Service Announcement Emails & Better Search Results

With the latest updates we improved the search result information and we are now able to send service announcements reliably to our users. This is serves as the foundation for more upcoming features.

Better Search Results

We received some feeback that our search results could reveal more useful information about events. We took this chance to improve the information we show as well as the layout. With this change, search results not only look nicer, but you can now easily see the event’s date, location, coverage availability and other information directly on the search results page.

Filter Events by “Open Call for Papers”

We added our first filter to the event lists: You can now filter for events if they have an “Open Call for Papers” and it also updates the content asynchronously. We’ll continue building similar features and filters in the upcoming weeks and months based on the technical foundation we now have for this.

Service Email Announcements

Initially we decided to not have a programmatic way of sending important service-related emails to our users. This wasn’t necessary until now, but since we want to occasionally inform users about changes and updates, we’ve built a system that makes it easier for us to send such notices to our users. To implement this feature, we built a mail queue which allows us to send emails in batches and it took us a little longer than expected. On the positive side, this allows us to build several other features that require the queue on top of it.

These announcements are completely unrelated to our newsletter, which contains regular updates to our service, feature announcements, related articles for event organizers or similar content. You can subscribe to our newsletter here.

Changes and Updates

• The height of the logo in our newsletter layout was incorrect and now displays as inteded
• We improved the space of the initially visible viewport on our homepage. This makes it easier to access the search box on the homepage
• Our recent refactoring to use CSS Grid on the event coverage page lead to some weirdly spaced links. We fixed these edge-cases and have a cleaner codebase than before
• A recent upgrade of our modal dependency that introduced support for the native <dialog> element broke the dialogs. We fixed this issue and with that improved accessibility even further