Topic: Feature Requests / Calendar - more repeat options

This is one of the reasons why I have been hesitant to use the calendar feature – more repeat options are definitely required.

Topic: System Announcements / Backpack Multiuser is Live

Great to see Backpack getting some love and going multi-user.

Would love to see the ability though for users to be able to specify whether they want to see calendars start on a Sunday or Monday.

Topic: System Announcements / OpenID and Open Bar come to Backpack!

@rthornton: Are you definitely signed in at MyOpenID.com? If not, then this may be why you’re taken there.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / textile hyphen not working

Unfortunately the new Backpack seems to use a weird implementation of Textile. Whilst parts of the formatting language seem to be supported, other parts of it (Textile) aren’t.. I guess that includes strikethrough.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Links auto-expanding in pre/code blocks...

I’ve just noticed this too. It makes it a bit confusing when pasting code into a forum post that has a URL or email address in it, that shouldn’t be displayed as HTML.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Optus SMS

Hi Michael,

The way the Backpack SMS works is that it sends an email to <your-mobile-number>@optus.com.au. When the Optus gateway receives this, it forwards the email as an SMS to your phone. The issue is with Optus – they only provide this email-to-SMS gateway for business customers who purchase a particular “add-on” for their account. There is no way for residential customers to get this… I’ve tried (unsuccessfully).

However, there is a bit of a workaround you can do using a third party. There’s a small cost involved, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I created an email account with Fastmail (I went for the “Member” account type). Fastmail provides the ability to forward an email as an SMS using their own email-to-SMS system. I then set up my Backpack account to have the reminders sent by email to my Fastmail account (turn off SMS reminders in Backpack).

In your Fastmail account, go to Options > Add Funds, to add funds into a pool for your Fastmail account. Then go to Options > Purchase SMS Credits to set aside part of the funds you added into your pool as credits for SMS’s (yes, you’ll have to pay for each reminder to be sent out, but it works out pretty cheap from memory).

Once that’s done, you will need to set up some redirection rules. You can use their inbuilt form, or write your own using the “sieve” language. Either way, go to Options > Define Rules. Here is what I use.. I think they may need a little tweaking still, but it should get you by/give you a starting point.

grr okay Textile sucks for pasting code.. the email addresses noted below shouldn’t be displayed as HTML, it should just be the email address, surrounded by “double quotes”

require ["envelope", "imapflags", "fileinto", "reject", "notify", "vacation", "regex", "relational", "comparator-i;ascii-numeric", "body", "copy"];

if header :contains "from" "<a href="mailto:system@highrisehq.com">system@highrisehq.com</a>" {
  redirect :copy "<a href="mailto:you@your-isp.com">you@your-isp.com</a>";
  notify :method "sms" 
         :options ["+61412345678", "Text", "Only"]
         :message "Highrise: $text$";
  discard;
}

if header :contains "from" "<a href="mailto:alert@backpackit.com">alert@backpackit.com</a>" {
  redirect :copy "<a href="mailto:you@your-isp.com">you@your-isp.com</a>";
  notify :method "sms" 
         :options ["+61412345678", "Text", "Only"]
         :message "Backpack: $text$";
  discard;
}

Click “DONE” at the top of the screen to save your changes!

There are rules there for Highrise and Backpack. Each will send a copy of the email to my normal email account, then send the first part of it as a text message to my mobile, then delete the email from my inbox in Fastmail. It’s not a perfect system, the SMS’s can display a little weird, however the sieve language seems to be pretty useful and the Fastmail forum has lots of people who can help you out further if you want to write your own rules.

You can get a Fastmail account here at Fastmail.fm. Hope that helps!

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Homepage with links to pages.

@Derick: Yes, but only if the link is in the sidebar.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Homepage with links to pages.

