies in the HTML code.