Web Team Update - February 2026

2026 Member Wishlist Survey

The Web Team has compiled and discussed all the responses. Charlie has directly responded to several of the survey contributors and created a Bugzilla hotlist to track feedback.

 

Several of the responses related to website content and organization, but are lacking concrete requirements that make them immediately actionable to the web team. Lois has invited these survey contributors to join a taskforce for addressing these issues, of which Andrew LaMarche volunteered. Andrew, Lois, and Charlie met via Zoom for an initial kickoff meeting. The next steps are to identify a few concrete areas to work on that could see some improvements given the available resources.

RUSA Shared Drive

Dave, Charlie, and others have completed the migration of files and folders from RUSA's Google shared folder to a Google shared drive. In this space, RUSA will have finer control on administration, content management, content contribution and viewing. RUSA now owns all folders and documents, making it much easier to organize documents and much harder to accidentally make catastrophic permissions changes. There will be a small number of shared drive administrators. Permissions will eventually be primarily role-based rather than having a large number of folder and doc individual owners as in the old system.

Improvements to Membership Service Workflows

Charlie is working with Nigel, Rob, and Dave to revamp the membership service workflows (join, renew, change). These workflows have been a recurring source of overhead for the membership committee.

 

Changes so far include:

  • Members are no longer blocked from changing their payment method (PayPal to check, or vice-versa). The existing unpaid store order is reused and updated in order to support this.
  • Identical membership requests are now deduplicated. If a member refreshes the confirmation page, or submits the form again with identical information to an existing unprocessed request, this will no longer result in a new membership request getting created.
  • Added a page title to the membership form to reflect which workflow is being executed.

 

An additional change to the renewal workflow is code-complete and being tested. When renewing a membership, member data and mailing address will no longer be editable as part of that workflow. Trivial tweaks to member/address data during renewals results in needing approval by the membership committee before the renewal takes effect. In the course of resolving this, several concerning issues have been identified with concurrent active membership requests (e.g. a separate renewal and an address change for the same member, or 2 renewals for the same member). Some of these issues need to be resolved alongside the slated changes to the renewal workflow.

 

Several additional bug fixes and enhancements are planned for these workflows:

  • Bug 716 - Auto-approve address data using an API.
  • Bug 1220 - Put the member update workflow behind authentication and then auto-approve updates.
  • Bug 1221 - Remove waiver acknowledgment from member change workflow..
  • Bug 1224 - Fix gender selection prompt in renewal workflow.
  • Bug 1228 - Additional issues with concurrent membership requests.
  • Bug 1229 - Reinitialize newsletter flag for dropped household members.
  • Bug 1181 - Use additional heuristics to deduplicate membership requests with similar data.

Climbing Fixes

Some bug fixes corresponding to the rollout of the climbing program:

  • Fixed an issue where event results couldn't be submitted when the attached route has a net elevation drop (including e.g. a loop route where the finish is 1' lower than the start).
  • Fixed an issue where routes without climbing data were dropped when selecting "Include inactive routes" on the Routes Search function.

Server Upgrade

Jeff resolved the remaining PHP warnings in our server logs (bugs 1193, 1194, 1196, and 1197). This increases confidence for the next Drupal/PHP upgrade.

Miscellaneous

Interactive American Explorer map:

  • Added a link from the AmEx awardees list.
  • Deduplicate group members.

 

Other bug fixes:

  • Bug 1201 - Fixed an issue where event submission and approval notifications were getting sent to the wrong person.
  • Bug 502 - Fixed gender code options on printable membership application.
  • Bug 1205 - Fixed an issue where some pages crashed if the request header was too large (but still reasonable).

 

Respectfully submitted,

- Lois, Charlie, Man-Fai, Paul, JLE, and Jeff