Release 3.27.1: A Stellar Nursery

This release makes some improvements to search, prioritizing relevance over recency, doing some better indexing, and letting you re-index with no downtime for search on your site.

Big thanks to the lovely folks at Escape Collective for the feedback!

Plus a small fix for polls so they look better in emails when readers are using dark mode.

Oh, and a poll:

Pumpkin spice belongs in?

A latte

Pumpkin pie

Oatmeal

All the things

Flavor jail

Click an option to choose it. You can pick more than one before voting.

Search me? No search you

1 CHANGED 4 FIXED 4 IMPROVED

Highlights

🔍 Site search moves to relevance over recency; rebuilds without downtime

Search results are now ranked by relevance by default, instead of recency, and we made changes to what gets weighted. So a match in a post’s title beats a match in the body of a post. Author and tag pages, if turned on in the index, show before posts. Search also now catches words it used to miss: for instance, “Roubaix” now matches the compound “Paris-Roubaix”. Titles and names show apostrophes and other characters properly instead of codes like ‘. And if you rebuild a search index, readers keep getting the current results until the new index is ready, so search never goes blank. Big shout out to the good folks at Escape Collective for their testing and feedback.

CHANGED 1 item

🗳️ Clarified and enforcing that reader polls are available on the Voyager and Luna plans, and not on Space Station

FIXED 4 items

🔍 Fixed site search missing hyphenated words, such as “Roubaix” in “Paris-Roubaix”, and words that ran together across headings and paragraphs

🧹 Fixed site search showing codes such as ‘ in titles, tags and author names, and matching internal tags

📎 Fixed file uploads and forms with files attached

🏷️ Fixed some forms, group subscription invites and checkouts replacing an existing reader’s labels, and sometimes their newsletters, instead of adding to them

IMPROVED 4 items

🥇 Site search ranks results by relevance, with title matches first, author and tag pages above posts, and “Most Relevant” as the new default ordering

👤 Author and tag results in site search match on the name only and no longer show a date

🔄 Rebuilding the site search index keeps serving the current results until the new index is ready

🌗 Newsletter poll answers are now filled buttons, so readers can tell they are clickable in Gmail’s dark mode

Outpost Moved its Servers to the E.U.

Release 3.27.1: A Stellar Nursery

Highlights