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Time Date	System Updates
Update 1375 23 January 2026	MFA Becoming Mandatory for HOPS Admins HOPS encourages users to make user of multi-factor authentication to keep their accounts, and their railway's data, secure: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/mfa MFA is recommended for all users who have access to details about other users, so effectively everyone down as far as heads of departments and roster clerks. MFA will become mandatory for HOPS Admins from 1 March 2026 - that's users with permissions 015 (administer permissions) and 080 (admin-login as other users). If you have these permissions, you can be ready in good time by setting up MFA on your account in advance of the deadline by visiting the 'person' avatar in the top right hand corner of HOPS and selecting My HOPS Account and then scrolling down to 'Multi-Factor Authentication' and following the prompts. Any HOPS user can set up MFA on their account if they wish to. If you have any questions please contact your HOPS Admin, or open a support ticket if you are a HOPS Admin.
Update 1374 23 January 2026	Ticket system - Fare Picker Update TICKET SYSTEM - Fare picker changes The fare picker will soon be updated in retail systems. Rather than selecting the ticket types required, and then seeing the prices, users will be presented with all the options and +/- buttons for each. A picture is available here: https://www.hops.org.uk/library/general-images This serves several purposes: * It removes a selection box (an extra two clicks) from the purchasing flow, as the user will no longer need to select the type of fare they require - they will all be offered. * It becomes easier for the user to compare fares * It enables simple display of 'normal' vs 'Donation' fares for Gift Aid purposes. * It lays the foundation for greater interlocking between fare types and other requirements - eg the ability to display members' fares, but for them only to be selected when the user validates themselves as a member. This has the effect of promoting the membership fares and therefore the membership product. Only the available ticket types are shown for each fare scheme. This removes the issue of users not finding a ticket because not all fare types are available on all dates, especially pronounced when searching for multi-day tickets. At present, a user who selects 'two-day ticket' for a weekend event will be told 'no tickets available' for the Sunday, whereas now they will be clearly offered the one-day and the two-day ticket on Saturday, but only the one-day ticket on the Sunday. A new description field will be provided, marked here in red, for each fare scheme to give clear guidance to the user.
Update 1371 5 January 2026	Events & Sessions - Settings The settings for Events and Sessions have been moved out of Ticket System Settings, and into the normal Ticket System > Bookings tab where the bookings data has always been shown. This is in response to feedback that it was annoying for users to have two places to look for event information - bookings for sales information and settings for settings - there is now only one list and it displays/links to both booking info and settings/editing. All the same functionality exists, it is just now all on one page. The old settings page is still in place with a forwarding message for a short time, to catch anyone who goes there looking for the settings. We hope that, although the act of change is always annoying, that once the location of the info in its new places becomes natural it will present a better-arranged system. We have deliberately done this work in January to avoid busier times of the year. There is some further work coming up in this same area which we will also do in the winter before everything hots up again. If you find any issues please let us know. Thank you.
Update 1368 5 January 2026	Retail Systems - Year-on-year Figures | Upcoming Retail Work YEAR-ON-YEAR FIGURES To aid month-month and year-year comparison, a Monthly Totals tab has been added to Retail Systems. https://www.hops.org.uk/retail_systems.php?t=126 PS. Year-on-year revenue for individual events can be found in Ticket System > Bookings > Event Bookings > Event Revenue. https://www.hops.org.uk/ticket_sales.php?t=12 -- OVERVIEWS The 'Overviews' for Retail, Tickets and Shop have been re-written to hopefully make them more resource-efficient for 2026. All Retail: https://www.hops.org.uk/retail_systems.php Shop: https://www.hops.org.uk/shop_system.php Tickets: https://www.hops.org.uk/ticket_sales.php Please let us know how you find them, and at what point in the year they start to get overwhelmed! -- UPCOMING WORK To give an idea of developments coming up: * Some heavy work will take place over the next several week to facilitate management of gift aid on ticket purchases, including 'normal' and 'donation' prices, issuing and redeeming 'donor benefits' (eg money off in the cafe), management of 'come back for a year', and integration with HMRC API. * Discounts on orders (separate from discounts on products, eg "£5 off your order" rather than "£5 off a specific item".) * Multiple discount codes per discount. * Integration with Square card payment system. * Developments to product shop, eg search, related products, and other sales-lead features. Thank you to everyone for your engagement in the development of the retail system in 2025 - We look forward to working with you all in 2026!
Update 1364 31 December 2025	Ticket Email QR Scanning Updates The process around scanning QR codes to confirm validity has been overhauled. Note this only applies to scanning QR codes on emails by ticket inspectors, not scanning on the POS in order to recall an order / print tickets, which is unchanged. Part of the objective here is to increase ticket security, as requested by several clients, while maintaining the ability to process queues quickly. PERMISSIONS Ticket QR codes can now only be scanned by logged-in users. Previously anyone could scan a code. While there was no personal information shown, limiting the scan to logged-in users both reduces the ability for 'everyone' to see what the resultant page looks like, and also means all scans are 'official' scans, rather than the customer scanning it speculatively. LAYOUT The layout has been changed to group together tickets for the same event. Eg instead of showing: Sunday Lunch - Adult - 12:30 - 15:00 - Thursday 1 January 2026 - DATE OK Sunday Lunch - Child x2 - 12:30 - 15:00 - Thursday 1 January 2026 - DATE OK Sunday Lunch - Senior - 12:30 - 15:00 - Thursday 1 January 2026 - DATE OK Sunday Lunch - Dog - 12:30 - 15:00 - Thursday 1 January 2026 - DATE OK It now shows: Sunday Lunch - 12:30 - 15:00 - Thursday 1 January 2026 - DATE OK - Adult - Child x2 - Senior - Dog We hope this is more intuitive. Both the quantity of tickets and the number of seats is shown. For 'travel' it is not as easy to group tickets together (as there are so many fine details), but effort has been made to make it as quickly-readable as possible. ITEMS SHOWN Only event tickets and travels tickets are now shown. Seat reservations are not shown as lines in their own right - the seat reservation information is shown in the row for the ticket it applies to. Other items such as vouchers and stock products are not shown. TICKET DELIVERY The page also now highlights if the ticket is not an e-ticket. It is envisaged that the QR scanning method of checking tickets is only used for e-tickets. It works for all methods of ticket fulfilment, but non e-tickets are highlighted. TICKET FRAUD - PREVIOUS SCANS All previous scans are now shown. If the order or items have ANY previous scans [by logged-in users*] an orange banner will be shown at the top of the page. The ticket inspector can then examine the tables of previous scans to determine the situation. This does require some interpretation, eg as a user may have purchased tickets for two events in the same order: The order will have been scanned when they attended the first event, then on attending the second event the ticket inspector will see 'Already Scanned', but examination of the detail will reveal that this is a legitimate case. * - Although it is now only possible for a logged-in user to scan tickets, many previous scans were conducted by non-logged-in users. Only scans by logged-in staff are considered here. ORDER SCANS VS ITEM SCANS Note that it is possible to scan an ORDER confirmation email, or an ITEM details email ("Additional" email). 'Additional' emails can be configured in the ticket system settings for items that require a great deal of additional information, eg a Driver Experience might have many paragraphs of 'things to bring' and 'what to expect' etc. The scan page has tables for scans on the ORDER and scans on each ITEM, to give the maximum detail to the inspector if they are trying to resolve the circumstances and determine whether a customer is legitimate. It isn't possible to predict whether the customer will present their ORDER qr code or their ITEM qr code, so both must be considered. INTERPRETATION It is up to individual clients to determine a policy on interpretation of the scanning data. Eg if you know that you only ever scan customers once at your one-and-only entry gate to an event then you can be pretty sure that if someone has already been scanned then they are trying to get two people in on the same email. Whereas if you have several entry points, or are scanning tickets several times during the day then it might be entirely reasonable that a person is scanned more than once, so the examiner will interpret the data shown to determine whether the pattern is reasonable. TICKET FRAUD - FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS In addition to the risk of two visitors trying to gain access on the strength of the same email, an additional risk has been identified: It would be easy for a user to save a copy of the HOPS 'ticket valid' page onto their own site, and present the ticket inspector with a QR code to that site instead of the real QR code which leads to HOPS. To mitigate this, two additional items have been added to the page: - The name of the logged-in ticket inspector is shown at the top of the scanning page. A ticket inspector should expect to see their own name there every time. A visitor trying to defraud the company would need to know the name of the inspector in order to fake this. - A 'Code Word' has been added. This can be set in Ticket System Settings in HOPS. If set, it is shown after the name of the ticket inspector of the scanning page. A ticket inspector should expect to see same code word every time. Eg the code word of today could be 'CHOCOLATE', and then this would show on every scan. A visitor trying to defraud the company would need to find out the code word in order to fake this. The code word can be set/changed whenever required. This system is used by some 'main line' bus and tram operators. While neither of these are 100% fool-proof, they both introduce a further level of difficulty for a person attempting to illegitimately use a QR code. Like all systems, it can almost never be 100%, it just needs to be more hassle than it's worth for a bad actor. FUTURE It is our plan to further develop this facility to include a camera view on the page, to avoid the need to return to the native camera app after each customer. It is also intended to allow the user to state their role, so that further interpretation of the data can be made. Eg a Guard could state their role as '1030 Padd-Oxford' or '1D22' (to use a main line example) when they are operating that train, and then '1300 Oxford-Padd' on the way back. This would enable easy distinction between a passenger being scanned on their outward and return journey. When being scanned on the way back, the system would show 'Already Scanned', but the guard would see the first scan was on the 1030 Padd-Oxford, so the passenger is obviously now on their return journey. Whereas if they look at the first scan and find it's on the 0700 Oxford-Padd then it is possible the passenger is trying to make a second journey on the same ticket. Another example could be events where the visitor is allowed access to several attractions - eg 'Your day ticket includes a one brake van ride, one trip on the miniature railway, and one session on the ice rink'. If this were to be strictly access controlled, the ticket inspectors at each location could state their role as 'BV', 'Mini Railway', and 'Ice Rink' - it would then be possible to control the 'Already Scanned' alert to 'Already Scanned at this part of the event'. We will be interested to hear feedback from users on if/how useful this would be.
