Minor updates and code changes occur every day. Only significant or noteworthy updates are shown here. Updates shown with a gold background are (or were at the time) only available to Advanced HOPS members.

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Time Date	System Updates
Update 1166 30 April 2025	RESETTING PERSONAL QUESTIONS A new button has been provided in the user profile page for managers to reset users' Personal Questions. This removes the need for Admins to raise a support request to have questions reset. Where a user works for more than one railway, their accounts are separated out before the Personal Questions are removed. They then have separate login credentials for each railway. Their password and Personal Questions will all happen to be identical to their current ones, but they will have a separate username for each. The Personal Questions are only removed from the account that is used for the railway that has made the requests. The user can then use the Forgotten Password facility, or the manager can 'Issue Password Reset' [does the same thing] and the user will be able to reset their password without needing to answer the Personal Questions. The user will need to follow the same process on the other railways they work at to re-gain access to those. The user can re-join their accounts together again once they have re-gained access to both. This accounts are split out to avoid a rogue Admin obtaining access to a user's account by means of changing their email address and obtaining a password reset, and then being actually logged in as the user and jumping to the user's other railways. By separating out the accounts, the rogue Admin can only obtain access to their own railway's data, which they had access to anyway. (Note this is the same process as has always applied, just previously it has been implemented by HOPS HQ rather than railway admins.) Admins should never be /actually/ logged in as other users. It is very bad practice to ask users to reveal their passwords. Admins should use the Admin-Login facility. The admin login facility does not allow jumping between railways.
Update 1162 29 April 2025	MULTI-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION HOPS will soon be offering Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) on HOPS accounts. This is in response to feedback from several railways. Like most things this isn't a straightforward as just 'doing it', there are lots of wider effects to consider, technical, procedural, and human-factors, so here are our current plans: * There will be an initial trial with a small group of invited users. * After the trial MFA will be available (optional) to all. * Railways will be able to enforce MFA for specific users. * In the long term, MFA will become a requirement for users with certain permissions (eg permission to administer permissions (015), permission to admin-login (080), etc) - permissions that enable access to personal data. It is likely the permissions included in this list will increase over time, and bring more users within the requirement of MFA. We recognise this may not be welcome by some users, but the demands from railways for us to implement MFA are now overwhelming, and once MFA is available we don't feel it is defensible for HOPS to not require it where appropriate. * Railways will be able to enforce MFA for selected users who otherwise don't require it by means of a permission that will fall in the above list. The permission itself won't do anything, it will just be the thing that requires the user to set up MFA. This being a permission will make it easy for railways to 'fit and forget' the permission to appropriate Permission Groups, ensuring that any new users in those groups automatically obtain the 'Requires MFA' permission without the HOPS Admin needing to take any action. This will also cover the case of a user obtaining the permission by being added to a department (eg 'Directors Department', etc). * All the above will be implemented gradually over a period of several months, with notifications to affected users in advance. * MFA will become an alternative to 'Personal Questions' for password resets for users who have joined accounts. * MFA will require the user to use an authenticator app. Any TOTP-compliant authenticator app can be used: Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator apps being the two most popular. Built-in and third-party Password Managers are also available for all major web browsers which have integrated authenticators. Note that a HOPS login applies to logging in to *HOPS*, rather than in to a specific railway. Once logged in to HOPS a user is free to jump between their railways. Therefore if a user's permissions at any one of their railways demand MFA then it is applied to their account and they will need to use MFA to log in, regardless of which railway they wish to view. --- Forgetting / Losing MFA details: A new button will soon be provided in the user profile page for managers to reset users' Personal Questions. This will remove the need for Admins to raise a support request to have questions reset. Currently, where a user works for more than one railway, their accounts are separated out before the Personal Questions are removed. This is to avoid a rogue Admin obtaining access to a user's account by means of changing their email address and obtaining a password reset, and then jumping to the user's other railways. By separating out the accounts, the rogue Admin can only obtain access to their own railway's data, which they had access to anyway. This is currently performed by HOPS HQ but the new button will enable Admins to manage this locally. When MFA is introduced, a similar button will be provided, which will separate out the user's accounts and then remove MFA on only the user's account for the requesting railway. This will prevent a rogue Admin being able to access another railway's data by illegally obtaining a password reset in the same way as described above. ---
Update 1161 28 April 2025	USER PHOTOGRAPHS We have reviewed and updated our help page on user photos to improve the quality of photos on ID cards: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/profile-photos Apart from making the info clearer, there is a new requirement for users to not be wearing sunglassess or a hat (religous headwear permitted). Both of these obscure or cast shadows on significant facial features which feedback has identified reduces the effectiveness of the photo. It is always tricky when accepting/rejecting photos, so the overriding concern will always be the user being identifiable, and the technical requirements/limitations of printing on ID cards. Occasionally we make mistakes, so if you believe a photo has been rejected in error please ask your Admin to contact us and we will be happy to accept it or give feedback. Thank you to everyone who tries to upload photos of their cats and dogs. We do enjoy them... before we reject them.
