Changelog

This page tracks changes you'd actually notice as a board member or chair — not every internal change under the hood. Every update that changes what a signed-in member sees or does gets a matching update to these docs, and a line here, in the same change. If you're contributing a user-facing change to BoardTools: add your entry at the top of the list below, and update or create whichever page under /docs now describes the new behavior.

2026-08-21

• You now scroll through a packet instead of clicking through it. The packet and document readers used to show one page at a time, so reading a 40-page packet meant 39 clicks on Next. Every page is now stacked in one continuous view: read the whole thing with the wheel, a trackpad, a swipe, or the ↑ / ↓ keys and the space bar. Previous/Next (and ← / →, Page Up / Page Down, Home / End) are still there as jumps when you want to land on a particular page, and the "Page 3 of 12" indicator now follows your scrolling. On a laptop or desktop the reader also fills almost the whole window rather than a modest centered box — reading is the activity, so the chrome gets out of the way. Long packets load a few pages at a time as you reach them, so a 200-page packet stays responsive. Your notes are unaffected: each page now carries its own notes panel right below it, so a note stays with the page it was written on. Phones are unchanged from the full-screen treatment shipped earlier the same day. See reading the packet and the document library.

• No more sideways scrolling on a phone. Two spots used to push the whole page wider than your screen at phone widths: the Members header's Import CSV / Invitations / Add member buttons ran off the right edge instead of wrapping onto a second line, and the top bar's New button kept its full label while its neighbours (the board switcher, search) had already shrunk to icons — for anyone on more than one board, that pushed the whole top bar past the edge on every page. Both now fit: header actions wrap to a second row when there isn't room, and New collapses to its icon (with the same accessible name) to match its neighbours.

• The calendar no longer offers a Month view too narrow to read. On a phone, Month was already not the view you got by default — but the toggle still let you pick it, and a 7-column week at that width leaves each day about a fingertip wide. Month is now greyed out until the window is wide enough, and if you had chosen it, widening the window brings it straight back — see Calendar. Alongside it, a handful of small consistency fixes: every field that is genuinely required now shows its * marker (some tag, folder, quick-motion and committee-responsibility fields were quietly required without saying so), comment timestamps on a document review round now read in your board's timezone like every other timestamp, the succession tables' column headings match every other table, and an upload's progress bar no longer looks finished for the whole upload if you have animations turned off.

• Selection checkboxes and other small controls are now big enough to tap. The tick boxes you use to pick several rows at once in Documents, Members and Tasks were 16px squares — hard to hit with a finger, and on a phone (where each row becomes its own card) that box is the only way to select a row. They are bigger now, and the whole 44px square around each one is clickable, so a near-miss still selects the row. Your notification preference grid works the same way: the whole row for In-app or Email is the target, not just the box. Nothing about what the controls do changed — same selections, same bulk actions, same preferences. A related fix restored the intended minimum size on a long list of other buttons, tabs, and menu items across BoardTools, which a styling bug had been quietly discarding.

• The packet and document readers now open full-screen on a phone. The reader used to open in a small, centered window sized like every other dialog — on a phone that left the page navigation and the entire notes/reply panel scrolled off the bottom with no way to reach them. The reader now fills the screen on a phone, with its own scroll so the toolbar, page, page navigation and notes panel are all reachable; a laptop or tablet is unchanged. The instructions at the top now also start collapsed behind a Show more link on a phone, so they don't push the page itself below the fold. See reading the packet on a phone.

• A dropped connection no longer breaks the page. If a save failed to reach us at all — patchy signal on a phone, a tunnel, a laptop waking up — the button you pressed could sit on "Saving…" forever, or the whole page could be replaced by an error screen, losing whatever else you had open. Those failures now show a small "Couldn't save — check your connection and try again" message in the corner, and the button comes straight back so you can press it again. Nothing was saved when you see it, so retrying is always safe. This covers the everyday controls across tasks, meetings, agendas, minutes, documents, projects and discussions.