Update 1362 15 December 2025	Order Numbers Hello, Order numbers have now started using M as a prefix instead of L, and the numbers are back down to six digits. We will now attempt to keep the number component six digits long and increment the letter, which makes the order numbers easier to transmit and validate verbally, as they will always* be A nnn nnn. (* Apart from the L numbers that have unfortunately gone over 1000000 before we managed to complete this work, but they will soon vanish into history). There is no significance to the L or M or other prefix letter. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1359 5 December 2025	ID Cards Overhaul - Action Required ACTION REQUIRED by railways that use the ID Card System. Please see below. This update is applicable to UK heritage railways only. Arrangements for railways in other countries will follow. --- The HOPS ID Cards system is now back online following extensive overhaul. To enable physical cards that last for several years, while maintaining an annual renewal in HOPS, the concept of 'Cards' has been split into two concepts: 'Authority to Work' and 'ID Cards'. The Card just identifies the user, the only distinction between a 1-year card and a 3-year card is the material and the cost. The Authority to Work means the person is a legitimate, authorised worker, and this is the thing that is renewed every year. The exact same mechanism as previously used for ID Cards is still used for Authority to Work (eg Department Confirmation, Generating and Approving, Department Confirmation, Personal Details Check, etc). Apart from making the terminology clear and providing additional cues on the pages, this process is unchanged. If you continue to follow your old process, but replace 'card' with 'AtW' in your mind, everything will work fine. AtW still update the appropriate competence element as cards did previously. The element is updated when the AtW is APPROVED. Every user has a setting for whether they will receive a 1-year card or a 3-year ID Card. This can't be changed by users themselves. It can be changed at the point of generation of the AtW. The three generation methods are still available - individual, user list, and renewal. As previously, 'renewal' is just another method of generating an AtW with some convenient (optional) other information shown. It doesn't make a difference to the system which method is used. A tick box has been added to the Generation page for 'automatic approval' to save this job having to be done separately, if desired. It is only shown when the user has permission to do approving. If ticked, the AtWs will be generated and approved in one go. You can still give users a choice of whether they would like to opt-in to having a Raildays card instead of a physical one. The user's preference, and their current setting for which type of physical card they will/would get is shown on the AtW generation pages to aid visibility. [We have not yet facilitated making the default into a Raildays card and requiring the user to opt for a physical card, we do still intend to do this.] The physical ID Cards are produced automatically, following the creation of an AtW, when required. There is no action required from the railway to do this. ID Cards are only produced if the AtW lasts longer than the user's current card: Ie, for a three-year card a new card will be sent in year 1 and 4, but not year 2 or 3. A card is only sent if the AtW is renewed, so there is no danger of wasted cards being sent for users who are no longer working. If one-year cards are used then a new card is sent every year (if the AtW is renewed). All 3-year cards expire at the end of March. The rollover for years is 1 October, so all 3-year cards are valid for a period between 2.5 and 3.5 years. Eg a 3-year card issued on 30 September 2005 will last until 31 March 2008; a 3-year card issued on 1 October 2005 will last until 31 March 2009. Three year cards are made of (recycled, recyclable) plastic. One-year cards are made from the existing laminated card stationery. For the first few days we will be manually checking the card printing output of the system to make sure it is all working correctly. If you find any issues please let us know, but please don't panic that the printing or cost will spiral in the case of a system error. We will resolve any that arise before printing and costs are incurred. Cards displayed in Raildays now keep the same number each year. So users with a card displayed in Raildays, receiving a new AtW for the new year, will not need to take any action in the Raildays app or the Time Register app. The card expiry will update automatically in Raildays, and TR will carry on without any changes. -- As previously advised, the cost of cards is changed to: * Cards displayed in Raildays - 21p (annual) * 1-year cards posted directly to users - 50p per card, 101p process and postage. Total 1.51. (Previously incorrectly advertised as 50+91=1.51. The postage was incorrect, the total was correct.) * 1-year cards posted in batches to the railway - 50p per card. Postage will be charged at cost. * 3-year cards posted directly to users - 2.07 per card, 91p process and postage. Total 2.98. (This is 20p less than the CURRENT cost of 3 x 1-year cards, and 1.55 less than the new cost of 3 x 1-year cards). * 3-year cards posted in batches to the railway - 2.07 per card and postage is charged at cost. For clarity, there is no cost attached to an AtW, or to Temporary Cards. -- Temporary ID cards is still offline. We did not intend for this to be affected by this work, but it was. We hope to have this available again over this weekend, but we were keen to get the main system back in place asap. -- ACTION REQUIRED - In order to make use of the new system, please could admins of UK heritage railways that issue HOPS ID Cards please email in to admin@hops.org.uk and state that you accept the new card costs as stated in this update of 5 December 2025? AtWs can be generated before this, but cannot be Approved until the costs are accepted (as this is the stage at which the physical card creation is started). -- I'm sorry this downtime has taken longer than planned, but I hope the new system achieves the cost savings that some railways desire, while continuing to provide the paper stationery that other railways desire. If anyone has any questions or queries please let us know. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1356 28 November 2025	System Work Today - ID Cards and Time Register There will be some bumpiness today as the new ID Cards system is brought in to use. Time Register devices may delay in uploading to HOPS, but records won't be lost as TR devices will store up transactions, in the same way as they would in the case of internet connection failure, and then upload when they can. ID Card checking may be unavailable for periods of time. It is expected that the new ID Card interface will be available by early next week. We will be closely monitoring for errors and fixing any that arise. It isn't necessary to report errors related to ID Cards or Time Register unless they persist after today. If it is causing you an urgent problem then please contact HOPS HQ for assistance.
Update 1353 25 November 2025	Archiving users with current memberships A new tick box has been provided in the User Archive checklist, membership section. If the user has a current membership, and if they are the only user on that membership, a tickbox is provided to update the membership end date to today. This is intended for situations where a member is being archived because they have passed away, or resigned their membership (and don't have any other remaining connection to you, eg shares). Where a user is part of a joint membership then the option is not given as the resolution is more complex and dependent on the organisation's policy for what happens in this situation, whether the user is the 'main' user or not, etc. The membership can be edited manually via the normal editing methods. General info: In the case of an archived user WITH a current membership, they do show in the 'Current' members tab, as they do have a current membership, but they don't show in the 'Expiring', 'Expired' or 'Ex-members' tabs. So you still see the membership while the membership contract is still in-date, but don't have to see it once it has ended. So this will be the case if the tick box is not ticked.