Update 1158 25 April 2025	POSTCODE / ADDRESS LOOKUP A new postcode / address lookup feature in HOPS it now available to all railways for a trial period until the end of June 2025. This is available when adding or editing a user's address (themselves or a manager entering details of another user), emergency contacts, and for public customers making online ticket sales, shares sales, membership sales, and shop sales. This aims to: * speed up the entry of user data * reduce the effort required by customers complete their checkout for purchases * reduce the propensity for errors / missing address components Addresses can still be added 'manually' for occasions where the required address isn't in the Royal Mail list. There is a cost to HOPS in providing this service, so the lookup feature will be an optional add-on for railways for which a small fee will be charged (£5 per month). The railways with which we have developed this feature believe that the time, staff effort, and wasted postage, saved will deliver an overall saving to their railways. The system is currently switched on for all railways for a trial period (without charge) until the end of June. Railways may OPT IN at any time to subscribe to the service to continue after then if they wish. (If no action is taken, the feature will disappear at the end of the trial, and no fee charged). Please do this by raising a support ticket in the Helpdesk, or emailing in. We hope this new feature is useful - Thank you to everyone who has worked with us to develop it.
Update 1160 25 April 2025	CONSTRUCT ROSTERS Has now moved over to the New HOPS system, with improved interface. Tick box mode has been improved so that multiple attributes of the selected turns can be set in one operation. Apart from tick-box mode, the functionality should be the same as before, but please let us know if you find any problems.
Update 1156 21 April 2025	We will soon be trialling a new postcode / address lookup feature in HOPS. This would be available when adding or editing a user's address (themselves or a manager entering details of another user), emergency contacts, and for public customers making online ticket sales, shares sales, membership sales, and shop sales. This aims to: * speed up the entry of user data * reduce the effort required by customers complete their checkout for purchases * reduce the propensity for errors / missing address components Addresses can still be added 'manually' for occasions where the required address isn't in the Royal Mail list. There is a cost to HOPS in providing this service, so the lookup feature will be an optional add-on for railways for which a small fee will be charged (~£5 per month). The railways with which we have developed this feature believe that the time, staff effort, and wasted postage, saved will deliver an overall saving to their railways. The system will initially be switched on for all railways, for a trial period (without charge). At the end of the trial railways may OPT IN to subscribe to the service if they wish. (If no action is taken, the feature will disappear at the end of the trial, and no fee charged). We will advise when the trial period starts and the mechanism for opting to continue using the lookup system after the trial. We hope this new feature is useful - Thank you to everyone who has worked with us to develop it.
Update 1155 9 April 2025	There is a new link on the Roster Construction page that links to a preview of the New HOPS Roster Construction page. HOPS Admins (and those keen enough to read these updates) are welcome to try it out. The original Roster Construct page is still in place so if you find any issues with the new one [which is likely] please let us know and then do whatever it is on the old page. When the reports die down we'll move the new page in to the place of the old.
