Last week, we pushed some new bulk editing features to the Assignments crowdsourcing platform and fixed some dastardly bugs.

For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes, and if you’d like to get a list of site improvements every Tuesday - along with ways to help contribute to the site’s development yourself - subscribe to our developer newsletter here.

Site Updates

Bulk flag and publish Assignments submissions

We added two new tick boxes at the top of the Assignment data viewer: “Flag All” and “Gallery All.” When clicked, all the currently visible Assignment submissions will be flagged or made public, as appropriate. Note that clicking this button twice will remove the flag or gallery tick from all visible Assignment submissions, so be careful to not undo any careful curation you’ve done.

Buggy tabs unstuck and Assignments are full of characters

Some recent feature releases interfered with the ability to easily switch tabs on pages that have them. That’s now fixed.

We also squashed a bug where certain characters could break an Assignment submissions, particularly when copying and pasting data. That should no longer occur.

Come hack transparency with us

Every Tuesday night, we gather in Cambridge with a group of coders, designers, and others who want to see more open government. Over the past few months, we’ve been mixing MuckRock’s agency database with a set of scanners and scrapers to help gauge the accessibility, mobile-friendliness, and security of America’s digital infrastructure.

You can find out more and join us by checking out Code for Boston’s website.

Reporting bugs and submitting fixes

There are a number of other ways to help us continue to improve the core MuckRock site experience. We have a project and a weekly newsletter, “Release Notes,” that highlights everything we’re working on. Register to get a summary of site updates each week and details on open issues that need your help.

Check out some of our issues labeled “help wanted” for ideas on good places to start or just pop into our Slack’s #Developers channel.

Subscribers to the weekly newsletter get exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits only available for subscribers. You can subscribe to the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

If you spot a bug or have a feature request, you can also help by opening an issue on GitHub.

If you do, please search open issues first to make sure it hasn’t already been reported. If it has been reported previously, please leave an additional comment letting us know it’s an issue for you, particularly if you can provide more details about when it crops up or what you think is causing the problem.

In addition to the new newsletter, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack.

Image via Wikimedia Commons