Update 1350 25 November 2025	ID Cards - System Changeover The changeover to the new ID cards system has now begun. It won't be possible to generate or approve ID cards for the next few days. It IS still possible to conduct Department Confirmation, so there is no need to hold up the renewal process for this, and this will all still be recognised when the system comes back again. For the short time the system is unavailable, for any new staff or existing staff needing replacements for lost cards, etc, the Temporary ID Card system can still be used. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1347 24 November 2025	Presentation of Additional Questions in orders Retail Orders with Additional Questions - The presentation of these in HOPS has been improved, and answers are now grouped more intuitively with questions asked per item, per person and per order. There are a great many permutations though, so if you find an order where it doesn't look right please let us know. (This only relates to presentation within HOPS, not customer-facing, but the customer-facing presentation of the questions will be similarly sorted provided no issues are uncovered.) Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1344 24 November 2025	Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is now available to all users in HOPS Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is now available to all users in HOPS. MFA provides an extra layer of security on your HOPS account by requiring users to present multiple credentials, or factors, when logging in. Practically, this will be something users know (their password) and something they have (e.g. an authenticator app running on a smartphone). Requiring multiple factors makes it much harder for another person to login to a HOPS account maliciously, even if they steal a password. This helps to keep everyone's personal data secure. Thank you our test guinea pigs for providing useful feedback on this facility. For a user to enable MFA, they click the avatar in the top right corner of HOPS and select 'My HOPS Account'. Then scroll down the page to Multi-Factor Authentication, and follow the prompts to set it up. (Note passkeys is not yet available.) For more details, a help page about MFA, with a link to TOTP, is available here: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/mfa (The passkeys page is not yet published so that link does not go anywhere for the moment.) -- Permission 545 is now available if you wish to enforce MFA to any users. It is recommended that this is assigned via groups (as with all permissions), ie make it a requirement 'that the Loco Manager uses MFA', rather than 'that Bob uses MFA'. The permission does not do anything else or allow access to anything, it is just a means of enforcing MFA for certain groups/users via an existing and well-known mechanism. HOPS will enforce MFA on users with permissions 015 (Administer Permissions) and 080 (Admin-login) in the future, so starting to encourage users with those permissions into MFA now is advised to avoid a sudden change when it becomes enforced. Note - as with all permissions changes, permissions are cached for up to 15 minutes. To see an instant change the user will need to either F5 to refresh, or visit the avatar in the top right corner and select 'Refresh Session'. This isn't an absolute requirement, if not done then the requirement for MFA just won't come in to effect for 15 mins. -- FAQs from users: * Do I HAVE to use MFA? At the moment, no. In the not-too-distant future this will change and some users will be required to enrol in MFA. This will be users with high levels of access to personal data in HOPS. Individual railways may also extend to certain other roles or individuals. Your railway will tell you if this is the case. Any user can enrol if they wish to. * What if I don't have a smart phone? Most browsers are able to perform the role of an authenticator, so users without a smart phone can use this on whatever device they do use to browse HOPS. It is recognised that, given the nature of our railway work, there will be a number of senior users who are excellent and their railway skill, but not so comfortable with computer technology, which is why we are introducing this as softly as we can. Unfortunately we can't ignore the accepted industry practice requirement for MFA, so HOPS Admins and local IT Support will be able to help users in using authenticator apps or browser extensions. * I work for more than one railway. Can I use MFA for one and not others? MFA works at an account level (as once you are logged in you can jump between railways), so MFA will apply to your one and only set of user credentials. If you have not joined your accounts then HOPS does not know that you are the same person on two railways, so you could have MFA on one but not the other. Joining accounts is recommended, and means you only need one set of login credentials: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/joining-user-accounts * I sometimes log in on my phone and sometimes on my computer. MFA applies to the HOPS account, so will be required no matter which method is used to log in. This ensures that the protection applies to the whole access to your account, without leaving the door open to abuse on certain devices. If you have any other questions about MFA please speak to your HOPS Admin. --- Thank you to everyone who has taken part in the various trials of MFA and fed back their findings. If anyone has any queries please let us know via a support ticket. If anyone has any queries please let us know via a support ticket.
Update 1341 22 November 2025	Terminology Update To aid clarity, 'Takings' has be re-named 'Order Payments', and 'Accounting' has been re-named 'Card Payouts'. Order Payments (formerly Takings) are payments made by customers, attributable to an order (equivalent to an invoice). This includes payments by all methods. Card Payouts (formerly Accounting) is money from the card processor (currently Stripe) to you. This only includes card payments. There is no change to the behaviour of the pages.
Update 1338 19 November 2025	Order Numbers Hello, Order numbers are currently an 'L' followed by up to six-digits. We are approaching 999,999 and the prospect of a seventh digit breaks some of the psychological niceties of manually entering or verbally communicating six-digit numbers. The prefix 'L' was originally intended to have a meaning, but it wasn't found necessary, so we will shortly bring the initial letter into the fold and start changing that in order to keep the number component six-digits long. For ease of validation when communicating order numbers we will try to keep it to a letter and exactly six digits, ie Annnnnn, but we may stray about L1,000,000 before we manage to do the necessary work. Therefore please be prepared for the letter to not always be L. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1336 18 November 2025	SMS Service Unavailable Sending text messages is currently unavailable in HOPS due to a problem at our SMS provider. This will affect: - Confirming user telephone numbers - Sending messages to customers of retail bookings The issue is due to a global outage of Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure platform, and is impacting many websites. All other HOPS functions are unaffected.
Update 1335 16 November 2025	Auto-Allocation of Seats HOPS Retail Systems - Tickets and Event sales can manage seat reservations, including a new 'automatic allocation of seats' facility. This can allocate seats in a priority order (eg fill up the train from the front, or every other table first, etc), and is clever enough to minimise wastage (eg by booking a group of two on a table of four). It can also follow rules such as 'no sharing of tables/compartments' if required, or allow sharing of tables/compartments if that is the railway's policy. Judicious application of the rules and priority order can also achieve making sure maximum flexibility remains available, eg where different size tables or compartments are adjacent to each other, to use those last: eg where there are tables of 2 and 4, to not obstruct space for a booking of 6 until there is no other option. Seats can still be moved around by the railway if a different arrangement is required. (To support this, additional options have been added to the settings for 'show customer seat numbers at checkout' and 'show customer seat numbers on confirmation email'. Feedback has suggested setting these to 'no' until confidence is gained in the behaviour of the auto-allocation tool.) We are quite pleased with how it all works. If any Ticket System user would like to try it out please let us know!
Update 1332 8 November 2025	ID Cards in 2026 ID CARDS - UK RAILWAYS (Information for railways outside the UK will follow.) Hello, We are now ready to share options for ID cards for UK railways for next year. I'm sorry this is quite late in the year - we have spent so much of the year with other developments in various parts of HOPS that we have only got on to this now. Apologies for the long email, but I hope this answers all questions. Please note there is ACTION REQUIRED, to let us know your views on options 1, 2 and 3. If you don't let us know that you are likely to use one or more of the options then we may not continue to develop/maintain that option! PROBLEM: The cost of producing ID Cards, and particularly the cost of posting them, has risen considerably, such that the system has run at a loss for the last year. We cannot continue to operate the current system at the current costs. It was our intention to introduce changes to the system for 2025, but we did not achieve that, but our consultation leading up to that in 2024 can be viewed here. OPTIONS FOR RAILWAYS FOR 2026: * OPTION 1. Continue using the current, annual stationery, with increased cost. The cost of cards will increase from the current 45p a card to 50p a card. The cost of postage (including envelopes, printing, etc) where cards are sent directly to users will increase from 61p to 91p. The total cost of a card and delivery will therefore rise from the current 1.06 to 1.51. For context, the price of a card has never been changed (45p) since the system was introduced in 2018, seven years ago. The price of postage was 55p in 2018, rising to 61p in 2023. This has massively lagged behind the rising cost of postage, even with the bulk discounts that HOPS obtains. Where cards are sent in batches to railways, we can no longer afford to dispatch those batches for free. As they all are different weights and volumes it isn't possible to set a price for those, but they will be charged at the appropriate postage rate. * OPTION 2. Longer Lasting Cards, with LOWER average cost! As previously discussed (albeit nearly two years ago), an option for a longer-last card, which has been requested by several railways in the past, will be available. Initially the longer-lasting cards will last for three years, but it is envisaged that the next round of cards after that would be valid for ten years. The cards are made from a recycled plastic material that will last for the lifespan of the card. The price for a three-year card will be 2.98 (posted to the user). This is 20p LOWER than the cost of three one-year cards in the current pricing regime. Price is 2.07 per card each when batched to the railway (+ postage). While the CARD would be valid for that long, the user's actual expiry date would be kept in HOPS AND STILL RENEWED EACH YEAR following the same process as at present, eg Department Confirmation and the user confirming their details are up to date (both optional). The manager would progress to issue the user with another year, but nothing would be sent through the post - their expiry date would simply be updated in HOPS. Where cards are used to obtain discounts (eg shops, cafes, and reciprocal railways), the card can be scanned (same as current) to determine its validity. It would a matter for each individual railways to determine how strict they want to be when accepting ID Cards for discounts, and whether they accept cards at face value or scan to confirm. (Note this is no different to, at present, where a user could leave volunteering and have their card cancelled part-way through the year. It just that the tail period of apparent validity would be longer.) ID cards can be scanned using any QR code reader, it doesn't require a specific app. iPhones, for example, can scan QR codes with just their normal camera. For railways that use HOPS POS, we will provide an integrated mechanism for scanning and verifying HOPS cards in POS asap. It is envisaged that if the initial three-year cards work ok then the next round could be ten-year cards (subject to consultation), which would further reduce costs. * OPTION 3. Raildays App The option to display cards in the Raildays app is unchanged and will still be available. The annual price of this will increase from 19p to 21p to reflect the rising cost of maintaining the system. Individual users can choose whether they would like a physical card or a Raildays card. At present the default is Physical and users opt-in to a Raildays card. A new option will be provided for railways to set the default to either Physical or Raildays and users opt-over to the other option. --- To facilitate option 2, and make a distinction between the expiry date of the physical card and the expiry date of the user's validity to work on the railway, some of the terminology in HOPS will be changed. The user's validity to work on the railway will be named 'Authority to Work', and this is what will be renewed each year. The physical card, which might have an expiry date of much later, will be named a 'HOPS Card'. This change of nomenclature will be apparent regardless of which of the above methods is used by each railway/user. The actual processes and functionality of issuing or renewing a card will be unchanged. Railways will be able to decide on a per-person basis which type of card to issue. This was highlighted by a few railways last year that, to avoid the potentially wasted cost of a three-year card to every new volunteer, some of whom are never seen again after their first turn, railways may wish to issue an old-style card for the first year, and then a three-year one at renewal once a volunteer has shown that they are likely to stay for three years to make the card issue worthwhile. Another example raised was seasonal staff, whose contract will end in three months so will definitely be leaving. There will be an option at the Generate stage to pick which type of card to issue. To provide for (most) railways where the same person does both the Generation and Approval of cards, a new 'Generate & Approve' button will be provided if the user has both permissions. --- Future prices. Prices will need to keep better pace with costs. The card prices will be set as above for 2026. We will advise prices for future years, if they are to change, in the autumn of the previous year. The postage prices will need to keep pace with postage costs, so will rise by the same amount as the Royal Mail price does during the year. We will advise when RM prices are published so that everyone knows what the new prices are. --- ACTIONS REQUIRED: Please could railways that make use of the ID card system reply to let us know their views on options 1, 2, and 3. (Thank you to railways that gave their views in 2024, if you could please confirm if your feedback is the same or has changed). Note that if we don't receive any interest at all in one or more of the options above then we may not continue to develop / maintain that option! If anyone has any queries regarding the above please let me know. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1329 4 November 2025	Multi-Factor Authentication MFA is now available to all users in HOPS. Thank you our test guinea pigs for providing useful feedback on this facility. To enable MFA, click the avatar in the top right corner of HOPS and select 'My HOPS Account'. Then scroll down the page to Multi-Factor Authentication, and follow the prompts to set it up. (Note passkeys is not yet available.) For more details, a help page about MFA, with a link to TOTP, is available here: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/mfa (The passkeys page is not yet published so I know that link is dead for the moment.) MFA is not mandatory for any users yet. We have also not promoted it in the general user community. Admins are welcome to make use of it and invite anyone else who they want to to do so. Next steps: We will soon make a permission available that will make MFA mandatory for users with the permission. The permission won't do anything else, we are just using a permission so that all the flexibility of groups and departments etc can be used to allow HOPS Admins to 'set up and forget' which users need MFA as they come and go. Which groups or departments to allocate the permission to will be a matter for individual railways to decide based on what data those groups have access to and the associated risk. Next steps after that: Eventually HOPS will enforce MFA for users with some permissions. The first two are likely to be 015 (permission to administer permissions) and 080 (permission to admin-log-in as a user). Others may follow as cyber-security expectations tighten as time goes on.