Update 1154 6 April 2025	As usual for our weekend project at the moment, work is taking place on Rosters which should have no visual or functional change to users, but if you spot anything please let us know. Thank you
Update 1153 4 April 2025	As part of our work to support multi-company operations in Retail Systems (eg a "Trust" and a "Limited"), Cost Centres are now attributed to a 'company'. The company short name is now shown in brackets after the cost centre wherever the cost centre is shown in the system, eg "123. Loco consumables; 456. Coal (LNER)" There is no change to functionality at present.
Update 1152 3 April 2025	Further work has taken place on Rosters today, which should have no visual or functional change to users, but if you spot anything please let us know. We are aware of the issue where sometimes a newly-added turn gets put in a separate horizontal line to all the rest of the turns on that day, and we are fixing it as it arises. Please continue to report instance of it so that we can find all the routes through the system where it can occur! Thank you
Update 1151 3 April 2025	Work has taken place to improve the performance of the server-side PDF creator. Please let us know if you spot any issues. Thank you.
Update 1149 13 March 2025	A new 'Exceptions' option has been added to Calendar Entries. This allows individual days within the entry to be marked as cancelled, or not shown at all. This is in addition to all the existing constraints on days of the week, etc. Thank you to all railways that work together with HOPS to facilitate improvements such as this.
Update 1147 19 February 2025	Work is going on on roster-related pages at present. There should be no visible change but if you spot anything not working as it should please let us know. Thank you
Update 1145 13 February 2025	Some new tools have been added to the Asset Management System to assist railways in maintaining asbestos registers. There is a new option on defects to specify that a defect is 'asbestos-related'. When this is set to 'yes', two additional options appear for recording the type of asbestos and its condition. Each individual instance of asbestos should be entered as a defect in this way. If there is more than one instance/type/condition of asbestos on an asset, the asset will have more than one asbestos-related defect. The presence of asbestos is considered a 'defect' in that it is undesirable. It is not to suggest that there is necessarily a defect in the asbestos or that is is unsafe. If there are containment measures in place, these should be recorded as control measures. All asbestos-related defects (and therefore all instances of asbestos) appear in the Asbestos Register (accessible from the Asset Management System home page), along with the details of the defect and normal risk assessment. If/when the asbestos is removed, the defect can be closed in the normal way and it will be removed from the Asbestos Register. A yellow triangle with an 'A' in it appears next to any defect number related to asbestos, and next to any asset that contains asbestos. -- In order to ensure that the Asbestos Register is exhaustive (i.e. it contains all known asbestos, not just 'the asbestos that has been found'), it is also possible to mark a Maintenance Task as asbestos-related. These asbestos-related maintenance tasks behave in the same way as normal tasks, but earn the yellow A triangle symbol, and appear in the Asbestos Regiser. A good task would be 'Asbestos Survey'. The task can be the conduting of the survey, but not necessarily the removal of the asbestos. Once the survey has been conducted, and the instances of asbestos entered into the Asset Management System as defects, the maintenance task can be marked as completed. This ensures that it is known whether an asset is 'not yet surveyed' or 'has been surveyed, and therefore all its asbestos will be in the Asbestos Register'. Each asbestos-related task will be presented as a tab at the top of the Asbestos Register.
Update 1139 28 January 2025	The email options for Group Bookings have been updated to enable emailing to the Customer, or to the Point of Contact. Previously it emailed the Point of Contact if there was one, and if not the Customer contact. Reminder: The Point of Contact is specific to the GB, and is only necessary to populate if the details are different to the selected customer's details.
