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Dear Userplane Customers:

I regret to inform you that we are shutting down Userplane, effective on August 1, 2013. We are sending you this notice in advance to facilitate communication with your users and the orderly winding down of any Userplane features that you may be using in your business. On August 1, 2013, those features will cease to function; thus, we will not be renewing any contractual arrangements that would require us to furnish service past that date. We will, however, be providing service up to August 1, 2013, and accepting payments for those services from licensed customers.

We at Userplane want to thank you for your business, and we wish you the best in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Totekasche Holdings, Inc. d/b/a Userplane
Mary Barnes, General Manager

Userplane Notify is the first in a three part series of blog posts highlighting the key features of our 1.3.0 release.
Notify is the latest evolution of Userplane’s notification system, which organizes important announcement information for a chat user, into a simple button / menu interface that is persistent across your website. These notices are calls-to-action for the user, and Notify handles a variety of them, including presence updates, friendship requests, conversation messages, and upgrade notices.

The Notify menu is comprised of three expandable groups – Conversations, Requests, and Activity – each keeping a chat user informed about communication opportunities related to their account.

Conversations

The Conversations group handles notifications related to direct communication between two users. Each notification represents a conversation with a particular user, showing the most recent message, and if necessary, a pending indicator for any messages that have yet to be viewed by the user. If a user has insufficient privileges to communicate with the user on the other side, Notify displays upsell messaging that encourages users to upgrade their account, or notifies the sender that the person they are trying to contact needs to upgrade.

Requests

When you send a friend request to someone, or they send one to you, the Requests group alerts users when these types of events occur. When a friend request is accepted, the user is added to your BuddyList (friends list). The options menu enables a user to cancel or refuse a request, or even to block or report the other user if evasive action is required.

Activity

Activity notifications are driven by user presence. When a user’s friend comes online, they receive a notification in the Activity group. The user can click to chat, or the options menu gives a user the option to “unfriend” if they no longer wish to receive presence updates for the other user.

Notify Preferences

Notify’s locale texts, as well as positioning, can be customized by setting specific preferences in your Dashboard. The location of Notify on the page depends upon the Userplane application you’ve selected. If you’ve chosen to use Presencebar, Notify appears in the Presencebar itself, next to the BuddyList roster tab. When using Webmessenger, Notify can appear in a container you’ve set via your Dashboard preferences. Or, if no container is declared, it will appear in a fixed position on the edge of the browser viewport – a position easily customized with CSS. The Notify button is aware of it’s position on the page, and will orient the display of the Notify menu within the visible area of the browser window.

We have been busy working hard to add highly requested features to our platform. With the release of 1.2.7 we have finished off the last of the 1.2.x branch of our code with a final maintenance release. This release includes quite a few fixes to long standing bugs primarily with the Webmessenger product.

We are also entering into beta testing with our 1.3.0 release which we hope to release sometime in the next few weeks. This release is largely geared towards dating sites and those who desire an integrated upsell/upgrade flow for their end users. In addition to a new role based configuration system we have added a new experience called Userplane Notify in conjunction with Webmessenger to provide the user a better sense of the conversations they are involved in as well as the status of other users they may be interested in chatting. If you are interested in finding out more about our next release we are at iDate 2013 this week and if you stop by our booth we can give you a quick demo and talk over the finer details. If you were not able to attend but would still like some more information please feel free to reach out to me directly for a demo.

Below you can read through the release notes to understand the updates made to Userplane with version 1.2.7.

SDK

Bugs

  • SDK-1995 – The Webmessenger interface opens in a collapsed state in Internet Explorer 8
  • SDK-2189 – Clicking on Badge: Webmessenger opens with a duplicate tab title "Unavailable Tab" as well as the correct tab.
  • SDK-2278 – Privacy lists are not being properly updated when blocking / unblocking a user
  • SDK-2282 – Adding/removing buddy requires extra clicks – error 404 given
  • SDK-2340 – In Presence Bar the Buddy List opens by default for some customers
  • SDK-2347 – Report Abuse: User able to submit empty message on Abuse report
  • SDK-2359 – Upon closing popup window, no notifications show in parent window until refresh
  • SDK-2372 – Hover text in French: Start a Video and Add Favorite both extend off the screen to the left, cutting off text
  • SDK-2378 – Unable to send messages to other user, can receive.
  • SDK-2379 – S2S Callbacks stopped posting variables in addition to having them on the url
  • SDK-2382 – Ignoring a friend request does not result in the proper behavior
  • SDK-2383 – Click handlers for avatar and displayname are not working
  • SDK-2387 – Very long delay for users to come online
  • SDK-2389 – While user is typing, receiver's scrollbar moves on it's own
  • SDK-2390 – IE 9: Automatic refresh/disconnect of the Webmessenger in IE lasts up to a couple of minutes
  • SDK-2391 – Status icon stays gray but you can still talk to the user
  • SDK-2392 – Two users talk together without closing the WM window – bad status goes gray and requires conversation request
  • SDK-2393 – When we block a member in userplane, not added to ignored members on website (setBlockedStatus)
  • SDK-2394 – Intermittent – Chat window closing on it's own
  • SDK-2395 – When a user comes online, timestamps in messages indicate current time, not actual time sent
  • SDK-2398 – Message input field UI not displayed upon reconnect
  • SDK-2399 – Modify help click handler in WM to use WebMessenger API instead of settings
  • SDK-2436 – Wording for the description of a member to correct
  • SDK-2437 – In French Locale the validation messages in English when reporting a member
  • SDK-2440 – WM window – block and report don't work
  • SDK-2441 – IE 9: Report Abuse window comes in behind video feed
  • SDK-2445 – Blocking users – Blocked user still seeing blocker online
  • SDK-2453 – Once user is unblocked, blocker won't ever receive any new messages from them
  • SDK-2460 – Clicking block button does not activate UI – requires a second click to show blocked
  • SDK-2461 – IE 9: Unable to get WM window to load in certain circumstnaces
  • SDK-2465 – Artifact being displayed in text message field while user types message

Improvement

  • SDK-2450 – Rework blocking/blocklist to only use xmpp privacy lists and not cache the list locally.

API

  • For Server-to-Server callbacks we now accept 201, 202 status as “Success” for our callback attempts.
  • Adjusted the “domainId” parameter in Server-to-Server callbacks to be “domainID” to match documentation

We have become aware with an issue in Chrome 23 using Flash Player on a mac that will cause audio quality to degrade severely in the A/V experience to a point of being unusable. This issue is caused by a bug in Chrome 23 which presumably will be fixed by Google moving forward but at this time there is no resolution we are able to provide to the issue other than to suggest using another browser on Mac if you are interested in using AV. The problem is detailed in the following link on Google’s Chrominium project.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=157613

If you would prefer to use Google Chrome 23 you can work around the issue using the following steps:

Users can manually disable the new Pepper Plugin that was shipped with Chrome 23. Here are the steps to disable it:
1) In the URL, type in “chrome://plugins”
2) Expand details in the top right corner (it should be a minus instead of a plus sign)
3) Search the page for “pepper”
4) Click “Disable”

The result should look something like the following image:

In observance of the Christmas and New Year holidays, Userplane will be closed December 24th and December 25th, as well as January 1st.  However, we will have some work hours on the days in between these holidays, through the remainder of the year.

Support during this time will be available on a delayed, intermittent basis. Should you need immediate support, please email our emergency support address.