Update 1326 2 November 2025	Bank Holidays Bank holidays are highlighted in several parts of HOPS relating to calendars and dates. Options for localisation of Bank/Public Holidays in HOPS has been introduced. A new setting has been added in Calendar Settings to select which nation's holidays required (P480 required). At present the following states have been done: - UK, England & Wales - UK, Scotland - Australia, NSW - Australia, Queensland (not Brisbane area) - Australia, Queensland Brisbane area The lucky residents of Brisbane get an extra public holiday! If admins from other parts of the world would like to provide details of how their bank/public holidays are determined we can add them. (Note a method of determining the bank holidays is required, eg "first Monday after 6 February" etc, not just a list of dates in a particular year.) Enabling this localisation of bank holidays took quite a bit of shuffling around in all the places where bank holidays are shown. We will monitor for any error messages arising as a result and fix asap. Thank you
Update 1323 31 October 2025	Important - Chrome Updates Affecting POS Hello A recent Chrome update is having an effect on POS devies. Starting in Chrome version 142, Chrome now prompts users for permission to access devices on the local network. Chrome 142 started rollout on October 28, and will roll out to all Chrome users over the next two weeks. Stripe Terminal's JS SDK, which is used by HOPS POS for communication with Stripe card machines through the local network, requires this permission to be granted. This means that, when prompted, the user needs to ALLOW this access; if a user blocks this access, the POS will be unable to connect to the card reader. In general, the permission is only required to be granted once. An example of the permission prompt is shown on Chrome's blog post here: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access Simulating this issue before Chrome 142: If you have not yet upgraded to Chrome 142, IT managers can use Chrome 141 and change the chrome://flags/#local-network-access-check flag to "Enabled" to test this new requirement. This new requirement was not expected by us, and it was not expected by Stripe either. HOPS first discovered this at the first railway site affected on Thursday morning. Stripe has sent notification to all its customers today (you may have received the same information as above from Stripe). Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1320 20 October 2025	HOPS Updates | Working at Height Prosecutions | Ticket Sales System Meeting | ORR Survey HOPS LIBRARY HOPS Library is going from strength to strength, with documents on a number of subjects now added: https://www.hops.org.uk/library A number of documents relating to carriages have been uploaded, and recently we have been adding documents relating to diesel locomotives: https://www.hops.org.uk/library/diesel-traction Thank you to all contributors to the HOPS Library - if you have a secret stash of documents that would be useful to other railways please consider contributing them. Thank you. ============== WORKING AT HEIGHT Working at Height continues to see increased attention from the HSE, as well as from railway regulators such as the ORR. Example: https://press.hse.gov.uk/2025/10/16/builder-given-suspended-sentence-after-roof-worker-fell-to-his-death/ This was particularly relevant to the heritage context as it involved what might be perceived as 'wise old boys' who had been 'doing it for years'. Another example, involving a fall from only six feet: https://press.hse.gov.uk/2025/09/24/sign-fitting-company-and-director-fined-after-fatal-fall-from-scaffolding/ Working at Height e-learning is available free in HOPS for all heritage railways. This will contribute to duty holders doing everything reasonably practicable to discharge their duty of care to protect their staff. ============== HOPS RETAIL SYSTEMS Includes: * Travel ticket sales * Events sales * Product sales (eg shop/cafe) * Vouchers * Gift cards * Membership system * Shares register There's never been a better time to think about ticket sales in 2026, There are two open Teams sessions this week where a demo of the Retail system in HOPS will be given, plus a Q&A from attendees. * 13:00 on Wednesday 22/10/2025 * 18:00 on Sunday 26/10/2025 (The two sessions are identical, it is not necessary to attend both) If you wish to join one of these calls, please let our Retail Systems manager Steve Morris know by email at steve.morris@hops.org.uk We are of course always available to discuss getting you on board at any time and Steve can be contacted as above or by calling 0118 225 0021. ============== ORR RM3 Survey The ORR is inviting colleagues across the rail industry [including heritage] to take part in the Risk Management Maturity Model (RM3) usage survey. RM3 is ORR's framework for assessing how well organisations manage health and safety risk through mature safety management systems. It provides a shared language for safety, helping organisations benchmark performance, identify improvements, and measure progress over time. This survey is an opportunity to share your experience of using RM3, the benefits it brings, the barriers you face, and the types of guidance, tools, training and case studies that would help you most. Your feedback will directly shape the RM3 Governance Board’s priorities and inform ORR’s future programme of RM3 resources and support. By taking part, you will help build a robust and sector-balanced picture of RM3 across mainline, freight, light rail, heritage, supply chain, consultancy and beyond. Take part in the survey, which closes on 10 November 2025. https://www.orr.gov.uk/guidance-compliance/rail/health-safety/strategy/rm3 ============== HOPS HELP We have reviewed and updated our HOPS Help page on adding a new membership (manually): https://www.hops.org.uk/help/add-new-member We hope this is useful as we continue to invest in developing HOPS Help pages: https://www.hops.org.uk/help ============== DISPOSALS GAZETTE HOPS is happy to provide the Disposals Gazette to the heritage railway sector to enable railways to demonstrate they have taken reasonable steps to allow other interested heritage organisations have the opportunity to adopt items before they are disposed or offered for sale on the open market. This is part of the charitable 'rules' for most preservation organisations. https://www.hops.org.uk/disposals ==============
Update 1317 7 October 2025	Payment Capture Process The process for capturing card payments will soon be changing. When the ticket system was first invented, we used to capture payments only at the point the order was concluded ('Confirm Sale' pressed and order received in HOPS). This caused an issue one day where a site stayed offline for several days, and payments started to become difficult to capture. As a result of this we changed to a method of 'payment taken from customer as soon as card is tapped', on the basis that it was better to have the money than to have the order record. Unfortunately this has led to some customers being charged twice, which is obviously not ideal. We now think that, on balance, the original way was better - payments captured when order completed - and the original risks arising from this can be mitigated in other ways without introducing the same unintended consequences: - The POS is now more vocal in warning when it has been working in offline mode for more than a few hours. A large, red, difficult-for-even-the-least-aware-clerk-to-ignore message is displayed and warns them that they need to seek advise their manager or technical assistance immediately to avoid payments being lost. That gives the manager/admin plenty of time to arrange to re-connect the device in good time. - The sites at which HOPS provides POSes that had poor internet now have much-improved internet connections, so the likelihood of offline working is reduced. - The 'Complete Sale' button now presses itself, if appropriate. Changes that will be seen by clerks: Where a part-payment is taken, there is currently a 'refund' button in the basket, for use if the customer decides to abandon the transaction having paid for part of it. This will no longer be shown. For 99.9% of transactions, where only one payment is made in complete settlement of the bill, there will be no changes. For all organisations except the North Norfolk Railway this will happen over the next few days. If you observe any issues or have any comments please let us know. Thank you Danny S.