Update 1135 28 January 2025	We have been asked by Railway200 to try to gather quantifiable data on the performance and impact of the Railway200 year. The first of these KPIs is in new volunteer engagement. It occurred to us that there are many other activities and promotions that for which it would be useful for railways to gauge success in terms of new volunteer engagement as well, so we have expanded the scope to be more general. Are now some new tick boxes on the New User form, displayed for Working users only (and on the Edit User form if a user is being made up to a Working user), to enable the 'reasons for wishing to work for the railway' and 'how you heard about opportunity to work for the railway'. When ticked, a text box is shown to allow the recording of additional or more specific information. Multiple tick boxes can be applied if a new user was influenced by more than one source. Predicting that you will come up with brilliant ideas for additions to the list, and inevitably also want your own local ones, the system facilitates this, so let us know if you have other specific promotion channels to monitor. Using this information, HOPS will be able to show railways not only the proportion of users that were influenced by each source, but also how many survive as working users year after year. Eg a promotion that produces 6 volunteers that last 10 years might be more valuable than a promotion that produces 100 volunteers that are gone after a month. One of the options is Railway 200, and this should be ticked (in addition to any other appropriate boxes) if it could be said that the existence of Railway 200 contributed positively to this new person becoming a volunteer. We hope this is useful!
Update 1132 20 January 2025	Just want you wanted to all hear after Thursday's update(!)... we are currently implementing a server software update. There should be no visible impact but please let us know if you find anything wrong. Following your positive feedback of the technical information from last Thursday, this is an update to PHP 8.4. This is work that would previously have required downtime, but thanks to our new containerised infrastructure downtime is not necessary! Thank you Danny S.
Update 1129 16 January 2025	Thank you to everyone for your patience during the maintenance time this morning. We're pleased to say that the work was completed and we're now hosting HOPS as a container cluster. There are now redundant copies of HOPS running invisibly in the background, at the same time, waiting to handle all your requests. A huge amount of work has taken place behind the scenes over the past six months to move the HOPS infrastructure over to a container platform and our thanks go to James Walker at Heron Web for undertaking this upgrade with us. Development on HOPS started over 15 years ago and at that time the traditional method for hosting a website was to rent a server with a website host. Over the years we've moved HOPS to bigger and faster servers but in 2024 we started to approach the limits of what's possible with that type of hosting. Concurrently, an excellent uptake in Retail Systems customers last year made it clear we needed to focus on reliability and response time as our next big project. A more modern approach to website hosting is to break the system down into smaller self-contained parts - containers - and run multiple copies. Each part of the system has a file, like a cooking recipe, that describes how to use it as a container. Once running the containers themselves are short-lived and don't store any data - so they can be added and removed from the overall system very quickly and reliably. We've been using this system to host our frontend user interfaces - New HOPS, Time Register, Point of Sale and the retail websites - for over two years so we're confident that it meets the demands of those services. When users visit a HOPS page they are now invisibly distributed between the containers, so that the load is balanced. If one of the containers fails it is automatically removed, and a new container is instantly added to the cluster to replace it. If we expect, or experience, a period of high use (e.g. Steam Gala) we can easily add more containers to the pool to handle the extra load. All containers share the same HOPS database (which is also separately balanced across multiple copies) so there is no possibility the containers will go out-of-sync with each other or have stale data on them. Our software development team can also use these recipe files to run an exact copy of HOPS on their own computers more reliably. Developers can test upgrades more thoroughly and know that next time the containers are recycled HOPS will be running from the same recipe, reducing the risk associated with future updates and changes. This has been a huge migration (as big, if not bigger, than "New HOPS" a few years ago) so we'd appreciate your patience over the next week or two while things settle down in their new home. Please report any problems to your HOPS Admin, and HOPS Admins can open a Support Ticket in the usual place.
Update 1125 12 January 2025	REPORTS & EXPORT - CSV DOWNLOAD This has received some love today to improve useability. Using 'Download as CSV' now downloads a file rather than showing CSVs on the screen. Note that a CSV is used for storing DATA, not prettily-presented INFORMATION. CSVs are really intended for machine-reading, but there are a number of programs that will open them and present the data in a human-readable way, eg Excel. We have found that, in some cases, opening a CSV in Excel shows just the data, but using 'Get Data from Text/CSV' in Excel show the data in a much prettier format, so if the former doesn't give the desired result then the latter might.