@jsweb-team:

It sounds like these would be “Links”, a feature that was removed in the Backpack upgrade recently. You probably would have created them prior to the version upgrade (they would have appeared at the bottom of the page right before the footer or page sharing info). You can’t add any more unfortunately. The only way to link one page to another is to:

1. Go to the page you want to link to, and copy the URL
2. Go back to the page you want to link from, and create a hyperlink reference either using Textile or HTML

Examples:

Textile:
"Description of the URL":http://jsweb-team.backpackit.com/page/123456

HTML:
<a href="http://jsweb-team.backpackit.com/page/123456">Description of the URL</a>

Are the pages shared?

@37s:

Come on guys, when are you going to add this feature back in? There’s been dozens of posts about it; it’s obvious that people would like to see it added back in. I know I’m starting to whine, but I’m getting frustrated with the amount of stuffing around required to add links to pages as well as the silence on your behalf about it.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Backpackit Page linking

Yeah, you can add a link into a note by entering either:

OR:

HOWEVER if you are linking to another page in your Backpack account, which is shared publicly, you need to decide whether to link to the public version of your page, or the private one (ie., the one you see when logged in to your Backpack account), (or both), as the public version has a different address to a private one:

eg.,

Which would appear as follows on your Backpack page:

Check out my favourite music on my Backpack page
Check out my favourite music on my Backpack page

The first is the private one, which I would have in a page so I can easily navigate around when I’m viewing the page and are logged into my account. The second one links to the public version of the same page. Note the different addresses. I wish the 37signals crew would see how bloody confusing this is for visitors to one’s various publicly published Backpack pages and fix it. This was all done automatically with the Links feature in the old version. :(

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Search still flaky

I am finding search quite flaky still. Some pages work fine, other’s don’t. Some terms work fine, others don’t.

I know support want us to submit extremely detailed requests to get this fixed, but I think a better idea would be if everyone had an option in their account settings to “Reindex pages for seach”, so that if someone is having problems getting search to work, they hit this button, and Backpack clear the cache for this account starts reindexing all their pages.

What are people’s thoughts on this sort of user-action approach?

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Posting date with notes?

@LarryN:

Awesome idea – even if this was just something in the settings page that was applied universally to one’s account, with the option to display it on a per-item basis as per current practice.

Topic: Feature Requests / Having an UNDO when deleting stuff

+1 for undo – just a message at the top of the page, or a 24 hour history per page (similar to the revisions in Writeboard).

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Deleting Writeboards - security issue

There is an issue surrounding the deleting of Writeboards that have been created in Backpack. I posted about this in the old forums a few months back, and hoped that it would be rectified with the new version, but unfortunately it hasn’t.

Scenario: A user “John” creates a Writeboard in his Backpack account. At some point after this, he changes his email address in the Backpack account settings from “john@myisp.com” to “john@mynewisp.com”. At some point after this, John goes into the Writeboard he created in Backpack BEFORE he changed his email address, and clicks on the “Delete Writeboard” link to delete it.

Problem: An email is generated by the Writeboard application and is sent to “john@myisp.com”. When John updated his email address in Backpack, it wasn’t filtered down into any Writeboards he had already created through Backpack. As such, should John not have access to his old email address, and another person has later registered this same email address, this second person now has the ability to restore the Writeboard and have access to any information that is in it. The original creator, in this example “John”, would have no knowledge that someone else now has access to his Writeboard.

Applies to: This only occurs when the Writeboard is deleted from within the Writeboard itself. NO EMAIL IS SENT if the Writeboard is deleted by clicking on the rubbish bin icon in Backpack.

Note: When deleting a Writeboard from within the Writeboard iself, a message is displayed on the screen saying:

You have deleted this writeboard:

     ”bills”

An email has been sent to john@myisp.com with a link to recover this writeboard. The recovery link will work for 2 months, after which the writeboard will be permanently deleted.

However, the email says:

From: <a href="mailto:system@writeboard.com">system@writeboard.com</a>
To: <a href="mailto:john@myisp.com">john@myisp.com</a>
Date: 05/08/2007 17:10
Subject: Your writeboard "bills" has been deleted

The Writeboard named "bills" 
was deleted on August  5, 2007.

As the creator of the Writeboard, you can restore
it within the next seven (7) days. After that it will
be deleted permanently.

