It’s true. Until now, Tender’s search capabilities have been in need of some work. Over the weekend, we deployed the first major update to overhaul the search system.

Design-wise, we didn’t like how the search was so comment-centric. Searching for anything that matches anywhere in a comment body will now return the whole discussion just once. You can also search for names and emails to pull up discussions that the user has participated in.

Also, we wanted the search to be unified on a single page. You can now search Discussions, FAQs, and users (if you’re a support member) from a single page. We’re working on a proper FAQ + Discussion search (heavily weighted to prefer FAQs) as well.

On the backend, we’ve added filters for searching just the title or by discussion state. We’ll also be adding filters for the published/updated dates, as well as configurable sorting.

Please check out the updated search and let us know how it works out for you. If you have any feedback, please let us know on http://help.tenderapp.com or ping us on twitter.

Yow, what happened to the queue? We had two separate issues on Thursday night and Friday night that have since been fixed.

The first one had to do with a strange error from parsing one of the many emails we receive. A bug in our email parsing library raises a critical exception that kills the queue process. I found the issue, deployed a workaround, and then submitted a patch to the library author. Typically, our queue catches and logs exceptions, instead of dying. However, the bug caused it to mistakenly raise a fatal SyntaxError, which is typically reserved for a typo in a script that prevents the application from even running.

The second problem has to do with a new job we deployed on Thursday. One of the problems we saw with accepting anonymous comments on Tender, is that you lose all connection to those comments when you create a new profile. The new job automatically links them to you when you create a profile on Tender. The problem is, these jobs started taking a bit longer than anticipated to run, holding up more critical tasks. I’ve since started using a priority system to ensure that critical tasks like spam checks or comment notifications are run before these jobs.

On a final note, it’s clear that the job queue is of utmost importance for Tender. We actually have a munin server setup for monitoring, but we’re still working with Engine Yard on getting the firewall port issues worked out. This incident has moved that ticket to our top priority so we can get on top of these issues sooner. Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone!

In our continued dedication to rolling out new features for Tender, we’ve recently deployed Autoresponders. Autoresponders allow you to automatically send an email to users after they submit an issue.

But we didn’t just implement your run-of-the-mill “We’ll get back to you soon” kind of autoresponders. We’ve given you power with some special variables. These variables let you use things like the customers name, email, the title & URL of the discussion, and even suggested FAQs!

Earlier this week we deployed a hugely requested feature: ticket bulk editing.

Using that form, you can now update the state, milestone, assigned user, tags, and project for a group of tickets. The best part is that it’s applicable for just a few tickets selected with checkboxes, or the whole result of a query.

Try it out, and let us know what you think.

A patch that was deployed late Friday afternoon angered the spam gods, and most incoming discussions were marked as spam. You may have noticed your Tender site being suspiciously quiet this weekend. In light of this, we’ve done these 3 things:

1. Added a switch to the site settings to disable spam. This might be a better option if you’re not receiving much spam as it is.
2. Refined the spam rules so that the third party spam service is used as little as possible. Your site’s comments skip the spam checker if they are emailed in, or if the user has posted more than 3 valid comments. Three comments is the point that a user is ‘trusted’ and no longer subjected to spam or captcha checks.
3. Added a site-wide spam log in our admin tools so we can monitor the incoming spam. This will help us track and fix future problems much faster. We’re currently going through the pages of spam and clearing or restoring everything.

What was the original bug? When we receive comments through email, we lose out on 3 key attributes that spam checkers use: user IP, user agent, and HTTP referrer. These are all values sent by the user’s browser, but not through email. As a result, we started using default values for everything. Reports of invalid spam were on the rise, so I took out the defaults thinking that spammy emails might be tainting those default values. Since all emails were using the same fake user IP, 5 bad emails could suggest to the spam checker that everything from that IP is bad. However, removing those 3 value completely must’ve put a big target over every email. This is why we’ve stopped checking spam for emails.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We take spam very seriously. The open nature of the service makes it a challenge to keep all of the laptop auction emails off your site, and all of the new support questions out of your spam queue. I’m hoping that the new tweaks tonight should help considerably. If not, we’ll be watching everyone’s spam and fine tuning as necessary.

Update: There’s a bug related to sites with disabled spam checking that now send all anonymous issues to the Trash queue. We’re deploying a quick hotfix, and then we’re going to restore all the issues for you.

A weird thing happened recently. Several people got the urge to build iPhone apps for Lighthouse. Whatever it was that was in the air, we caught it too. And since we’re the people who actually make Lighthouse, we were able to do some back-end tweaks to make it turn out just right (in our ever-so-humble opinions, of course).

Presenting Lighthouse for iPhone.

One of the first big new features to hit Tender are Queues. We actually launched this feature a few weeks ago, but forgot to tell everyone about it! (silly us). Queues are a way to organize issues on the admin-side. They’re generic notification-enabled buckets that hold issues. It’s much easier to show than to tell, so we have some screenshots to walk you through it all.

Spam is a never ending battle for just about any web based system that allows anonymous user discussions. The nature of Tender is to let users easily post discussions, which means that we too are susceptible to spam.

For some Tender accounts, spam has become a problem. We've managed to filter a great deal of spam coming into the system, but a handful of spam has been making it through those filters.

Let's start off by saying that I woke up this morning with a case of the Mondays.

Our servers decided to hop on board that boat as well. Go figure.