Overview

The past few months have been focused on intense coding, optimization, and feature refinement rather than major migrations or other disruptions -- in part due to Dogi's tireless maintenance of our servers (thanks @nemo!). This has resulted in stable growth and a variety of long-requested new features being implemented.

New site features

A variety of new features have been added, including:

• Event features: RSVP and date selection features have been added to make organizing events easier without needing to use Eventbrite or other services (Github link](https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/57))
• Coauthorship: users can now indicate co-authors, strengthening collaboration and attribution (Github link](https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/113))
• Callouts: use of @warren or @liz in comments auto-links to those users’ profiles, and also alerts them via email (Github link](https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/116))
• Newsletter helper: newsletters are now templated by the site, making the weekly task of assembling a newsletter (typically by Shannon Dosemagen) much faster.
• Profile pictures: due to strong demand, users can now include a profile photo which will begin to be used throughout the site (Github link](https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/71))

Gallery

The beta event feature -- we'll be adding more to this soon!

Using the tag with:username, you can now give people co-authorship credit on a research note!

Callouts -- a great new feature which makes it easy to draw a few people into a conversation on a topic via email notifications.

Uptime

Minimal changes have occurred on Public Lab's web serving infrastructure; uptime remains very high: PublicLab.org has uptime as follows:

• April: 99.93%
• May: 99.57%
• June: 99.92%

Usage & mailing lists

We’ve seen some really strong mailing list growth as we enter the 3rd quarter of 2014 -- as of July 16, we have 2,484 members on the main publiclaboratory group. You can view all the groups here. Other interesting statistics follow, including graphs of activity over the past 52 weeks:

1980 research notes have been posted by 317 contributors since over 3 years ago