Knowledge Base Changes for March 2017

Keith Rozett updated this Knowledge Base after a 7-year hiatus.

The biggest change was the ability to review existing articles.

Review Articles feature

Logged-in users are encouraged to check existing articles for correctness, broken links, etc.
A Review Articles link exists on the home page. This takes the user to a list of the 10 oldest articles that have not been checked.
When viewing any article, logged-in users are able to take 3 new actions: mark the article as reviewed, edit it, or mark it as deleted.
- If the article’s information is correct and all the links work, the user should mark it as reviewed. The review time and name of the reviewer is recorded.
- If the user finds errors or broken links, they should edit the article with the changes. This is the same edit feature that always existed in the Knowledge Base.
- If the user thinks the article should be deleted, they can say so, but they must also provide a reason (e.g. the article is specific to something that no longer exists).
Viewing an article shows a history of all reviews and marks for deletion at the bottom of the page.
When viewing the list of articles that need review, users can also see a list of articles marked as reviewed and a list of articles marked for deletion.

New articles and edits are picked up by the search engine immediately, instead of every half hour.
Deleting an article now keeps it in the database. Although it will disappear from the website, this gives us the ability to restore deleted articles in the future.
The Knowledge Base now runs the latest version of Ruby on Rails (see technical details below).
All requests are now HTTPS for added security.

Upgraded from CentOS 5.11 to 7.3.1611.
Upgraded from Rails 2.3.5 to 5.0.2.
Upgraded from Ruby 1.8.7 to 2.4.0.
Sphinx search engine was upgraded to 2.2.11, which now supports real-time indices.
More tests were added to give complete code coverage.