Update 1124 11 January 2025	CALENDARS Further work has taken place on calendars: - It is now possible to archive a Custom Calendar (please let us you know if you find any archived ones still being displayed in the system!) - A new calendar view has been added to Customer Calendar view. The old list view is still available, setting in Custom Calendar Settings. - The attribute of whether or not a calendar shows on the Daily Operations page, which caused a lot of confusion versus permissions, has now been removed and is entirely controlled by permissions. - The main Calendar Monthly view has been re-labelled 'Month List' and a new 'Month Cal[endar]' tab has been provided which displays the same information in calendar view. --- As always, if you find any problems with any of the above please let us know. Thank you
Update 1122 4 January 2025	ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM It is now possible to allocate individual assets to individual users. New permission 539 (per asset register) enables a user to assign assets to users. This is a separate permission from 292, which is the permission to edit assets, so that a user can be allocted 539 to allocate/de-allocate assets to users without having permission to edit the rest of the details about an asset. This facility is intended for recording the issue of individually-identifiable assets to users, such as laptops or safe keys. It isn't intended for numerous assets which aren't individually identifiable, eg general site keys, for which an Element is the more appropriate method of recording. When allocating an asset to a user a 'Return/Review' date is set. This is to ensure that loaned assets don't get forgotten about for too long a period so as to make it difficult to recover, or such as the asset becomes life-expired when allocated to a user that no longer needs it when it could be more productively re-deployed. This enables the company to _demonstrate_ it is making good use of the company's/charity's assets. The default is three years, but up to five years can be set. A shorter date can also be set, for users allocated assets for fixed-term projects. If an asset's review/return date becomes overdue, this is shown on the asset register front page. At the point of the review/return date, it is possible to confirm the user still needs the asset and extend the review/return date. A 'Justification' field is also provided, enabling the justification of the allocation of the asset to be recorded. When a user returns an asset, this is recorded in the same way. Whenever an asset is allocated, confirmed or returned, an entry is added in the Work Record, so that the history of allocation to previous users is preseved. In the Asset Register, a new 'Allocations' tab shows all the assets in the register allocated to users, and their review/return date. A new 'Assets' tab in the User Details pages shows assets allocated to the specific user. An additional traffic light has been added to the User Archive screen that shows red if the user has assets allocated to them.
Update 1121 3 January 2025	Commercial Contacts now have attributes of 'supplier' and 'customer'. A contact can be both. Only suppliers are shown in Purchase Orders and Product Suppliers. Only customers are shown in Group Bookings and Retail Sales. Hopefully this makes the drop-down lists a bit shorter!
Update 1120 3 January 2025	A new attribute is available in System > HOPS Config Settings which determines which is the most appropriate word to use an in address: 'county', 'state', 'area'. Eg the majority of railways in England/Wales may prefer 'county', in Scotland 'area' will most likely be preferred, and in Australia 'state' may be best. Each railway can make its own choice. Addresses are being standardised as: Field 1 - street Field 2 - town/city Field 3 - county / area / state (as determined by the new attribute) Field 4 - post code / zip code. Changing the attribute in HOPS Config only changes the LABEL of the field on forms etc, it doesn't change any data in the field itself. We will almost certainly have missed some places in the system where address field are sticking to their old labels. If you find them please let us know. Thank you.
Update 1119 3 January 2025	GROUP BOOKINGS Significant work has been undertaken on the Group Bookings system tonight. The only visible changes should be improvements in the the selection of the customer. The 'saved' customers now refer to the Commercial Contacts in the Finance menu. The customer's address and contact information are shown automatically on selection, and change if the drop-down menu is changed. When editing a group booking, if the address and contact details for the customer (in the commercial contacts record for that customer) differ from those stored on the group booking, yellow highlighting will be applied to encourage the user to update the deatils to the more recent data. It is now only necessary to enter contact details for a specific 'point of contact' if these differ from the stored ones (eg specific teacher for a school visit, where the company details will have listed the accounts contact). We believe we have got to everywhere in the system that uses this info, but please let us know if you find anywhere behaving suspiciously. COMMERCIAL CONTACTS The Commercial Contacts page now highlights where duplicates might exist (two contacts with the same name). A 'Merge' page is provided to assist in merging duplicates in to one. Tabs on the Commercial Contact Details page now show all the POs, Group Bookings and Sales Orders for each Contact.
