Attachment Fixes, Chat Stability, and Upcoming Beta

This week we fixed a couple issues that were slowing down agents working with attachments, strengthened our Live Chat app, and prepared to launch our new beta environment.

Weird Filenames

The week started with an odd attachments bug that was slowing down agents that work with a lot of files. The first report that led us to the problem complained that their browser always made them choose which application to use with an attachment:

Not a huge issue if you only open an attachment once in a while, but it’s a major pain if your day revolves around emailing files.

Then we received another report asking why all their attachments had the same filename when downloaded, and the lightbulb went off.

We were losing every word after a space in a filename! After a quick fix, files like “4th quarter sales.xls” no longer lost the “.xls” and “sales-january.xls” and “sales-february.xls” were no longer both just “sales.”

Chat Stability

This week also brought a couple improvements to the Live Chat app. First, there was a small bug that caused the “Chat with Us” button to show temporarily when the browser couldn’t connect to the server in a timely manner.While the button was only on the screen for a couple seconds, it definitely looked amateurish and had to be fixed.

We’re happy to say, it won’t happen again.

We also spent some time on the Live Chat backend. Chat and real-time updates run on NodeJS servers that are separate from our main app. Every time a change is made in the database, our main servers send this information over to the NodeJS servers and vice versa.

We noticed a couple of bottlenecks in these communications that were causing them to take much longer than necessary. We won’t bore you with the technical details, but the end result is snappier updates all around.

Back to Beta

As a few customers have noted, beta features have been missing in action over the last six weeks. We’re happy to say, our new beta environment is almost ready again! We’ll be testing it thoroughly this week and hope to relaunch it to the public afterwards.

It’s been a long couple of months putting the fun stuff aside to harden our infrastructure and knock out bugs. Spring cleaning is done though, and we can’t wait to show you some of the new features we’ve been working on like:

• easier forwarding with autocomplete
• private emails with third parties inside tickets
• redesigned Trends dashboard

And a few more that have to stay under wraps a little longer. It’s going to be a fun Summer!