Monthly Archives: August 2016

AdBlock was messing up our website (even though we don’t serve ads!)

We discovered recently, to our considerable annoyance, that it is possible for AdBlock to mess up our website in a really serious way, even though we don’t serve up any advertisements of any sort (and never have.)

Here’s what was happening: when you use AdBlock, you have the option to add various lists of advertising sources. (You can find them here.)

One of these lists is from someone called fanboy.

If you subscribed to fanboy’s EasyList, for example, Kerika’s sign up page would not display the buttons for Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box:

AdBlock problems
AdBlock problems

(The same problem showed upon the Login page as well.)

It turns out that the EasyList filter uses JavaScript classes called social-media-header’ and social-media-button,  social-button and soc-button which were also the names of classes that Kerika was using.

The conflict caused Kerika’s signup and login buttons for Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box to not appear for Chrome and Firefox users who had AdBlock installed.

It took a while to figure out this was the cause.  We are not fans of fanboy.

AdBlock was messing up our website (even though we don’t serve ads!)

We discovered recently, to our considerable annoyance, that it is possible for AdBlock to mess up our website in a really serious way, even though we don’t serve up any advertisements of any sort (and never have.)

Here’s what was happening: when you use AdBlock, you have the option to add various lists of advertising sources. (You can find them here.)

One of these lists is from someone called fanboy.

If you subscribed to fanboy’s EasyList, for example, Kerika’s sign up page would not display the buttons for Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box:

AdBlock problems
AdBlock problems

(The same problem showed upon the Login page as well.)

It turns out that the EasyList filter uses JavaScript classes called social-media-header’ and social-media-button,  social-button and soc-button which were also the names of classes that Kerika was using.

The conflict caused Kerika’s signup and login buttons for Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box to not appear for Chrome and Firefox users who had AdBlock installed.

It took a while to figure out this was the cause.  We are not fans of fanboy.

Bug, fixed: Export notification wasn’t going away

A small bug fix we did recently: when you do an Export of data from a Task Board or Scrum Board, you get a notification from Kerika when the export completes: that’s because the export could potentially take a long time, if you had a very large board, i.e. with hundreds of cards on it.

(In practice, most exports take just a few seconds, so the notification comes very quickly after you start the Export.)

The notification comes in two forms:

  • By email, with a link to open the file containing your exported data.
  • In your Kerika Inbox, on the top-right of the Kerika application, looking like this:
Export Notification in Kerika Inbox
Export Notification in Kerika Inbox

There was a bug that clicking on the “Dismiss” button on Kerika Inbox didn’t make the notification go away: it would reappear after a page refresh.

That bug has been fixed. Enjoy.

Apologies for the long absence…

Sorry for not having posted in a while; we have been swamped with a new UI design that has consumed all of our time.

The new UI, by the way, is all about making Kerika more accessible, particularly to people who are new to visual collaboration.

Our user feedback had revealed a couple of uncomfortable truths that we needed to address:

  • Very few users were aware of all the functionality that already exists in Kerika. Which means that we didn’t need to focus so much on building new functions as we did on making sure people understand what Kerika can already do.
  • Our new users aren’t just new to Kerika; in most cases, they are new to visual collaboration altogether.  Even though there has been a proliferation in recent months of all sorts of companies trying to recast old, tired products as exciting new visual collaboration (hello, Smartsheet!), our new users aren’t converting away from our competitors as much as converting away from paper, email, and SharePoint.

This, then, is the goal of our new UI: to make it easier for people to adapt from paper and email to visual collaboration, and to make it easier for all users to exploit all the great functionality that we have already built.

We will have more on this in the coming months, as we get closer to releasing our new user interface, but in the meantime we have queued up a bunch of blog posts to make sure you know about all the other great stuff we have been working.

Yeah, our biggest problem is we don’t tell people what we have already done…