What's up with the Communities?

At some point during this past week, WGU made some changes to the Community system.  For most of Wednesday, PocketWGU couldn't display any community messages (it came back that afternoon).  Yesterday, we noticed that while we could get messages again, we were only getting small bits of the messages and not the whole message.  Bummer.  The good news is that we've figured out how to fix this, and the fix is now available for Android in version 1.8.2 of the app.  A new version for iPhone/iPad should be along soon (subject to Apple's review cycle).

Something nifty about this issue was that it forced us to re-think how we approach community content.  This involved looking at some very old code.  Our code for parsing community message threads is some of the oldest in PocketWGU, and relatively unchanged since it was created nearly 2.5 years ago.  This was one of the first features we got working and it's worked ever since (until Wednesday).  One thing we had never previously figured out was how to display a user's name in our listing, because the mechanism we used didn't provide it.  In looking for a solution, we found a slightly different mechanism that does.  So, after some tweaks to the old parsing code, the latest version now displays the actual user's name.  Nice.  We've also fixed a few more bugs and put some polish back on the new menu system.  Hope you like it!