Update 1115 28 December 2024	ENGINEERING POSSESSIONS Further work has taken place to improve the saving of dates and times on engineering possession parts, but it isn't finished yet. A new 'Duplicate' facility has been provided (link at the top of the item page), recognising that many items are duplicates of previous ones. A new concept of 'Draft' and 'Published' has been introduced. Users with permission 163 (view possessions) can only see published items. Users with permission 165 (add/edit possessions) can see draft possessions. If a published possession is edited, an 'Explanation of Change' field has been provided. A new concept of 'Cancelled' has been added. A possession that has been published can be 'cancelled', whereupon it continues to show to all users but with the heading 'Cancelled'. A draft possession cannot be 'cancelled', but it can now be deleted. A published possession can't be deleted.
Update 1114 28 December 2024	VOLUNTEERING FOR VACANT TURNS This function has been updated and now includes a facility to allocate an alternative turn to the one the user orignally volunteered for. If an alternative is selected the user is advised in their email [note this may take some explanation initially if a user is allocated an alternative turn that appears to be identical]. All the 'busy' and 'competence' red notes on the page have been updated to reflect the many and varied options, but please let us know if you find anything amiss.
Update 1113 28 December 2024	The Engineering Possessions section of HOPS has received some improvements to formatting. EDITING possessions now gives the opportunity to select locations from a list, as well as writing in free text, but there is further work to do on editing, particularly relating to entering of dates. Options to delete 'parts' of a possession, and whole possessions, have been added. A new tab has been added to the Daily Calendar page to show possessions that occur on that date. The overall Possessions page (Tools > Engineering > Possessions) is now sorted by month instead of week. Possessions have been added to the Week Calendar (Calendars > This Week). If you find anything new not working please let us know.
Update 1112 13 December 2024	Significant work has taken place in the Purchase Orders system. There should only be minor visible changes, but if you notice anything that looks incorrect please let us know. A noteworthy change to the PO pages is that they will now highlight if the contact details of the supplier have changed since the PO was created and give the opportunity to update the details on the PO to the most recent details or leave the original details.
Update 1108 4 December 2024	There will be some brief periods of downtime on Wednesday 25 December 2024 for back-up restoration drills. The periods of downtime will be brief ( < 1 minute). If HOPS is working when you visit it it is safe to use. There will periods of downtime between 7.30am and 9.30am GMT on Thursday 9 January 2025. The period of downtime is likely to be at least 45 minutes. This is to facilitate server upgrade work which will improve resilience and reduce the requirement for downtime in the future. A two-hour range is being advertised to ensure there is sufficient time to roll-back to the old server if required. If HOPS is working when you visit it it is safe to use. This downtime is being held-over from December to avoid disturbance or risk to Christmas operations at all railways. The two-hour period on 9 January starts at 7.30am GMT, that's: 15:30-17:30 AWST in West Australia 17:00-19:00 ACST in Northern Territory 18:00-20:00 ACDT in South Australia 17:30-19:30 AEST in Queensland 18:30-20:30 AEDT in New South Wales / Victoria / Tazmania 09:30-11:30 in Italy 09:30-11:30 in South Africa If you have any queries please contact your HOPS Admin, or HOPS Admins please contact HOPS HQ via support ticket.
Update 1107 4 December 2024	Sticky column headings on the View Roster page are back again, thanks to the page now being a New HOPS page. There may be different browsers on which the behaviour will be better or worse so please bear with us as we try to cope with them all....!
Update 1106 1 December 2024	A new 'Internal Remarks' facility has been added to turns on rosters. This shows only on Construct Rosters and is intended for the roster clerk to make notes to themselves, eg where a person has been rostered for a specific reason such as to avoid lapsing or following a specific request. The internal remarks can be edited in 'Quick Assign' or 'Edit Turn Details'.
