Changelog

Version 5.3 — 2026-05-18

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Aaron Sylvan with Claude-assisted automation.

Platform — Drupal core updated to version 11.3.9.
Platform — Two supporting modules were updated alongside core: Pathauto, which generates the site's readable page URLs, and Views Bulk Operations, which powers batch edits to many records at once.
Redirects — The old /honor-roll address now redirects to /honorees, so older bookmarks continue to work.
Site Health — A 404-tracking system is now in place, so future broken links can be spotted and routed where they belong.
Citations — Added a behind-the-scenes safety check that prevents empty citation rows from being introduced by bulk imports.

Version 5.2 — 2026-05-17

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Aaron Sylvan with Claude-assisted automation.

Honorees — Rechecked 3,267 honoree citation URLs that had been flagged as broken in an earlier audit, and restored 1,327 working references. Many of the flagged URLs turned out to still be alive, because the original check had hit rate limits and reported false positives. We also replaced confirmed-dead URLs with Wayback Machine snapshots where archives existed. In all, 1,069 individual honoree records were improved.
Hardware, Software & Companies — Every cited URL on hardware, software, and company records was audited and verified, with 13,476 records updated to point at either a verified-current link or a Wayback Machine archive.
Source Names — Across all databases, citations recovered from the Wayback Machine carry a "(wayback)" tag on their source name, so it is clear when a link points at an archived copy rather than the live page.

Version 5.1 — 2026-05-03

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Aaron Sylvan with Claude-assisted automation.

Edit Forms — Citations that contained only a name (no URL) or only a URL (no name) are now fully visible and editable for our content editors. Previously, citations missing either field were hidden from the edit form.
Honorees — Over 2,700 honoree records had previously-invisible name-only citations restored to view.
Companies — 25 company records were similarly affected.

Version 5.0 — 2026-04-21

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Aaron Sylvan with Claude-assisted automation.

MAJOR CHANGES

Total Rebuild — The site has been completely rebuilt on Drupal 11. The previous Drupal 7 platform had reached end-of-life and was retired; the new platform is the foundation for ongoing work.
New Visual Design — A refreshed look across the site: updated typography, layout, navigation, and color treatment, with cleaner card layouts on the browse pages and bigger, more prominent images on individual records.
Honor Roll Becomes Honorees — The page formerly at /honor-roll is now /honorees, with a richer per-person template. Old /honor-roll bookmarks continue to work and redirect automatically.
Citations Consolidated — On Honor Roll entries, citations used to be split across two separate fields (Source Credited and More Information). They are now unified into a single Citations field, matching how hardware, software, and company entries already worked.
Image Attribution Everywhere — Every record can now carry photographer, license, and source-URL credit for its main image. Honoree, Hardware, Software, and Company pages all display this attribution where it is present.
Responsive Refresh — Navigation, search, and browsing were rebuilt for current desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Browse Pages Rebuilt — The hardware, software, company, and honoree index pages were all rebuilt with cleaner card layouts, refreshed filters, and better pagination.

MINOR CHANGES

Search — Cross-database text search was rebuilt, and the Leadership page is now searchable.
Honorees — Honoree page URLs now use names (for example, /honoree/grace-m-hopper) instead of numeric IDs.
Honorees — The random sort on the /honorees index page no longer leaves a long parameter visible in the address bar.
Date Display — Birth and death dates show "(b.)" and "(d.)" prefixes before the date rather than after.
Date Display — Partial dates (year only, or year and month) now render gracefully across the site rather than guessing "January 1".
Member Communications — Member contact data was migrated to Neon CRM as part of the platform transition.
Editor Tools — "Edit this page" and "Edit this post" buttons were added throughout for authorized editors.

Version 4.0 — 2026-03-24

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Aaron Sylvan with Claude-assisted automation.

MAJOR CHANGES

Honor Roll — 181 new biographical entries were added, focused on women (and one non-binary person) who made significant contributions to information technology. Sources include the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, Wikipedia, IEEE, and ACM. 103 of the new entries include portrait images from Wikimedia Commons or fair-use sources; 78 are text-only.
Honor Roll Quality Pass — Across roughly 1,891 biographical records: character-encoding errors were repaired, raw wall-of-text descriptions were converted into polished prose, broken citation markers were removed, 726 name-field issues were cleaned, and the gender field was filled in for 386 records based on pronoun usage.
Portrait Resolution Upgrade — 1,628 portrait images were uploaded under a standardized naming and attribution scheme. 538 portraits were replaced with higher-resolution Wikimedia Commons versions, raising average vertical resolution from 277 px to 1,627 px, a 5.9x improvement. 534 images now carry full Creative Commons or Public Domain attribution.
Birth and Death Date Research — A research pass across 1,058 Honor Roll records yielded 49 new birth dates and 57 new death dates, confirmed 551 people as still living, and upgraded 171 year-only birth dates and 62 partial death dates to full dates. A further 137 verified death dates were written into the database from Wikidata.

