Recent changes

[Jeremy]

Dear everyone,

As many of you have experienced, two recent changes on PCIbex have had some noticeable impact:

1. Some projects, including the Empty Project, were upgraded to an early version of PennController 2.1

2. I have been much less responsive in providing support on all platforms (forums, Slack, emails)

Unfortunately, some unforeseen issues with PennController 2.1 prompted further support requests, which only made point 2 more noticeable. This is why Florian and I have decided to downgrade the public projects back to PennController 2.0. This means that, as of today, new projects created from the projects listed on the farm’s homepage will ship with PennController 2.0, as was the case until late summer 2023.

PennController 2.1 is still under development and still publicly available at https://github.com/jeremyzehr/penncontroller_new, and projects currently using PennController 2.1 have not been downgraded to 2.0 (and projects duplicated from projects using 2.1 will also still use 2.1). This means that if you have an experiment currently working under PennController 2.1, it will remain unaffected.

You can always decide to change the version of PennController that your project uses, if for example you want to upgrade to 2.1 or downgrade to 2.0 — see the Versioning how-to guide for instructions. Note that different versions of PennController respond differently to aesthetics rules; in particular, the projects on the farm’s homepage ship with a PennController.css file in Aesthetics with these rules that center content in PennController 2.0:

.PennController {
    max-width: 40em !important;
    margin-left: 50vw;
    transform: translateX(-50%);
}

As for point 2, my availability will remain limited for the foreseeable future. I will try to progressively catch up with the messages on the forums and with the emails, but I cannot promise that I will be able to address all the questions and requests. In particular, I will temporarily not address requests to look up missing submissions (experience has shown that, unfortunately, lost submissions are unrecoverable).

If you encounter trouble signing up for the forum, this is likely due to our fairly restrictive spam tool; please send a brief email to support@pcibex.net asking us to add you manually if the issue is not resolved within a week (at least in some cases, we can override the system’s blocking of your sign-up through a simple click, and we try to keep up with that as best we can).

Finally, I also want to encourage everyone with experience and insights to share to reply to messages on the forums to help others: your experience can greatly benefit them!

Best,
Jeremy

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