Update 1104 27 November 2024	There will be a brief period of downtime on Friday 29 November, between 0730 and 0800 GMT. This is to enable server upgrade work. That's.... 15:30 AWST in West Australia 18:00 ACDT in South Australia 18:30 AEDT in New South Wales / Victoria / Tasmania Part of this work includes changes to reduce or eliminate the need for downtime in the future, which has become all the more important now that HOPS deals with sales transactions. Time Register devices will be unaffected and will store up transactions until HOPS comes back online. POS devices will display a prompt inviting the operator to 'work offline', after which they will work normally and upload transactions when HOPS comes back online. Card payments are unaffected. For confidence, there will be a brief test period after the site is taken offline to prove the POS devices before work starts, during which time the work can be aborted if necessary. Public ticket sales websites will be offline. We apologise for any inconvenience. If you have any queries please contact your HOPS Admin, or HOPS Admins contact HOPS HQ.
Update 1102 17 November 2024	As part of development of the Asset Management system, we invite railways to send in details of specific measurements they record when conducting maintenance tasks on S&T assets, eg, track circuits and FPLs. This is with a view to establishing common and diverse practices among railways. If you are happy to send in details of your S&T maintenance task measurement requirements please send to danny.scroggins@hops.org.uk (The items sent in will not be shared with other railways.) Thank you
Update 1101 16 November 2024	Details of Timesheets have been added to the 'Time' tab on the user details page. Timesheet info is shown in addition to the existing information about Time Register records. The date range filtering facility has also been improved and is available for both Time Register and Timesheet lists.
Update 1100 15 November 2024	The menu option for Custom Calendars has now been integrated in to the 'Today', 'This Week', 'This Month' menu options. There's no difference to functionality at this stage. This is part of our work to enable more than one timetable/modifier to be used on the same day.
Update 1099 13 November 2024	Additional Columns have been added to the Employee Leave Allowance table to show the number of AL days taken and remaining in the current year.
Update 1097 13 November 2024	The employee annual leave response form has been updated to show the working pattern of other staff during the time the person has requested off. This will help to manage leave where there are expectations that only N people will be on leave at the same time.
Update 1093 6 November 2024	It's time for the annual reminder of the URL for users to confirm their details are up to date: https://www.hops.org.uk/user/confirm This is a useful process in the renewal of ID cards, and also useful for railways that don't use the ID card system to be in a strong position to demonstrate they have taken reasonable steps to make sure information needed in an emergency, especially medical and emergency contact, is up to date.
Update 1089 30 October 2024	The order of the role columns on rosters has been standardised. Previously it was: 1st - Order (specified in the Roles editing page) 2nd - the order in which the roles were added to HOPS Now it is: 1st - Order (specified in the Roles editing page) 2nd - Alphabetical. The order can always be set by the railway (via the role editing page), but if no order is set or if two roles have the same sort order, the next sort is now alphabetical rather than just 'the order they were entered in to HOPS'.
Update 1084 20 October 2024	There will be some periods of downtime on Tuesday 22 October, between 7.30 and 8.30am BST. This is to enable server upgrade work. That's.... 15:30-16:30 AWST in West Australia 17:00-18:00 ACST in North Australia 18:00-19:00 ACDT in South Australia 17:30-18:30 AEST in Queensland 18:30-19:30 AEDT in New South Wales / Victoria / Tazmania 09:30-10:30 in Italy 09:30-10:30 in South Africa Part of this work includes changes to reduce or eliminate the need for downtime in the future, which has become all the more important now that HOPS deals with sales transactions. Time Register devices will be unaffected and will store up transactions until HOPS comes back online. POS devices will display a prompt inviting the operator to 'work offline', after which they will work normally and upload transactions when HOPS comes back online. Card payments are unaffected. For confidence, there will be a brief test period after the site is taken offline to prove the POS devices before work starts, during which time the work can be aborted if necessary. Public ticket sales websites will be offline. We apologise for any inconvenience. If you have any queries please contact your HOPS Admin, or HOPS Admins contact HOPS HQ. Thank you.
Update 1083 7 October 2024	'Next Turn' date has been added to the Competence Lapsing and Cometence Expiring pages.