MINOR CHANGES

Honor Roll — 9 confirmed duplicate records were merged, keeping the version with the longer biography in each case.
Honor Roll — A language pass softened obituary-like phrasing for 1,043 records of people presumed still living, and re-prioritized opening sentences to lead with achievements for 662 deceased-person records.
Honor Roll — The "Still Alive" field was renamed "Date of Death Unknown" with corrected meaning: it now indicates "believed deceased, but no confirmed date" rather than "this person is alive".
Honor Roll — The date display was revised so "(b.)" and "(d.)" prefixes appear before the date rather than after.
Honor Roll — A birthday calendar was built: roughly 1,710 records sorted by birthday for use in social-media and curation planning.
Citations — Source-name normalization: 18,916 citations whose source name was the placeholder "Other Website" were given a proper source name based on the URL's domain, such as Wikipedia, Columbia University, CNET, Newegg, MyCalcDB, and roughly 1,100 others. 5,407 entirely empty citation rows were deleted.
Citations — Suspicious-URL cleanup: 1,093 citations were removed whose URLs were clearly not authoritative sources, such as malformed strings, bare IP addresses, Facebook pages, and Google cache or Translate links.
Citations — Honor Roll URL liveness audit: 5,458 cited URLs were checked, and 3,186 were flagged as not resolving. These flagged URLs became the starting point for the Wayback recovery work in May.
Companies — Orphan-record cleanup: company records with no hardware or software pointing at them were identified and resolved through merge-or-remove decisions.
Companies — A logo standardization pass.
Permissions — A site-wide audit of editor permissions and text-format access, which resolved a long-standing issue where some editors could view but not save changes to description fields.
Spam Blocking — A suspicious-account audit; questionable accounts were removed.
Editor Tools — Photo attribution fields (credit, license, source URL) were added to Honor Roll, Hardware, and Software entries, with templates updated to display the attribution.

Version 3.2 — 2021-06-21

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Elaman Imashof.

Search — Make Y2K filter an option rather than requirement
Search — Repair bug involving double-quotes for matching phrases
Search — Add Honor Roll entries
Companies — Add the ability to merge duplicate entries for a company
Donors — Repair bug allowing post editors to indicate donors
Date Tool — Repair defect showing 'January 1' when MM/DD unknown
Moderation — Do not allow blank titles for submitted quotes
Honor Roll — Add gender option 'NB', remove option 'other'
Honor Roll — Add 'filter by gender' and 'sort by DOB' for browsing
Honor Roll — Repair 'sort by Z-A' option
Honor Roll — Repair logic conflicts around 'still alive' and 'date of death' fields
Database — Use global search-and-replace to fix corrupted apostrophe characters in entries

Version 3.1 — 2021-05-04

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Elaman Imashof.

Donors — Bulk add/rename/delete sponsorships of individual posts
Database — Add ability to merge types of hardware/software/companies
Moderation — Allow 'delete all by this author' for spam prevention
Moderation — Empty workbench of all pending entries
Moderation — Correct error confusing author vs. editor in moderation notices
Copy Writing — Adjust text in moderation emails to be more polite
Copy Writing — Explain transition away from post-Y2K content
Research — Add content from research on Video Games, Mobile Phones

Version 3.0 — 2021-03-14

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Elaman Imashof.

Search — Filter results to products and events on or before December 31, 2000
Research — Find more Analog Computers, CPUs, Mobile Phones, Video Games
Platform — Update Drupal to latest minor version without changing major release
Platform — Update all plugins and extensions
Platform — Bugfixes to blog posts, email notifications, new user management

Version 2.7 — 2017-12-22

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Ivan K.

Search — Refine results of text searches, according to data type
Database — Major cleanup of hardware and software taxonomies
Database — Data type of "Company Type" changed to single item
Landmarks — Booleans will allow items to be flagged as historical milestones
Landmarks — Can be within a specific Company, a Product Type, or significant to all IT.
Landmarks — Only "historians" can change "landmark" status of an item
Landmarks — Until we build our "landmarks" database, it will be hidden from guest users
UX — Minor changes and debugging

Version 2.6 — 2017-11-06

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Ivan K.

