Release Notes // September 2024
9/25/24
- Last Played indicator when sorting sermons by "Recently Played"
- Fixed referral code URLs in the Coins & Referral section of the dashboard
- Remove email warning message from contact form when the user isn't logged in
- Hide broadcaster home page "recently updated series" when they have no series
- Fix some player settings not behaving as expected (for example using the CC button wasn't actually toggling the captions properly)
- New Korean Localizations
9/24/24
- We took a small team to an undisclosed location with the purpose of setting up our VAULT#2 mirror site. This is a big step of faith for us. It is a miniature version of what we have at our HQ at Bob Jones University, but a Vault Network will provide the vital redundancy needed to safeguard great preaching into the future.
9/20/24
- Languages, Scripture, and Sermon pages will properly update all items on the page when you change the UI language.
- The language and event category fields on sermon pages have been fixed to properly reflect the UI language
- Categories page now uses horizontal sermon lists and other optimizations
- Home page "newest video grid" now uses a horizontal list
- Adjusted gap and verbiage on promotions page
- Collections pages have a new metadata image
9/19/24
VAULT #2 is being setup in an undisclosed location. A rack has been delivered today and we will be sending a team next week to begin the process of setting up the equipment. We begin again. Learn about The Vault by clicking here.
Updated The Vault page to include some details about The Vault Network.
More work done on Collection pages.
The Vault Network
In the world of computers, it is never a good situation to have a single point of failure, or a single copy of data. Redundancy of at least 3 physical copies, preferably in 3 geographic locations, is ideal. However, the Bible talks a lot about the “four corners of the world” and it has long been our desire to reach those four corners, both symbolically and physically, by establishing a Vault site at each location. This Vault Network would provide multiple copies of the entire sermon library while also distributing the traffic. It is the ultimate protection measure that will ensure the long survival of this treasure far into the future.
Collections
COLLECTION: AUDIOBOOKS
https://www.sermonaudio.com/collections/audiobook/
Introducing Collections -- a new kind of landing page on SermonAudio featuring carefully curated content that can be helpful as a starting point to find some of the best content on the site on a variety of topics. It's our way of saying, "Start here."
9/18/24
- Added contact page and contact buttons for solo and broadcaster pages
- New Korean Translations
- Phone numbers should now be clickable on mobile devices
9/17/24
- Added "Add Language" button
- Darkened shadow on dropdowns to improve contrast with the page background and make them easier to see
- Use a larger "chevron" arrow on our more subtle dropdowns
- We've beautified and improved the LANGUAGES page on the site. 60 languages with sermons!
9/16/24
- Fix missing gap in The Vault page text
- Fix scenario where user image and dropdown would not appear on the dashboard
- Close share modal when user navigates to a new page (like via the browser back button)
- Broadcaster denomination will be automatically applied when signing up with as part of a denomination
- Improved speaker appearance with bios
- Slightly increased site padding
- Adjusted signup sale promotion text
- Fix canonical urls being incorrectly directed to web.sermonaudio.com instead of www.sermonaudio.com and add
og:urlmetadata - Fixed some visual inconsistencies with daily devotional
- Re-fetch site promotions on each new page
- Updated Korean Localization Text
- Completed the next VAULT VLOG #57:
9/15/24
- Praise God! we came through a very successful Sunday peak.
- The system did not seem to be under load at any time.
- The site was responding very fast.
- Better use of caching (both CDN and memcache) helped.
- Over-provisioned capacity in both nodes and pods.
- Improved command-center metrics was extremely helpful.
9/13/24
- Send solo site donation modal to new site instead of legacy and fix some styling issues
- Reduce padding on small mobile devices
- Tons of updated Korean strings
- Add speaker series page
- Continued stress-testing work for Sunday preparation
9/12/24
- We had a presentation of what Global Sermons is going to look like from the broadcaster dashboard perspective. Exciting!
- Again, spent most of the day stress testing with Sunday load. Every millisecond matters. Inspecting every piece — CPU, RAM, pods, nodes, bandwidth, load balancer, CDN, connection counts. Exceeding 1300+ API requests/sec and holding steady. More to test tomorrow after upgrading key hardware component, adding more strategic caching, sizing nodes/pods correctly, and working around getting rate-limited with what would otherwise appear to be DDoS behavior on Sundays when everyone gets on the site all at once.
9/11/24
- We now support what are called "Collection Pages" which are simply beautifully presented pages with curated sermon content surrounding specific topics.
- 23 years ago today ... 9/11. Special collections page setup: www.sermonaudio.com/collections/911
9/10/24
- Updated formatting for Privacy Policy page
- Updated formatting for Articles of Faith page
- Show language indicator on sermon pages
- Show non-English language code on sermon listings
- Hide Listen Line info on non-US broadcasters
- Remove "preferred media type" so that sermons will always prefer video when available unless play button or "play audio" is clicked
- Updated Daily Devotional page with images and removing bullets
- Enjoyed speaking to the IT and Cyber majors of Bob Jones University to answer tons of questions and share with them experiences learned when building our own infrastructure at The Vault and not relying solely on the cloud.
9/9/24
- We experienced a sitewide outage during peak traffic on Sunday. We have since been working around the clock to identify the failure and are in the process of implementing additional safeguards and more intelligent health-checks for automatic failover to prevent this from happening again. We apologize for the inconvenience.
9/6/24
- Fixed a number of legacy URLs including RSS feeds that were affected with the site change
- Dramatically optimized the performance of the My Feed page
- Identified and fixed a major memory leak that caused the new site to slowdown over time
- Implemented automatic failover of the new site cluster
- Added a new human translator for the Korean interface language
- Moved the News and Webcasts section higher on the menu navigation
- A number of minor fit-and-finish enhancements throughout
Released this video announcement:
9/3/24
- Added some additional lines to the privacy policy
- Fixed the broken links in the privacy policy
- Fixed the dashboard user icon appearing cut off
- No longer show the legacy link indicator in the dashboard user dropdown
- Added logging to improve our ability to debug the slow page loads
- Fix the legacy link indicator and welcome modal sometimes re-appearing when they shouldn't
- Legacy links and URLs fixed
- Fix sermon page action buttons highlighting the wrong color on dark mode
- Released an announcement to our Android app users indicating our knowledge of an issue with the latest app release and our goal of making this a high priority to address.
- Had the joy of meeting with the lead developer of the Biblearc -- an interactive app to assist with deeper, more meaningful Bible study. He demonstrated the integration of Biblearc with SA and it blew me away! We hope to establish a formal partnership with this wonderful tool.
9/2/24
After years of putting together mockups and designs, and after years of going from concept to code, we have finally removed the Beta label off our site and have launched this massive rewrite as our primary website for SermonAudio! A solid foundation has been laid for the future.
Read all about it here:
https://www.sermonaudio.com/news/launch