• "Nothing here yet" messages now look consistent across a member's profile, committees, meetings, and surveys. A handful of empty sections — a member with no seat/term on record, no shared contact details, or no committee membership; a meeting with no agenda items, materials, or recording yet; a survey with no audience yet; an archived-committees list with nothing archived — used to be plain, unstyled sentences sitting next to sibling sections that already used the shared "nothing here yet" treatment. They all render the same way now, so a page never mixes two different looks for the same idea. Nothing about the underlying data or actions changed.

• Roll call no longer makes you wait for one member before marking the next. Recording attendance used to freeze the whole roster until the mark finished saving — on a phone, taking the roll for a twelve-person board meant twelve waits, and the button you had just tapped went dead under your finger and lost keyboard focus. Every mark now appears the instant you tap it and saves in the background: other members' controls stay live, the member's own RSVP buttons stay live, and focus stays where you put it. If a mark can't be saved, just that member snaps back to what was recorded before and a message says why, so the roster and the quorum indicator never disagree. The same applies to the quick Your RSVP buttons on a meeting card or detail page and to the status dropdown on a task row. See RSVP & attendance.

• RSVP and "Cancelled" chips now look like every other status chip. Your own RSVP, a meeting's board-wide tally (attending / maybe / declined), and the Cancelled marker used to be soft rounded pills in their own colours — a second visual language sitting beside the squared status chips the rest of BoardTools uses for meetings, motions, tasks, documents and votes. They are all one chip style now, on the same colour tokens, so a page of mixed statuses reads as one list rather than two. Nothing about RSVPs themselves changed: the same words ("Attending", "Maybe", "Not attending") plus a distinct shape for each answer, so an RSVP never depends on colour alone, and answering with the quick Your RSVP buttons works exactly as before — see RSVP & attendance. One visible fix came with it: a cancelled meeting in the calendar's list view was drawn differently from the same meeting in the meetings list, and now matches it.

2026-08-20

• Zoom in the packet reader, and a reader that fits a phone. The in-app reader used to size every page to the width of the screen and stop there — on a phone that left a dense packet page at body text far too small to read, with nothing to do about it, and the reader's buttons wrapped onto three rows above an already-short page. There are now Zoom out / Zoom in controls (Fit width, 150%, 200%, 300%) beside the page arrows, and your zoom level stays put as you turn pages. On a phone the controls collapse to a single row of icons, and to leave a note you simply select text with your finger — an Add note to selection button appears above the page. See Making the text bigger and Reading on a phone. The document library's Read action opens the same reader, with the same zoom.

2026-08-18

• Directors can upload documents. Every role except the read-only Observer can now upload a new document to the library — a director filing a report or disclosure no longer needs an officer to do it for them. Organizing the library (folders, tags, new versions, restore, delete) and uploading governing documents still need document-management permission — see How do I upload a document?.
• Observers are now read-only in discussions too. An Observer (auditor, counsel, prospective member) could previously post in discussion spaces even though the role is read-only everywhere else. They can still read every space they belong to, but posting — on the web and by email — now matches the rest of the app; see Who can do what.
• Committee chairs manage their own discussion space. The chair of a committee can now rename or archive that committee's space and lock or unlock its threads, without needing board-wide admin permission — see Where are a committee's discussions?.
• The Roles & permissions page now explains participation. The grid in Settings → Roles & permissions gained rows for posting in discussions and uploading documents, plus a note explaining the capabilities that aren't permissions at all (reading discussions, responding to surveys) — so it no longer looks like directors can't participate in discussions; see What can each role do?.

2026-08-12

• "Invited" now clears when someone signs in, however they got there. A member who signed in without using their emailed invitation link — because their email address was already a BoardTools sign-in, or they went straight to the board's address — stayed stuck showing an Invited badge on the roster forever, even though they were signed in and using the board. Signing in now clears that status to Active immediately (and marks their outstanding invitation accepted), and anyone stuck in the old state fixes itself the next time they open the board. The Invited badge is also amber now instead of teal, so a pending invitation is no longer easy to mistake for an Active member at a glance — see What are the member statuses?.