To restore the Writeboard, visit:
<a href="http://123.writeboard.com/[writeboard-number]/undelete/[undelete-code]">http://123.writeboard.com/[writeboard-number]/undelete/[undelete-code]</a>

...

[General 37 Signals information/ advertising]

Note that the message on the screen says you have two months to undelete it, but the email says you have seven days.

IMHO this is a pretty big security issue. People have all sorts of information in their Backpack accounts, and many use the Writeboards feature. Giving someone else the chance to gain access to it by not providing the functionality in the Backpack/Writeboard programming interface to update an email address is pretty poor and needs to be fixed ASAP. I discovered this because I had gone through this exact scenario, but was lucky enough to still have access to my old email account. Many people though, would not be so fortunate once they change their email address.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / textile version

I think they got rid of some Textile support for the new version of Backpack, not sure why, but there’s been a few posts lately about pages now being broken because of it.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Posting date with notes?

yeah, they really need to include the year on these things.. it’s kind of silly otherwise. Hopefully if/when 37s do add in the year, they keep the format as dd mmm yyyy, because if they just use dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy, it will start to get very confusing for users..

@deus62: Dates on notes is now optional (you see it when you edit a given note).

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Watch Topic

No worries. I think I’ve seen the forum devs around here now and then, maybe they will see this and create some documentation. :P

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Forum keeps forgetting me

Yeah, I am too. It looks like it only creates one session cookie, but I dunno if that’s tied to the login or not.

Topic: Feature Requests / Archive Pages

I think this is a good idea, and as erikmallinson indicates, would compliment the archival of projects in Basecamp and cases in Highrise (which once done, do not count towards the project/case limit). Once done, it shouldn’t count towards the page limit IMHO.

Topic: Feature Requests / Add a... should be per Divider...

Agreed – there needs to be a better way to add items so that there is less scrolling involved. The ID attribute is a great idea too, for creating a contents or something at the top of each page should one wish to do so.

I would also like to see an option in the settings page, which lets you specify a default for where new items should be added – either a) add new items to the top of each page, or b) add new items to the bottom of each page. This should be something that each user can specify per account, because everyone has their own way of organising pages. A setting like this would compliment the “Add a…” per divider suggestion noted above (because not every page may have a divider, but may still be quite long).

Topic: Feature Requests / Custom Color Scheme

I’d love to see a consistent look and feel across the 37s apps too.

Topic: Feature Requests / Calendar requests

Agreed – a start and end time for appointments is needed. This, and having the week start on a Sunday, are the main reasons I don’t use the Calendar function in Backpack.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Watch Topic

Hi btoone,

To view your list of watched topics, you need to view your forum profile (NB: not your account settings that you access using the link in the top right hand corner of the page). For you, this is http://forum.37signals.com/backpack/users/6878. From here, you can view all your posts, or just the monitored ones.

Updated watched forums are only subscribable via RSS – Beast forum software doesn’t send out any emails. To stop watching something, you will need to visit the particular post and decheck the “watching topic” checkbox You also can’t subscribe to an entire sub-forum (eg., system announcements) – but you can subscribe to the RSS feed for it (kind of an all or nothing approach, which is a bit silly…).

It took me weeks to find out how this works. There is no documentation for it on this forum or the developer website (Beast). I just happened to click my name next to one of my posts one day, and voila! there it was. Maybe they should do something about that… :)

Edit: Interestingly, you can view the monitored posts of any user. Seems a bit invasive to me.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Writeboard Color

Still, it would be nice if it maintained the same colour scheme as the Backpack account, and maybe even the Open Bar as well. Users would be sure they’re still in their account then, as the layout would appear the same.

Topic: Feature Requests / Aesthetic Customization

yeah, I would love to see a return for the ability to add custom CSS. I also wish they would provide the same themes for backpack as they have for Highrise and Basecamp. I would prefer that my Backpack account looked the same/similar to BC & HR.

Topic: Feature Requests / Repeats on Backpack Calendar

All great ideas I’d love to see.

Also: end times for appointments.