Security Upgrades

As part of our ongoing effort to keep ProposalSpace—and our users' data—secure, we recently had to disable access for older web browsers.

If your web browser is displaying an error when you try to log in, it's probably because you're using an older, unsupported web browser. Please make sure your browser is up to date, or at least a more recent version than the following:

• Chrome 30
• Firefox 27
• Internet Explorer 11
• Safari 7

Changes to the Data-Export Tool

One of our users recently reported a problem with the way our data-export tool was handling special characters. Abstracts for his call often contain mathematical symbols, which were being displayed correctly on the ProposalSpace website, but were becoming garbled in the output file generated by the data-export tool. For example, Δ (delta) was showing up as Δ and ± (plus-minus) was showing up as ±.

We fixed the issue by changing the character encoding for the output file. Now, any character that is displayed correctly on the website is also displayed correctly in the output file.

(A special note: Some programs, like MS Word, might ask what encoding to use when opening the file. If that happens, select "Unicode" on Windows or "Unicode 6.3 (Little-Endian)" on Mac.)

Also, we've removed the "strip HTML" option from the data-export tool and made that the default action. If you miss having that option, just let us know and we'll be happy to put it back!

New Option in Data Export for HTML Tags

The data-export feature now has an option for controlling how HTML-formatted text is exported. You can find it on the data-export page (Tools -> Data Export) right above the Create Report button:

So if you've set up any of your forms (submission, role, or review) to include a formatted-text field, you can now tell the data-export feature whether you want that text exported as formatted text (with HTML tags) or as unformatted text (without HTML tags).

For example, let's say you have a field in your Presenter role form for the presenter's bio. You've set up the field so the user can format the text, but you don't want any of that formatting when you export the bio. Now, all you have to do is check the box at the bottom of the data-export feature and voilà—all of the HTML code is stripped out!

Three Common Mistakes to Avoid with Charts & Graphs

Charts are charts, right? Wrong.

You have a lot of decisions to make when creating a chart, most of which seem benign. But some of those decisions can make a critical difference between providing insight into the underlying data and causing the reader to draw the wrong conclusions.

To illustrate just three of the ways charts can be made to be misleading, check out Ravi Parikh post on How to Lie with Data Visualization over at Heap's Data Blog.

Improved Data Export Feature

We've just released some exciting improvements to the data-export feature in ProposalSpace!

• Proposal information is no longer spread across multiple rows. All the information for a proposal—including role data, reviews and scheduling information—is now on the same line.
• You can now select individual questions from the submission and role forms to include in the export file.
• Special characters (like é) now display correctly in the export file.
• The "Proposals to Include" section now shows totals for each category so you can tell in advance how many proposals will be included in the export file.
• We've streamlined the code so the export file is generated even faster.

All of these changes were in response to feedback from our fantastic users. Keep the ideas coming!

New Tracker Dashboard

We've just released a new dashboard for the Session Tracker in ProposalSpace. The dashboard contains a couple of charts designed to help call admins track proposal activity over time and to monitor how many draft proposals are incomplete vs. complete. It also contains an Alerts section that displays issues that might require attention, like impending deadlines, submissions that haven't been approved for review, and submissions that need to be assigned to reviewers.

The idea is to make the Tracker Dashboard a place where admins can stay on top of every aspect of a call. We're always looking to make the feature more useful, so if you have any information that you would like to see on the dashboard, please let us know!

New Merge Fields in Messaging Module

Three new merge fields are now available in the Messaging Module:

• proposal.id, which displays the ID for each proposal.
• proposal.datetime, which displays the date/time assigned to each proposal in the Scheduling Module. (If no date/time is assigned for a proposal, the system displays "N/A".)
• proposal.location, which displays the location assigned to each proposal in the Scheduling Module. (If no location is assigned to a proposal, the system displays "N/A".)

If you have any suggestions for other fields you would like to include in your messages, just let us know!