Dodona changelog

[bmesuere]

This discussion contains the public changelog for Dodona. You can click the "Subscribe" button in the right sidebar to be notified of new updates.

Smaller changes are listed below. Larger changes are added as comments below.

September

• 🐛 Our CSS is now properly prefixed for older browsers.
• ✨ Courses can now only be made available to everyone after approval from Team Dodona.
• ✨ We improved the performance of several pages by tweaking our database indexes and reducing the number of queries.
• ✨ Folders name preparation are now ignored by Dodona when syncing exercises.
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where filtering tables sometimes failed when using special characters.
• ✨ The exercise info page no longer shows all courses using an exercise. The list is limited to all courses of your own institution.
• ✨ The form to request teacher rights was expanded to ask for some additional information.
• 🐛 We greatly improved the speed of processing exercise repository updates which was slow since the move to Azure.
• ✨ We improved the alignment of all dropdown menus.
• ✨ We removed the counts from the dropdown menus when searching for exercises. This greatly improved the search speed.
• ✨ We simplified the registration settings of our courses. You can now pick between open, moderated, and closed.
• 🐛 In alerts on the top of the page, links looked identical to bold text. They are now also underlined.
• ✨ When editing series from the "manage series" page, we will now redirect back to that page after editing instead of to the course page.

August

• ✨ Our errorpages received a fresh coat of paint: https://dodona.be/500.html
• ✨ We have a new dashboard that show the system status and upcoming maintenance: https://status.dodona.be/
• 🐛 Authenticated API requests now use the user's language. This fixes a language bug in the IDE plugins.
• 🐛 Elixir sign in now uses the updated authentication URLs.
• 🐛 On the course edit page, clicking on the copy button no longer triggers a page refresh.
• 🐛 We updated our pagination library which fixes the very long load time on pages showing a lot of items.
• ✨ preserveAspectRatio, stroke-linecap and stroke-linejoin are now allowed in user-generated SVGs.
• 🐛 Figcaptions are now correctly hidden in all cases.
• 🐛 We made a tweak to the docker configuration to reduce the chance of unexpected "internal error" statuses.
• 🐛 Fixed a layout issue on the home page on mobile devices.
• ✨ We added a page containing all subprocessors we use: https://dodona.be/subprocessors.

July

• 🐛 The sign in page was updated to use the correct "Sign in with Microsoft" branding instead of "Office365".
• ✨ We now link to the relevant documentation pages in the email when something goes wrong while processing an exercise repository.
• 🐛 Fixed a case-sensitivity issue which sometimes caused adding repositories to fail.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where adding users to an evaluation sometimes failed.
• 🐛 Figcaptions are now properly styled.

June

• 🐛 Fixed an issue where the exercise descriptions were not fully visible in some cases.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where searching for students by course labels failed.
• ✨ You can now filter courses by academic year.
• ✨ Exercise descriptions can now use figcaptions in figure tags by adding the show-caption class to figure.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where long student names caused a scrollbar to appear while evaluating submissions.

May

• 🐛 Fixed an issue where course cards were sometimes shown multiple times on the home page.

April

• ✨ We made a number of performance improvements, especially when submitting code and when showing listings.
• ✨ We cleaned up the form to create and edit courses. It is no longer possible to set an institution other than your own and academic year is now a dropdown instead of a free text field.
• 🐛 Links from Dodona to GitHub were sometimes broken if the repository used a non-standard main branch name. This is now fixed.
• ✨ We now store the origin country for each institution. This helps us picking a better default time zone for new users.

March

• ✨ All our documentation is now available in English: https://docs.dodona.be/en/
• ✨ The series visualisations received a fresh coat of paint. The new color scheme makes them more readable in both light and dark mode.
• ✨ The icons on the evaluation page, indicating the evaluation status of a submission, are updated to be more easily understandable. See this post for more info.
• ✨ The Python sandbox and debugger received an update. A number of bugs were fixed and it was updated from Python 3.10.2 to Python 3.12.7.
• 🚀 Our universal judge now supports C++.
• 🐛 Adding newlines to a score item description is now again possible by pressing shift+enter.
• 🐛 Due to a bug, it wasn't always possible to submit a (modified) solution from the debugger. This is now fixed.
• 🐛 With some keyboard layouts, it wasn't possible to type [ and ] in our editor. Pressing the necessary keys triggered a fold shortcut instead. The respective shortcuts were removed to enable typing [ and ].
• 🐛 Filtering saved annotations was broken, this is now fixed.

February

• ✨ When not signed in, we now look at the browser preferences to pick a language instead of always choosing Dutch.
• 🐛 Several links to these discussions were broken. They now work correctly.
• ✨ The links to our Twitter and Facebook profile were replaced by links to our Bluesky profile.
• 🚀 It is now possible to optionally set both the natural language and the programming language for your courses. See this post for more info.

January

• 🐛 When making a copy of a course, advanced course settings are now correctly copied as well.
• 🐛 When using the evaluation module, scores were sometimes left blank instead of explicitly assigning 0. This is now fixed.
• ✨ The editor now supports psql syntax highlighting. Use psql as programming language for an exercise to enable this.

[bmesuere]

It is now possible to optionally set both the natural language and the programming language for your courses!

This feature is particularly useful for public courses, as specifying these languages will help other users find relevant courses more easily.

For existing courses, we have automatically set the programming language if all exercises in the course used the same language. You can visit the course settings page to review and update these settings as needed.

[BTWS2]

What if the course is available in both languages like the course of Peter? https://dodona.be/en/courses/4157/

My long term goal is to make the featured courses about websites and databases available in both languages. How does Peter do it, to make the description of a series available in both languages?

[bmesuere]

The advise here is to make 2 separate courses for this: one in Dutch and one in English. Making it available in both languages at once is a hack and not recommended.

[bmesuere]

We have updated the icons that are used in evaluations. Instead of the colored green or red underline, we now use the actual status icon of the submission. This new approach is more color-blind friendly and contains more information.
Before:

After: