It's summer and time for a bi-annual Tech Department update. Let me take you through what we're and have been working on this and next year.
What are we working on?
Generally
- For us, 2025 so far has been focused on bringing stability and maintaining the services we already have. Time is strained for most in our team and it's also a limit of how many things we can maintain at the same time. Hence we're no longer implementing new services, even though they're seemingly small or easy, because it adds to things we need to keep updated at the end of the day.
- In January we moved our server provider, the cost is a bit higher, but we already see tremendous improvement in issues we had compared to our old provider. With so many services on our servers (24) we run at the same time, this should've been done a long time ago, and a very welcome change.
Control Center
- Control Center has moved into a maintenance phase now. We're ensuring stability and fixing bugs, but no new improvements are prioritized. It's of course still possible to create enhancement suggestions, just know why it's not prioritized, and we very much welcome pull requests if someone want to add improvements.
- Psst: If you're good with Laravel and want to contribute on a more fixed basis, let me know.
- Onwards we don't have any big plans for Control Center right now, which means we can focus on other areas in our tech world.
Discord bot
- Markus and Thor have been working on the staffing and name prefix functionality lately. The focus in general right now is to stabilize the new functionality so it works as intended.
- We also introduced some auto-replies for frequently asked questions in the channels. It's still under testing, and not perfect, so please do come with feedback (to me) of how it works. Especially in local languages, as I don't monitor all the local channels.
Moodle
- We're not developing Moodle, but in general just holding it up to date with latest updates and functionality.
Wiki
- Just a reminder to all editors to tag your content as per editor guide, otherwise the search quality is getting worse. Later this year we'll no longer display pages in search results which are not tagged, simply to not clutter the results with pages the user don't know applies to their FIR or not.
Homepage and forums
- The forums seems to work good and the activity is as anticipated, since most of the chat has moved to Discord. There's no more plans here at the moment.