Anti-Spam — "Add/Edit Article" and "Add Company" now require special "historian" permission
Date Picker — Now always uses "textedit" field instead of dropdown menu for specifying years
UX — Blue box soliciting add/edit now uses less screen real estate
UX — "Submit" button now correctly specifies "submit for moderation" or "publish to live site"
UX — Publishers have clearer moderation tools, including red "delete" button
UX — Comma added to "Welcome, username!" message
UX — Home Page "Browse" button goes to a page offering six databases, instead of defaulting to hardware
UX — Upon login, users are taken to a page offering to create various types of content
UX — Personal Profile editor cleaned up considerably
Responsive Display — Defects at tablet size have been repaired
Responsive Display — Defects in Firefox have been repaired
Responsive Display — Menu bar now has line+shadow underneath for visual clarity
Add/Edit — Blog Article editor now has clearer UI for uploading images
Add/Edit — Resource data fields now better organized
Add/Edit — Quote data fields now better organized
Blog Sidebar — Now has nicer buttons inviting browsing our databases
Blog Sidebar — Now suppressed on phone-sized devices, to avoid clutter

Version 2.5 — 2017-09-25

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Ivan K.

Navigation — Re-style desktop navigation completely
Navigation — Re-style tablet navigation
Navigation — Re-style phone navigation
Navigation — Add "blog" to primary nav (hardware/software/etc.)
Navigation — When scrolled down, "search" is always visible
Navigation — Fix top-of-nav spacing problem on administrative views
Navigation — Use icons for data types (hardware, software) on tablet/mobile
Spam Blocking — Spammy accounts are auto-deleted regularly
Spam Blocking — Add/Edit blog content requires different permission than db
Content — remove slider from home page
Content — four buttons on home page should link to hardware/software/etc.
UX — Add/Edit blog entries now triggers moderation sequence

Version 2.4 — 2017-07-12

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Ivan K.

Content — restore missing blog posts
Spam Blocking — blog post comments handled by Disqus instead of Drupal
Spam Blocking — delete unverified accounts after 24 hours
Spam Blocking — only people with 'editor' permission can publish to blog
UX — fix "shuffle" feature on Quotes and Honor Roll pages
UX — fix "squished images" problem for horizontal-format images on Honor Roll page
UX — fix bug in "date tool" on "submit new company" page
UX — fix bugs in CAPTCHA
UX — fix bugs in moderation workflow
UX — fix display bug with apostrophes on Honor Roll pages
UX — fix header language to differentiate between "search" and "search results"
UX — fix JS infinite-scroll tool
UX — fix spacing on mobile version of faceted searches
UX — additional/clearer icons for different data types on "search results"
UX — aesthetic alignment improvements on "date picker" and "image uploader" tools
UX — allow Honor Roll page to show only entries with photos
UX — by default, browse oldest entries first
UX — change "main nav" sequence to begin with "hardware" and include "blog"
UX — change URL routing from resource-sites to resources
UX — email links inline, rather than in "footnote format"
UX — hide email addresses on /members pages
UX — if there are multiple information sources for an entry, each needs Title+URL
UX — show db size "search found ____" entries on all 'browse' pages
UX — suppress "author" and "creation date" to remove clutter from "search results"

Version 2.3 — 2016-12-15

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Boby Ui.

Content — repair missing entries on "Board of Directors"
Database — add ability to export "companies" and "honor roll" as .csv

Version 2.2 — 2016-09-01

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Boby Ui.

UX — clarify new user registration
UX — notify editors when new submissions/edits arrive
UX — clarify moderation emails to authors (your entry is awaiting moderation or accepted/rejected)
Spam Blocking — Set up IP blacklist
Spam Blocking — Implement better CAPTCHA
Spam Blocking — require email authentication within 24hrs
Debug — repair JS scrolling bug that was introduced when we started allowing the sharing of faceted searches
Misc — hide email addresses of CEOs on the "company" pages
Misc — perform a one-time export of member db for Mailchimp

Version 2.1 — 2016-05-13

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Boby Ui.

