Release notes: Citizen Space v3.1.20

We've just released our latest version of Citizen Space. In addition to the usual security and infrastructure updates, we've also made some improvements to the product features – read on for more details.

v3.1.20 rolls out today to all Citizen Space customers. If you have any questions about the new release, you can – as always – speak to your customer success manager.

What we've improved 


Export format (.xlsx)

This is a change we've been wanting to make for some time as it opens the door to further improvements in the exports from Citizen Space. You won't notice a huge change right now, but .xlsx is a cleaner, more stable and more modern file-type.

NB: If you still would like the file in .csv format, then this is easy to do. You can save the .xlsx file as a .csv from Excel, and it'll be a cleaner .csv version, too.

'Last logged-in time' field

While we're on the subject of exports, now included in the Users export is the date and time of the last login for each administrator. A number of you have asked for this so you can see who has logged in and when, to make it easy to manage who still needs access to the Citizen Space hub and who is active. 

More sort options for published responses

For users of response publishing, this update allows visitors to your site to sort published responses by submitted date or alphabetically. This means it's easier for visitors to access the data and find the responses they're looking for. Don't forget, as administrators you can also choose up to five questions from your consultation which site visitors can use to filter the published responses.

If you don't currently have response publishing turned on and would like to, just give your customer success manager a shout and we can get that enabled for you.

Save-and-return improved again

We made changes to save-and-return last year to make it easier for respondents to know what their unique ID is if they need to get in touch. This release sees another update to the wording on screen and in the save-and-return email to make things clearer for your respondents.

Improvements to loading speeds

We're always looking for ways to make the platform faster and we have an ongoing piece of work to keep making tweaks to speed things up. This latest release includes improvements to the loading speed of the 'responses organised by question' page.

Problem-solving updates

In our product updates, we also try and tackle as many bugs (and other things which might cause frustration) as possible. We've packed a fair few fixes into this release, including some you've identified for us – like copies of private consultations being public by default (Citizen Space will now carry the public or private setting of the original over to the cloned version).

We've also stopped the postcode answer component being a little overly sensitive to whitespace, so that should mean if people accidentally put in their post/zipcode with extra spaces, it'll still be accepted.

There's lots more we've tidied and tweaked, but that's a flavour of the work behind the scenes.