Update 1082 7 October 2024	We have spent some time re-working the system for merging accounts, and cleared the backlog of previously un-mergeable ones. If you have a HOPS account at more than one heritage railway, you can merge them together to avoid the need to hold two sets of login credentials. Here is a video that explains how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfqhvAmIJ2I
Update 1079 1 October 2024	It is now possible for an Asset Manager to log a task that they are responsible for via the Asset Managers page. This will help where an asset manager is responsble for assets across a range of registers.
Update 1074 5 September 2024	Update reporting on ticket system developments commenced. These can be found in a new tab in System > System Updates.
Update 1072 4 September 2024	A sort order field has been added to Stock Diagrams.
Update 1068 4 September 2024	Adjustments have taken place in connection with gradual conversion of Rosters to New HOPS format - User Roster and My Roster are in the new format. Improvements have been made to ensure these pages reflect Railway Time (regardless of the physical location of the viewer). At the same time, improvements were made to the Next Operating Days widget on the home page to ensure that respects Railway Time correctly.
Update 1067 24 August 2024	The diagrams, locos and staff working each train is now shown on train list tab of the daily page, with links to the appropriate roster and the user details page (for obtaining phone numbers etc) Eg https://www.hops.org.uk/operations_date.php?d=2024-08-22&t=t
Update 1066 5 August 2024	The Competence Element Requirements section of the Role Editing page has been overhauled to make it easier to search and find the desired element, especially where the number of elements on the railway is very large.
Update 1065 5 August 2024	The 'Save as Draft', 'Publish' etc buttons at the top of Members' News have been separated out to make their operation clearer.
Update 1064 5 August 2024	A warning has been added in the 'Add New User' page if a user with the same firstname and surname already exists. This will hopefully reduce the volume of duplicated users being added.
Update 1063 30 July 2024	An 'Unattribute' button has been added to Spot Reports to enable attribution errors to be undone.
Update 1062 30 July 2024	A tooltip has been provided on the Accommodation Bookings chart to enable the full details of very short bookings to be seen at-a-glance.
Update 1061 30 July 2024	Various updates to My Roster and User Roster have taken place. Please let us know if you find any issues.
Update 1060 6 May 2024	There will be two HOPS Annual General Forums for HOPS Admins and senior managers at Advanced HOPS Subscribers this year. Event 1 and Event 2 are identical. There are two events to offer maximum flexibility to 9-5 staff and volunteer staff with day jobs, UK staff and Australian staff. Staff from either country may attend either event. The meeting will be via MS Teams. There will be: - a presentation about the developments of HOPS in the last year - plans for the coming year and future developments - changes in the heritage railway landscape - HOPS staffing arrangements - fees and costs - long-term plans - an opportunity for questions and comments. This is (one of) your opportunities to steer the future development of the program. Attendees need to please register to gain access to the meeting. Please email alan.johnson@hops.org.uk to register. More than one attendee per organisation is permitted.... but please not hundreds! * EVENT 1 The first is on Tuesday 11 June 2023 at 9.30am (British Summer Time), and is timed for the convenience of UK employed staff for whom it is during work time, and volunteer Australian staff for whom it is in the evening. This meeting is at 9.30am UK time. The UK will be on British Summer Time at the date of the meeting. 0900 BST is: 1100 SAST in South Africa 1100 CEST in Italy 1830 ACST in South Australia 1900 AEST in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales Attendees from the UK or Australia are welcome to attend. * EVENT 2 The second AGF event is on Thursday 20 June 2023 at 7pm, is timed for the convenience of volunteer staff in the UK who have day job during the day. Event 2 is at 7pm (UK time). The UK will be on British Summer Time at the date of the meeting. 1900 BST is: 2100 SAST in South Africa 2100 CEST in Italy 0330 (21/6/24) ACST in South Australia 0400 (21/6/24) AEST in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales Event 1 and 2 are identical, and staff from any country may attend either event, but Australian staff may prefer to attend Event 1 which is at a more convenient Australian time.