Update 1314 7 October 2025	Refunding Vouchers and Gift Cards Hello The tools for refunding Gift Cards and Vouchers have been improved. First, some definitions: - The refund process has always been made of two parts: 1. Adjust the order (or create a new negative one) and 2. refund the difference. Eg if a person has ordered 2 of an item, and now won't be having those items or has brought them back, the quantity can be reduced to 1 or 0, the order will then show as over-paid, and the difference can be refunded. (Note for full clarity, reducing the quantity to zero should only be used if the service/product hasn't been supplied. If it has been supplied but you have decided to give a refund anyway, eg due to a bad experience, instead of reducing the quantity to zero the price should be reduced to zero (or whatever amount you decide). This ensures that the sales records still show that the item was sold, and just that zero pounds was taken for it in the end, rather than that the item wasn't sold at all.) - A GIFT CARD is an order for an EVENT, without selecting a SESSION, eg a Sunday Lunch Gift Card, without selecting a date. The recipient of the gift uses the code on the Gift Card to select a session and obtain tickets, without paying. The sale is made at the point the Gift Card is purchased. - A VOUCHER is a means by which a customer can pay an amount of money, and then they or someone else can use that voucher as a method of payment towards a future order. The sale is made at the point the Voucher is used in payment. A voucher can be part-used, or used in part-payment. NEW: Up to now, reducing the quantity of a Gift Card or Voucher to zero was blocked because the system had no way to ensure the voucher or gift card hadn't been used and wouldn't subsequently be used. We have now provided a 'Revoke' option to achieve this, and the rest has fallen in to place. If you browse to the customer's original order you'll see the '[Revoke]' link. Select which Gift Cards or Vouchers you wish to revoke (as there may have been more than one). This will ensure that the item hasn't been used before revoking, and that it can't subsequently be used. The order will show over-paid as normal and then the refund can be achieved as normal. If a customer wants a SWAP (eg to swap a Sunday Lunch Gift Card for a Murder Mystery Gift Card, as the customer doesn't want a refund in cash, I recommend refunding to Voucher and then using the voucher to purchase the correct item. I hope that in the future we will be able to provide a more succinct way to swap products, but as you can see from the above it is always considerably more complicated than it might seem, especially when the risk for us is that if we make a mistake then the railway might suddenly lose several hundred pounds (eg if a gift card could be both used and refunded). If anyone requires any more detail please let us know. Thank you
Update 1308 1 October 2025	Drugs & Alcohol | Library | Document System | Retail Systems Meeting HOPS CHEMISTRY - Drugs & Alcohol Screening Service For railways that are subscribed to the drugs and alcohol screening service, the current provider (Synlab) has sold its drugs and alcohol testing business to 'Eurofins'. Eurofins will provide the service going forward. There are no changes to the method of calling the service out or how it is used - but we'll advise you if this changes. You may just start to see a different company name on the paperwork. --- If you are not already making use of the centrally-negotiated drugs and alcohol screening service, provide a great saving to each individual railway subscribing to a contractor in their own right, more details can be found here; https://www.hops.org.uk/drugs Please let us know if you would like any more information. ================= HOPS LIBRARY Some years ago we proposed a HOPS Library of useful documents for heritage railways. Unfortunately we didn't get it off the ground at the time, but the developments to the file uploading system for Operations, General and Department Documents has provided a good opportunity to use HOPS Library as a development ground. So here it is! https://www.hops.org.uk/library The HOPS Library is also in the Services menu. HOPS Library is available to Advanced HOPS railways only at this stage. So far we have collated resources relating to various parts of the HOPS system that we have published in the past in the library, plus a collection of signalling-related drawings. This enables us to start off small and address any errors or bugs in the new file system. We intend to increase the scope of the Library to all documents that may be of use to railways, not just those related to HOPS, particularly including traction and pway documents, and will be glad to receive these from railways who are willing to share. (You will see, as we have done in HOPS Resources, that we will make clear that the donor railway is not taking and responsibility for the user of their documents. https://www.hops.org.uk/library/competence ) If you have documents you are willing to share please do send them to admin@hops.org.uk (or provide a link to where they are stored on your HOPS and we will pick them up from there). We hope the new Library system is useful, and we look forward to rolling it out into the other document systems in HOPS. ================= ARCHIVING USERS An extra traffic light has been added to indicate if the user has any open 'Cases' before being archived. ================= MULTI-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION Work is continuing on this. Thank you to everyone who has volunteer to test it out. We have enough offers now. When we get a bit further developed we will contact users who have kindly agreed to help. ================= DOCUMENT SYSTEM MIGRATION - * ACTION REQUIRED! * There are now 1044 documents remaining in HOPS with more than one file on them. This is good as 40% of the documents we started with are now dealt with. You can find these documents that require your attention in HOPS Admin > Continuous Improvement. For more information about the document repositories updates, please see https://www.hops.org.uk/system_updates.php?search=action+required+repositories&t=-2 or video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQqrCyS0R5c Note this opportunity won't last forever. The new document file/folder system contains a lot of developments that a lot of railways have been asking for, so we will need to implement it eventually. At that stage it will be necessary for all outstanding files to be treated to Option 1 or Option 2 automatically. ================= DISPOSALS GAZETTE A reminder that HOPS provides the heritage railway disposals gazette service: https://www.hops.org.uk/disposals This facility exists to provide organisations requiring to dispose of heritage assets an opportunity to demonstrate having taken reasonable steps to advertise to advertise the assets to other preservation organisations before they are sold or scrapped. ================= HOPS HELP The HOPS Help pages now have a search facility: https://www.hops.org.uk/help Results with the searched terms in the title are shown first, followed by results with the searched terms in the body. We hope this helps! ================= TIME REGISTER The Time Register Android app for signing on points has been updated, and many issues that have occurred over the last few years as Android OS has moved on have been resolved. The new apk can be downloaded from https://www.hops.org.uk/signin_records.php?t=7. This app significantly reduces the ease with which a user can navigate away from the TR app (accidentally or deliberately). If they press 'Home', or sleep/restart the device, it will return to the TR app. Note this is only intended for use at tablets at signing on points, NOT for users who sign in on their personal mobiles. When installing, your device will probably warn you that the app is not an official Android app and ask you if it's from a trustworthy source (which it is). ================= TIME TO START THINKING ABOUT 2026... We are pleased to report positive uptake of the HOPS suite of retail systems this year, with many railways and other HOPS user organisations now benefiting from these specialist packages. In October this year we plan to run two Teams sessions, open to all, to update those of you not yet availing themselves of the Retail system in HOPS, as well as providing opportunity for discussion from interested companies, and companies already using the system. The first session will be at 13:00 on Wednesday 22/10/25 and a further session will take place at 18:00 on Sunday 26/10/25. (The two sessions are identical, it is not necessary to attend both) If you wish to join one of these calls, please let our Retail Systems manager Steve Morris know by email at steve.morris@hops.org.uk We are of course always available to discuss getting you on board at any time and Steve can be contacted as above or by calling 0118 225 0021. (NOTE Steve is now away until 13 October. He will send links to the meeting when he returns. If you would like to discuss anything sooner than that please contact danny.scroggins@hops.org.uk thank you) We look forward to seeing you on one of the calls in October! ================= ACCOMMODATION BOOKINGS The Accommodation Bookings tab of the daily calendar has been updated to show bookings to users with permission 470 (previously only shown to users with 473). The name of the person for whom the accommodation is booked is still only shown to users with 473. =================
Update 1305 18 September 2025	POS Change - "Confirm Sale" | Thermal Ticket Updates Hello CONFIRM SALE BUTTON A change will soon be made to POS so that, if it can, the 'Confirm Sale' button presses itself. This avoids the need for the clerk to remember to press it (which it is accepted is possible to forget if no further action is expected, such as the printing of tickets or receipts). There are some circumstances where it won't press itself, such as if payment hasn't succeeded, or for zero-value total orders (to ensure that the order isn't completely unexpectedly). The POS will proceed with its follow up actions (eg printing tickets or receipts) as if the 'confirm sale' button had been pressed by the clerk. A picture can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HOPSAdmins/posts/24749390104699996/ or here: https://www.hops.org.uk/library/retail-systems --- THERMAL TICKETS The format of thermal tickets has now been changed. The headline of the ticket, eg, "Adult Return" is now printed in larger text at the top of the ticket. Underneath this is a new "public friendly" description of the journey being made. Eg for a railway with three stations called AAA, BBB and CCC, the description will show: For a single: (eg) BBB - CCC For a return: (eg) BBB - CCC - BBB For a circular: (eg) BBB - CCC - AAA - BBB For a ranger: nothing at all. Some of the other items on the ticket have been re-arranged for clarity. The "issued" information is now shown along the bottom of the ticket, and is still in the same format: (location name) YYYYMMDD HHMMSS (order number Lxxxxx). As before, "ADV" is only shown if the ticket is purchased in advance, and "(Members)", etc - the fare type - is only shown if it is not a "normal" fare. Space has been kept available on the right hand side of the ticket for a future development... watch this space! A photo of the old and new formats can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HOPSAdmins/posts/24749222348050105/ or here https://www.hops.org.uk/library/retail-systems If you are a user of HOPS Retail Systems but not yet printing your tickets in this attractive and highly-Instagrammable way, please get in touch and we will tell you the details - steve.morris@hops.org.uk or 0118 225 0021. Thank you
Update 1302 16 September 2025	Time Register The Time Register Android app for signing on points has been updated, and many issues that have occurred over the last few years as Android OS has moved on have been resolved. The new apk can be downloaded from https://www.hops.org.uk/signin_records.php?t=7 This app significantly reduces the ease with which a user can navigate away from the TR app (accidentally or deliberately). If they press 'Home', or sleep/restart the device, it will return to the TR app. Note this is only intended for use at tablets at signing on points, NOT for users who sign in on their personal mobiles. When installing, your device will probably warn you that the app is not an official Android app and ask you if it's from a trustworthy source (which it is). Two new QR codes have also been provided at the link above - one for downloading the APK onto signing-on points, and one for use in directing users to time.hops.org.uk if desired.