MAJOR CHANGES

Migrate Blog from old site — The old WordPress blog has been reproduced on the new site - including the recent obit for Andy Grove
Migrate Users from old site — Several dozen user accounts from the old site have been recreated on the new site. (Passwords will have been reset.)
Faceted Searches Described — When browsing hardware or software, there is now grammatically articulate text describing the exact search criteria at any time.
Faceted Searches Can Be Shared — When applying facets to a search (such as 'manufactured by Intel'), the URI is now updated to reflect the search query. Therefore, interesting sets of search results can now be shared via copy-and-paste.

MINOR CHANGES

Configure 'SendGrid' Email — For the site to have outgoing email (including notifications such as new account creation and password reset), we set up service with a third-party provider. Pricing is free if our volume is low.
Configure 'SOLR' Search Server — 'Search' was working on the test site, but failing on the live server. This has been repaired.
Better OpenGraph Data on Home Page — Previously, sharing 'www.ithistory.org' on a site like Facebook would show a preview with bad 'title' and 'description' text. For instance it said the page title was 'Front Page' instead of 'IT History Society'. New writing makes more sense and describes the mission concisely.
Better Text on Blog Sidebar — Previously, when reading an individual blog post the sidebar displayed placeholder text. Now there's a short description of ITHS, as well as links to the databases. Could still use graphical improvement.
Better Blog List — When looking at a list of blog posts, show the author's real name ('John Smith') rather than userid ('jsmith'). Also use the 'thumbnail' field to choose images for display. And some adjustments were made to the layout to make better use of available space.
Better Text on 'Contact Us' — The form for emailing an inquiry had placeholder text; now it describes the organization better.
Better CTAs — The blue buttons on 'single item' views now say 'Add hardware to our database' (whichever data type is appropriate to that view) instead of the old 'contribute to this page', which was confusing and might have been mistaken for meaning 'donate money'.
Dual Role on 'Board' — On the /board page, Jeffery Stein is now visible as both Chairman and as a Board Member. Previously a bug prevented this.
Validated Users — We have a new 'role' that admins can assign to user accounts, called 'validated' - which we can use to indicate accounts which have been explicitly marked by humans as being non-spam-related.
Random Order Quotes — On the 'quotes' database, the option to sort randomly was failing. Now it works; refresh the page and you'll see a different list.
Images Missing on Static Pages — Four of the static pages had bad URLs left over from the transition from 'test server' to 'live server'. They have been repaired.
Single Items Without Images — On the 'single item' view, entries without images had an awkward empty space; now there is a border and text saying 'no image'. Hopefully this may encourage visitors to upload images of their own in some of these cases.
404s in Footer — Corrected minor bug relating to footer URLs for 'Terms of Use' and 'Privacy Policy'
Better Search Results — Larger icons to show what type(s) of data each search returned
Better Share Buttons — Tweaked placement of social sharing buttons to add whitespace
Better Mobile Search Results — Suppressed the 'date modified' and 'author' and 'text preview' on phones, because too much clutter
Honor Roll Cleanup — Some names had erroneous 'node field' text in them; all were manually inspected and cleaned.
Update Site Modules — Update every Drupal module and extension to the latest version (staying within Drupal7).

Version 2.0.1 — 2016-03-28

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by Nestor Valentsuela.

Board Members — Photos added for each Board Member or Trustee, page allows 'refine' via JS
Home Page — New Slider graphics and text describe the organization better
Logo Placement — Minor tweak to whitespace around logo in title bar
Member Benefits — Graphical page articulates different tiers of donations
Sharing Tool — Switched away from "shareaholic"; implemented "addthis" instead

Version 2.0 — 2016-02-05

Upgrade managed by Aaron Sylvan. Code by IT Trailblazers.

Total Rebuild — Transition to Drupal7 (previous site was written in PHP without an MVC framework)
New Skin — Database contents are displayed with larger and more prominent images. Typography and layout updated to be more contemporary
Responsive Design — Site optimized for display on desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile
SEO-Friendly — All pages of db contents now have unique and SEO-friendly URLs
Social-Friendly — All pages of db contents have "share" buttons, and OpenGraph metadata to facilitate sharing photos
Comment Section — All pages of db contents can have threaded comments, which may be "voted up or down". (implementation via Disqus)
Faceted Search — Add the ability to refine searches (e.g. by Manufacturer, Product Type)
Sort Order — Added the option to display results in chronological order
Anyone Can Edit — Anyone can create an account that enables submission of entries or edits
Moderated Edits — Requested changes go into a queue, to be approved/declined by official ITHS editors