Faster, safer sign-in, and an Australian backup copy

Most of this week's work is about sign-in: it is quicker for a student's first time, it locks down faster when nobody is signed in, and it no longer breaks when your browser fills in the email box for you. Alongside that, your nightly backup gained a second home in Australia, and two small console details were fixed.

Signing in is quicker, and stricter when nobody is signed in

• A student's first sign-in now goes straight into the app. It used to send a first-time student back to the sign-in screen once before it worked. That extra step is gone.
• Opening the app or the console while signed out now goes straight to the sign-in screen. Before, the page behind the sign-in screen briefly started loading first. It never showed anything a signed-out visitor shouldn't see, but it asked our database questions it had no reason to ask. Now the sign-in screen appears immediately and nothing behind it loads until you are actually signed in.
• Signing in now works when your browser fills in your email address for you. A quirk in some browsers meant the box could look filled in while the sign-in button stayed greyed out and unresponsive, with nothing on screen to explain why. That is fixed for both the staff console and the student app.

Your backup now keeps a copy in Australia

The nightly encrypted backup of your data now keeps an additional copy in Australia, in cloud storage we rent directly from Amazon Web Services. Because AWS now holds a copy of your data on our behalf in this way, it is listed as a subprocessor: in the subprocessor list published in our knowledge base, and in the data processing agreement your institution signs.

What did not change: this adds a copy, it does not replace one. Your primary data has always been hosted in Australia, and the backup is still encrypted before it ever leaves our systems. Who can access it, and under what approval, is unchanged.

See subprocessors and data residency and tenant isolation.

Source pages for the writing assistant moved onto Ask Anything

The pages you connect so the writing assistant can draft Ask Anything answers from your own counselling, fees, and IT support pages used to live on a separate Sources tab. They now sit directly on the Ask Anything tab, under the answers they feed, since that is the only thing they are for. A link to the old tab still lands you on the right place.

See connecting your own pages.

Hover explanations no longer get cut off

A hover explanation near the edge of the screen, such as on a button in a long list, used to be cut off mid-sentence rather than shifting to stay on screen. Hover explanations now reposition themselves so the whole thing is readable, wherever the button sits.