Update 1299 16 September 2025	Retail System - Shop Stock The old 'Inventory', which showed quantities of items in stock at each location has been removed. This information is now shown on the Stock Items tab and the Stock Items Search tab. A new tab, 'Low Stock', displays a cleaner list of items that have total stock (at all locations) lower than the internal low stock threshold. The internal low stock threshold can be set in the details of each product. As I know everyone will want to immediately make use of this excellent facility, but dread the task of setting a value for each product, tick box mode has been updated to include a 'Set Internal Low Stock Value' option. This will assist where large numbers of similar products require similar thresholds. Note this is different from the PUBLIC low stock threshold, where drives when 'low stock' is shown on the public site (where set to do so). 'Blank' is acceptable to enter into the threshold value box (for both internal and public). If 'blank' is entered, then the item will never be considered 'low stock'. This is appropriate for non-stock controlled items, such as cups of tea, etc. The Low Stock list is sorted by cost centre, including a 'none' option and an 'all' option. (Note the 'all' option may overload browsers at large shops!) The in-stock number at each location takes account for what has been ordered online but not yet sent/collected. These are excluded from these figures, so the number shown is the number available to be purchased, ie what will be left after all current commitments are met.
Update 1296 16 September 2025	Export to Xero There is now an 'Export' tab in Retail Systems. A downloadable file of orders and items is available in the official Xero import format. Note that changes made to orders in HOPS after exporting to Xero will not be reflected in Xero, so it is recommended that orders are only exported once they are tax-dated, after which changes to the order in HOPS are not permitted. (We may, in the future, be able to build an API that interacts directly with Stripe, but not yet...) Thank you
Update 1293 16 September 2025	Advanced HOPS Railways - HOPS Library Some years ago we proposed a HOPS Library of useful documents for heritage railways. Unfortunately we didn't get it off the ground at the time, but the developments to the file uploading system for Operations, General and Department Documents has provided a good opportunity to use HOPS Library as a development ground. So here it is! https://www.hops.org.uk/library The HOPS Library is also in the Services menu. HOPS Library is available to Advanced HOPS subscribers only at this stage. At present HOPS Library contains resources relating to various parts of the HOPS system that we have published in the past. This enables us to start off small and address any errors or bugs in the new file system. We intend to increase the scope of the Library to all documents that may be of use to railways, not just those related to HOPS, particularly including traction and pway documents, and will be glad to receive these from railways who are willing to share. (You will see, as we have done in HOPS Resources, that we will make clear that the donor railway is not taking and responsibility for the user of their documents. https://www.hops.org.uk/library/competence ) If you have documents you are willing to share please do send them to admin@hops.org.uk (or provide a link to where they are stored on your HOPS and we will pick them up from there). We hope the new Library system is useful, and we look forward to rolling it out into the other document systems in HOPS. Thank you.
Update 1290 11 September 2025	Changes to VAT options in HOPS Retail Systems A large number of changes have been merged this evening that change the way VAT is presented. Previously a 'VAT proportion' and a 'VAT rate' were required to be entered when setting a price for an item. This has been replaced with a drop-down box with the common rates of UK VAT: "20% VAT" [Equivalent to old 100% VATable at 20%] "5% VAT" [Equivalent to old 100% VATable at 5%] "0% (zero-rated)" [Equivalent to old 100% VATable at 0%] "VAT Exempt" [Equivalent to old 0% VATable] In addition, the presentation of VAT has been updated to the names shown in inverted commas above, rather than the old "100% @ 20%" format. (Any existing values that are different to those above have been preserved.) We hope this mades the system easier to use. The above changes have NOT been implemented on Event Sessions, where the old Proportion and Rate boxes remain. This is because we recognise that some events are, for accounting purposes, formed of differently-VATable components (eg train ticket separately accounted from dining ticket), and therefore odd percentages are required. We will hopefully address this with a more robust system in the future. If you find anything not behaving as it should please let us know and we will fix it. Thank you
Update 1287 9 September 2025	Retail Systems Update Meeting We are pleased to report positive uptake of the HOPS suite of retail systems this year, with many railways and other HOPS user organisations now benefiting from these specialist packages. In October this year we plan to run two Teams sessions, open to all, to update those of you not yet availing themselves of the Retail system in HOPS, as well as providing opportunity for discussion from interested companies, and companies already using the system. The first session will be at 13:00 on Wednesday 22/10/25 and a further session will take place at 18:00 on Sunday 26/10/25. (The two sessions are identical, it is not necessary to attend both) If you wish to join one of these calls, please let our Retail Systems manager Steve Morris know by email at steve.morris@hops.org.uk . We are of course always available to discuss getting you on board at any time and Steve can be contacted as above or by calling 0118 225 0021. We look forward to seeing you on one of the calls in October! Thank you.
Update 1284 28 August 2025	Emails "from" local railway addresses for group bookings customers and purchase order suppliers ** NOW AVAILABLE for emails to group bookings customers and purchase order suppliers ** Note each railway need only subscribe to this service once, so if you are already subscribed for retail emails, this is already available to you. EMAILS "FROM" LOCAL RAILWAY EMAIL ADDRESS It is now possible for certain emails from HOPS to be delivered to customers/suppliers with a local railway email address as the "from" address, rather than a HOPS no-reply email as they currently are. This will help with customer communication, especially when recipients reply to retail emails. This has previously been advertised for Retail Systems emails, it is now also available for Group Bookings emails to customers, and Purchase Orders emails to suppliers. This is being achieved via a third-party email-sending service which attracts a cost. The cost to railways is £9 per month. It is possible for an unlimited number of email addresses on the same domain to be used within the single £9 per month fee, eg sales emails could come from sales@yourrailway.com, while group booking emails come from groups@yourrailway.com and purchase orders come from finance@yourrailway.com This is the same service that sends emails immediately (rather than waiting in the queue), and which provides the delivery reports and click-reports. It is intended to develop these insights further in the future for railways that are contributing to its costs. In order to send 'as' your domain it will be necessary for some MX records to be added to your domain, but this is an easy task which your website manager or provider will be able to do easily. If you wish to make use of this localised email sending facility please contact HOPS HQ.
