Site Release 2.0
The biggest difference in 2.0 version is invisible. It's the switch from using a rather unstructured form of programming that didn't even have many functions, to using object oriented techniques (Based loosely on Jacobson et al, 'Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach', 1992.) The main advantages of this are that it makes the code easier to understand and modify (and hopefully debug). The previous code was too much of mess.

We added several new objects to the project. These include email lists, networks, speakers, and speaker topics. A network is a special type of group that can have groups that belong to it (And since networks are also groups they can belong to a network too, and thus you can have an infinite regress which is scary...). A speaker is a person who can add topics to our site that they are able to speak on. Email lists get their own object.

We also now allow for several new relations between previously existing objects. Most notably these changes affect events. Now events can be related to issues, networks or groups, email lists (for instance a conference or day of action organizers email list) and can also be searched for by type (conference, protest, day of action, etc).

We added geographical scope for groups, networks, and events. Thus you can choose what the constituency is for your organization or event - whether it is local, citywide (aka metro), state, regional, national, or international.

Our figures for how many times a file/resource had been downloaded will be much closer to the truth. The previous figures were unintentionally inflated (blame strange browser behavior), perhaps by a factor of five.

We changed our dropdown lists that let you affiliate a person with a group or school (or any object that has a location with another object that has a location). Now it limits the dropdown list to groups and schools that are near the person, whereas previously we limited it to the entire state (which gave too many results and was bad for people living on the border of states).

To improve our security, we moved away from having a password for each object to having a user system so that you could login and have one username and password control multiple objects. In addition, we moved towards a more strict form of moderation. Now user-submitted data will have to be approved by a moderator before it will be widely publicly available. This will considerably reduce the probability of a virus being spread through our site, of a malicious hacker attack, or of people getting away with submitting silly things like a Fascists club (yeah someone did it before). In addition, we added links to many pages where users may suggest that we moderate or edit entries so that our site maintains the highest quality of data.

For graphics, we changed our dropdown menu and redid everything. Notably we made the forms for adding, editing and searching for data look considerably better.

For the user interface, we now display results (for searches or browsing) in page sets of twenty records. Navigation is much easier as you can sort records alphabetically or reverse alphabetically by clicking once or twice on the title that you wish to sort on. You can also skip to a different page of results using the numbers or next or previous.

For Canadians we bought a database of postal codes so we can now convert postal codes into longitudes and latitudes. Thus Canadians (and Americans who live near the border) will be able to find groups, people, events, and schools that are within a specified radius of a postal code.

For American high school students, we added a database of 12,000 high schools. We deeply hope that high school students will use our website!

You can subscribe to receive regular emails from our site. You choose how often you get them, and you choose what they contain! They can include information about new people, new groups, new resources, and upcoming events. This information can be limited by issue and/or location. This feature will make it easier to keep up to date with what's coming into our website without having to sift through old information to get at the good new stuff.