2026-08-04

• Attendance history and rates. A member's profile now has an Attendance section — their present, remote, and absent counts across past meetings, their attendance rate, and their most recent meetings — and a committee's page shows that committee's overall attendance rate across its own past meetings. You no longer have to open every past meeting and tally rosters by hand to answer "who has missed three of the last five?". Future and cancelled meetings are never counted, a past meeting with no roll call taken is never counted as an absence, and a member with nothing recorded shows "No attendance recorded" rather than a misleading 0%. Your own attendance is always visible to you; someone else's is visible to whoever can record attendance (an administrator, the chair, or a staff liaison) — see Attendance history & rates.

2026-07-29

• Surveys, self-assessments, and polls. Build a questionnaire — rating scales, single and multiple choice, free text — send it to the whole board or one committee, and read the results in one place. Each member gets their own single-use link by email, so no sign-in is needed to answer. Every survey is created anonymous or attributed, and the choice is permanent: an anonymous survey's answers are stored with no link to the person who gave them, the board can still see who has responded (so you can chase the stragglers) without seeing what anyone said, and results stay hidden until at least three people have answered so a small result can't be worked out by elimination — see Surveys.
• Sign out works everywhere it's offered. Two of them quietly did nothing when you chose them: Sign out in your account menu inside a board, and the one in the menu button on the BoardTools.io homepage on a phone (on that one, turning the phone sideways used to be the workaround — it moved the button out of the menu). Both sign you out properly now — see How do I sign out?.

2026-07-28

• Chairs can finish setting up their own board. The person who creates a board starts as its chair, so the chair role now also covers inviting members to sign in, changing a member's status, and setting up seats, terms, and committees — the steps a brand-new board's first setup needs. Admins are unchanged, and no other role gained anything — see Roles reference.

2026-07-18

• Discussions. Board, committee, and custom discussion spaces bring threaded conversations into BoardTools — post from the app or by email, with per-space email settings (every post, new threads only, a daily digest, or muted) — see Discussions.
• Availability polls, with auto-scheduling. Poll members for a meeting time by email — no sign-in required to respond — and, if you turn on auto-scheduling when you create the poll, BoardTools promotes the winning time into a scheduled meeting itself the moment the last invitee answers — see How do I respond to an availability poll?.
• Committee charters and responsibilities. Every committee now has a versioned charter (with full edit history) and named, owned responsibilities you can track between meetings — see Committees.
• Highlight and note the board packet. Mark up a meeting's packet right in the in-app reader — highlight text, leave a private or shared note, reply to a shared note, and your notes carry forward automatically when the packet is regenerated — see Highlighting and noting the board packet.

2026-07-17

• Take minutes without leaving Run mode. Each agenda item in the run-the-meeting cockpit now has an inline Minutes panel — capture notes and the decision as the discussion happens, saved automatically, on the same record as the meeting's Minutes page — see How do I take minutes while the meeting is happening?

2026-07-16

• Account menu. Your name and role in the corner of the app are now a real account menu — My profile and Sign out in one place. Previously there was no way to sign out from inside a board at all.
• Consent at board creation. Creating a board now asks you to agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy up front; if either is later updated in a meaningful way, board administrators are asked to review and re-accept the change the next time they sign in.
• Your name heals itself. If your display name was ever showing your email address instead of your actual name, it now corrects itself automatically the next time you sign in, as soon as your sign-in profile has a real name on file.
• Voting eligibility follows your seat, not your role. Whether your ballot counts is now decided by the seat you hold (voting or non-voting) rather than your permissions role — see Who's allowed to vote?
• Hand off a role in one step. A new Transfer role action promotes a replacement and steps the current holder down at the same time — see Roles vs. positions.
• Member privacy defaults. Your home address is now kept private from fellow board members by default, and administrator notes on your profile stay visible to administrators only — see What do other board members see about me?
• Edit your own profile. Every member can now update their own name, pronouns, bio, and communication preferences directly — see Your profile & account.