Update 1281 27 August 2025	Action Required! - Preparation for Upgrade of Document Repositories Document repositories will soon be converted to New HOPS. The New HOPS interface more closely-resembles a familiar files-and-folders system which we hope users will find more intuitive. This also unlocks other requested functionality such as drag-and-drop, and moving files and folders around within the system. Up to now, you might have uploaded more than one "file" in the same "document" if they closely-relate to each other, such as multiple files relating to the same event, multiple versions of some instructions, or multiple different file types of the same instructions (eg Word and PDF). In future, all files will exist in their own right and live in folders, there will no longer be separate concepts of 'documents' and 'files'. OLD: Folders contain Documents contain Files NEW: Folders contain Files Where a document currently contains more than one file the text 'ACTION REQUIRED' will be displayed to users who have permission to make the necessary update (P206). This leads to two options. The files will be separated out so that each exists in its own right, you can choose whether they are both stored in the current folder (option 1), or create a subfolder to contain them both (option 2). Here is a helpful video that demonstrates the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQqrCyS0R5c Please let us know if you have and concerns or questions. Thank you
Update 1278 25 August 2025	HOPS Housekeeping A signficant amount of housekeeping is going in in HOPS code and database this weekend. We are closely-monitoring error logs in case of any problems, so if you find any issues please try again after 5-10 minutes. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Update 1275 14 August 2025	Fees Link | File Attachments in News | Membership System HOPS FEES LINK DISTRIBUTED EARLIER Apologies that this link didn't initially work - foiled by my own permissions system! The link now works (requires HOPS login). Thank you --- FILE ATTACHMENTS IN NEWS It is now possible to add file attachments in News stories. Note these are NOT attached to the email notifications, so they won't clog up people's inboxes. They are linked in the news email and download when the user selects the link (HOPS login at the appropriate railway required). Similar facilities will be added to other places that use the same text block editor as development progresses. --- PURCHASE ORDERS When adding a new line to a purchase order, the Cost Centre of the line above is copied in to the new line. This can be changed to something else by the user if desired. --- HELP PAGES We have reviewed and updated our Help pages on managing permissions: Permissions overview: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/permissions-introduction Permission groups: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/permission-groups We hope these are useful and we will continue to update and develop the help pages in HOPS. These can be accessed via https://www.hops.org.uk/help/ or via the question mark icon in the top right corner of HOPS. --- MEMBERSHIP SYSTEM There has been a big spike in railways taking up the HOPS membership system recently, which is great! Several updates have been made in light of feedback, especially from organisations with very large numbers of members: - The New Member form has been re-arranged to assist flow. Further updates are being made to this to assist in adding new members on-the-fly. - Drop down lists of users are having a search box added to the top to reduce the scrolling required to find the required user. - Date of birth has been added to the Membership Detail pages. - Some updates have been made to automatically apply different membership number formats, eg "AA00123" to assist other legacy systems at railways. A Help page on Membership Types has been added: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/membership-types For info - There are two parts to the system, the membership register in HOPS, and the public sales site. It is possible to use the former without the latter, but the greatest benefit comes from making use of the public sales site which fully integrates with the membership register. If any other railways are interested in making use of the membership system please contact steve.morris@hops.org.uk --- Thank you
Update 1272 14 August 2025	HOPS Fees from 1 September 2025 Hello, For the last several years we have been able keep HOPS fees static for most railways by application of various discount schemes, eg direct debit payment discount, Raildays Promotion Programme, and Retail Services customers. While we are pleased to be able to continue the existing discount schemes for another year, regrettably will be necessary to increase HOPS subscription fees for most railways this year. Please find below a link to HOPS fees from September 2025. https://www.hops.org.uk/download/4d012edf-9be4-485f-aeca-3d100101f8bc I hope you will find the contents acceptable, but please let us know if you wish to discuss (or object) to anything. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1267 11 August 2025	Custom Pages in Retail System | Ticket Protection | Membership Search and Sort CUSTOM PAGES IN RETAIL SYSTEM We are pleased to say that there is now a facility in HOPS Retail Systems for custom content pages to be displayed in the online sales interface. Any number of pages can be created in Retail Systems > Custom Pages. These can then be accessed at aaa.hops.org.uk/pages/bbb where aaa is your railway's prefix, and bbb is a slug that you sent when creating the page. Here is a real example: https://her.hops.org.uk/pages/ticket-protection-terms-example And here are some fake examples to further illustrate : sdr.hops.org.uk/pages/terms nnr.hops.org.uk/pages/delivery-policy bodmin.hops.org.uk/pages/opening-hours You can link to the pages within the text of product or event descriptions etc, and you can do this relatively by using just "pages/opening-hours". The now-HOPS-standard text block editor has been used, so images, titles, etc can be added, and as this tool is developed further in future those developments will appear here too. Permission 557 is required to add/edit custom pages. ==== TICKET PROTECTION - SECURE MY BOOKING Ticket protection provider 'Secure My Booking' has sponsored a load of development work in HOPS to enable railways using HOPS Retail Systems to offer their ticket protection service. This allows railways to sell ticket protection for passengers who can't attend due to illness, transport issues, etc. It provides a good opportunity for railways to put a clear 'line in the sand' for when a refund will be provided and when one won't. Full details are provided here: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/secure-my-booking === MEMBERSHIP - SEARCH AND SORT The Search and Sort facilities in the membership system have been updated to improve clarity. Search now includes membership number and copes if a first name and surname is entered in to the search box together. The sort facility has been re-labelled to make it clear that's what it is. Thank you
Update 1263 8 August 2025	Emergency SMS Messaging Service Hello, An emergency SMS messaging service is now available in the ticket system, intended for use in urgently contacting customers if an event session has to be cancelled at short notice. This is available in the EMail/SMS tab of a session's booking details, alongside the place where the email addresses of all the participants can be obtained for sending emails, which is also useful in the same circumstances (remember to BCC!). The SMS message service is not designed for routine communication [although we may develop that if there is a demand], it is only intended for ad-hoc use, eg for event cancellation due to bad weather, infrastructure failure, etc. There is a cost to using the SMS service of 3.9p per SMS sent. The system has to be enabled by HOPS to make it available for use, this is done by request upon receipt of agreement to the cost. The system is also guarded by permission 556, so you can control who has access at the railway. This is the only thing guarded by this permission. There is no retainer cost, so if you never use it there will be no cost, but it is recommended that if you think you might wish to make use of it in the future that you request it to be enabled now as we may not be available at the time an out-of-hours emergency occurs and you need to make use of it. To enable the service, please email to steve.morris@hops.org.uk acknowledging that you accept the cost of messages sent. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1260 6 August 2025	Customer emails "from" local railway email addresses It is now possible for Retail Systems emails to be delivered to customers with a local railway email address as the "from" address, rather than a HOPS no-reply email as they currently are. This will help with customer communication, especially when recipients reply to retail emails. This is being achieved via a third-party email-sending service which attracts a cost. The cost to railways is £9 per month. It is possible for an unlimited number of email addresses on the same domain to be used within the single £9 per month fee, eg membership-related emails could come from membership@yourailway.com, while retail emails come from sales@yourrailway.com, and shares-related emails from shares@yourrailway.com This is the same service that sends emails immediately (rather than waiting in the queue), and which provides the delivery reports and click-reports. These peripheral services have been provided for free for retail clients thus far. It is intended to develop these insights further in the future for railways that are contributing to its costs. In order to send 'as' your domain it will be necessary for some MX records to be added to your domain, but this is an easy task which your website manager or provider will be able to do easily. If you wish to make use of this localised email sending facility please email alan.johnson@hops.org.uk to opt in. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1257 6 August 2025	POS and User PIN Permissions POS AND USER PIN PERMISSIONS Permission 468 previously controlled both the ability to create POS / Fulfilment Devices AND the allocation of PIN numbers to users. These have now been split in to two separate permissions. 468 controls the creation of POS and fulfilment devices. New permission 558 controls the creation of PIN numbers for users. Everyone and every group who previously had 468 has automatically been allocation 558, so take no action = no change. If you wish to split it out you can un-allocation one permission or the other. Thank you === SECURE MY BOOKING Ticket protection provider 'Secure My Booking' has sponsored a load of development work in HOPS to enable railways using HOPS Retail Systems to offer their ticket protection. This allows railways to sell ticket protection for passengers who can't attend due to illness, transport issues, etc. It provides a good opportunity for railways to put a clear 'line in the sand' for when a refund will be provided and when one won't. https://securemybooking.com/ Contracts with Secure My Booking are a matter for railways to negotiate directly, but in general SMB agrees a price with the railway to provide the protection to the railway, and then railways can sell it to their customers at whatever mark-up they like. Hence the railway obtains a proportion of the revenue for offering the service, at very little risk. It is possible, in HOPS, to configure which specific events and/or 'travel' ticket protection is available for. So it is possible, for example, to offer it for events that are high-cancellation-cost to the railway such as premium dining, but not on low-cancellation-cost events such as normal travel or incidental food (eg cream teas) if desired. Please contact Secure My Booking directly if you wish to discuss options with them: samuel@securemybooking.com [For clarity, HOPS does not receive any commission or other benefit from railways using Secure My Booking (apart from the normal commission on sales payments). Secure My Booking has sponsored HOPS's cost of the integration work.] ===
Update 1254 28 July 2025	HOPS Updates HELP PAGES We have reviewed and updated our Help pages on managing permissions: Permissions overview: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/permissions-introduction Permission groups: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/permission-groups We hope these are useful and we will continue to update and develop the help pages in HOPS. These can be accessed via https://www.hops.org.uk/help/ or via the question mark icon in the top right corner of HOPS. === SAFETY CIRCULAR A volunteer member of staff was struck and seriously injured as they alighted from a wagon forming part of a works train. https://www.hops.org.uk/safetycircular/90 Safety Circulars are published for the benefit of all heritage railways sharing lessons learned and best practices. https://www.hops.org.uk/safetycircular You can subscribe (and unsubscribe) to email update notifications via the link above. Sharing lessons learned with other organisations, and learning from lessons from other railways is an indicator of "Excellence" in RM3. === TIME REGISTER - ANOMALIES The sort order of the Anomalies list has been switched so that the OLDEST is now at the top. This is to assist in guiding the user to resolve the sign-ins before the sign-outs to make resolving the sign-outs easier. === ASSET MANAGEMENT - DEFECTS Advanced warning that update work will be taking place on this part of the Asset Management system over the next few weeks. There will be a short period of time where logging/editing/closing defects will not be available. We will advise in advance when this is to take place. === PURCHASE ORDERS Thank you to everyone who has fed back on the overhauled purchase order system. There are a small number of things we are still aware need to be ironed out: - Search facility on Cost Centres drop-downs - Search facility on Supplier Name - Page load speed. - "My CC Approvals" and "My FD Approvals" tabs still occasionally showing too many POs. We are working through the above as soon as possible. === GREASE TOPS We now have all the sizes of Grease Top Hats back in stock, especially size 57 - apparently the standard for Drivers across all HOPS Heritage Railways in the UK and beyond. https://www.heritage-ops.org.uk/product/160 === HOPS UPDATES We try our best to communicate information about HOPS services and developments as best we can. This is to note that, in times of service disruption, updates will be posted on the main HOPS Facebook page, where they can be viewed by admins and users - https://www.facebook.com/HeritageOps/ We will no longer post updates on X (formerly Twitter). In normal operation, updates are posted on HOPS in System > Updates ( www.hops.org.uk/updates ) and on either HOPS Admins Group or the main HOPS Facebook page (depending on the target audience). You can subscribe (and unsubscribe) to email update notifications via the Updates link above. Thank you === HOPS VIDEOS We are making good progress re-uploading HOPS videos to YouTube. However, it is taking a lot of sifting through videos from the cutting room floor to find all the right tapes. If anyone wants to admit to having pirated the videos and wants to give us back a copy of the ones we have not yet found please let us know! Thank you. === Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1251 23 July 2025	New Purchase Order System Now Live The HOPS Purchase Orders system has been comprehensively overhauled. There should be only minor changes to functionality, such as bug fixes. If you find any issues please let us know. * The Purchase Orders pages have been re-written into New HOPS, giving a better UI and better operation on phones and narrow screens. * There are no new or changed permissions, but permissions are now slightly more diligently/logically applied where they previously weren't. The result of this will be some users no longer able to do some things and will need permissions allocated, but there are not any cases where users will be able to do things they previously could not. * Updating the 'flags' now takes place in a popup without the need to load a separate page. Permissions to update flags are now diligently applied: Mark Goods received (P176), Invoice Received (P182), Paid (P174), Statement (P172). * Three tabs have been provided: "Purchase Orders", "My CC Approvals" (P171), "My FD Approvals" (P192). Under the Purchase Orders tabs are lists of POs including All Open POs, My Open POs, All Closed POs, My Closed POs, Deliveries Expected (P172), Awaiting Payment (P173) and Forced Closed (P260). These behave in the same way as in the old system. The My CC [Cost Centre] Approvals tab contains a list of PO Line Items that require the user's approval (or have already been approved). This is only displayed to users with P171. The My FD [Finance Director] Approvals tab contains a list of POs that require the user's approval (or have already been approved) because they meet the threshold for FD approval. This is only displayed to users with P192. * A new "Stock Location" field has been provided for users of HOPS Retail Systems to indicate the location (eg shop/cafe branch) that the stock is to be added to the stock total for when it arrives. An interface is not yet provided to create Stock Locations, please contact us for assistance with this. There are some outstanding issues which will be resolved tomorrow (24/07/25): - "My CC Approvals" and "My FD Approvals" tabs are showing too many POs. This will be filtered down to only POs awaiting the user's approval, and POs approved by the user. - Some column widths are not formatted correctly - Some pages are slightly slow to load. We will try to improve this. We will be on standby in HOPS HQ on Thursday morning (24 July) for any issues arising. Please let us know via the support ticket mechanism if you have any problems, or via phone to HOPS HQ on 0118 321 8752 if urgent. Thank you.
Update 1248 23 July 2025	HOPS Videos | Purchase Orders | Help Pages | HOPS Updates | Grease Tops PURCHASE ORDERS The purchase order system will be under maintenance from 7pm (UK (BST) time) tonight for maintenance work. If you find the PO system accessible then it is fine to use. Some/all parts of it will be unavailable as work progresses. It will be back online by the morning (UK time). There should be no changes to functionality (apart from bug fixes) - if you find anything not working as it should please let us know. --- HOPS VIDEOS We are making good progress re-uploading HOPS videos to YouTube. However, it is taking a lot of sifting through videos from the cutting room floor to find all the right tapes. If anyone wants to admit to having pirated the videos and wants to give us back a copy of the ones we have not yet found please let us know! Thank you. https://www.youtube.com/@HOPSHeritageRailways --- HELP PAGES We have reviewed and updated some further Help pages: Guidance for new users of HOPS: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/new-user We hops this will be useful for Admins to send to new users of the system to explain the first steps. Managing occurrences of two (or more!) users with the same name at the same railway: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/handling-duplicate-names Resetting Passwords: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/reset-users-password Email address validation: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/email-address-validation We hops these are helpful. Help Topics can be viewed via System > Help Topics, or via the question mark icon in the top right corner of HOPS, or this link: https://www.hops.org.uk/help We are working to update and develop as many pages as we can. --- HOPS UPDATES We try our best to communicate information about HOPS services and developments as best we can. This is to note that, in times of service disruption, updates will be posted on the main HOPS Facebook page, where they can be viewed by admins and users - https://www.facebook.com/HeritageOps/ We will no longer post updates on X (formerly Twitter). In normal operation, updates are posted on HOPS in System > Updates ( www.hops.org.uk/updates ) and on either HOPS Admins Group or the main HOPS Facebook page (depending on the target audience). You can subscribe (and unsubscribe) to email update notifications via the Updates link above. --- GREASE TOP HATS After a long wait, we are pleased to say that we now have all the sizes of Grease Top Hats back in stock in our shop: https://www.heritage-ops.org.uk/product/160
Update 1245 17 July 2025	Online Shop ONLINE SHOP We have made some great steps recently towards being able to offer an online shop facility. This will enable 'Stock Items' to be sold by themselves, where it is currently only possible as an upsell at the checkout (add-ons). We previously launched the 'donations' system, which makes use of this because a 'donation' is just a 'stock item' that can be sold. ** IMPORTANT info for railways that already have stock items which are used as add-ons / upsell: There are many new attributes relating to postage costs and delivery mechanisms for products. In order to ensure your upsell products continue to behave as they currently do, these items have been set to: - NOT contribute to any postage costs calculations - NOT require delivery information to be collected [Eg asking the customer whether they would like to have the item posted or collect on arrival, and their delivery address] Therefore the system will continue to be silent on both of these things, as it has been in the past. If you wish to, you can change these settings so that the customer does have the option to collect on arrival or receive by post, and whether they should be charged postage for having it sent. But if you take no action there will be no change. --- In general, railways that are already used to HOPS retail systems are welcome to start preparing settings etc in readiness for products that you already sell via POS to be sold online. [There are also settings if you which specific products to only be available via one mechanism or the other.] Settings for the shop system in general can be found at Tools > Retail Systems > Shop System, or https://www.hops.org.uk/shop_system.php Settings for individual products can be found in Tools > Retail Systems > Shop System > Stock Items List, or https://www.hops.org.uk/shop_system.php?t=2 To help in this preparation process some helpful additional reports have been compiled: Report 135. Products without Names Report 136. Products without Descriptions Report 137. Products without a lead time Report 138. Products with a retail price of zero (free) Report 134. Products without URL Slugs Report 139. Products with a weight of zero (Method A) Report 140. Products with no postage volume limits (Method A) Report 142. Products with no postage group (Method B) Report 141. Products with no postage price (Method D) Report 143. Products that can be purchased when out of stock --- If all the above makes no sense to you at all, but you would like to know more, please contact Steve Morris, who helps railways learn about, deploy and exploit maximum benefit from HOPS Retail Systems at steve.morris@hops.org.uk and he will be happy to answer questions or give a demo. Thank you to everyone from all railways that have worked with HOPS to bring this latest retail development to fruition!
Update 1239 17 July 2025	"Open" Tickets OPEN TICKETS New options are now available in Ticket System Settings to allow 'Open' tickets, ie where a specific train isn't required to be selected for a travel ticket. https://www.hops.org.uk/ticket_sales_settings.php?t=16 It is possible to select whether an 'open' (no specific train) ticket should be available for leg 1, 2, 3 of the journey. This enables rules such as: "Passenger must specify a train out, but can take any train back" "Passenger can take any train out, but must specify a train back" "Passenger must specify a train in both directions" "Passenger can take any train out and any train back" The booking confirmation, receipt, etc says "No specific train", rather than "Any train", recognising that there might be non-public trains in operation. Separate settings are available for POS and Online, so these options can be applied differently for the two sales methods. Where these options are not set the passenger will be required to select a train. This has been the case up to now so all railways are set to this, so no action = no change.
Update 1233 15 July 2025	YouTube Videos | Purchase Orders Update | Disposals | Safety Circular YOUTUBE VIDEOS Most HOPS videos are available again on the new HOPS YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HOPSHeritageRailways There are videos for users, managers and admins on various topics relating to HOPS, Raildays, Retail Systems, and heritage railway management topics in general. You can subscribe in the normal way to receive notifications when new videos are published. We have nearly completed the uploading of our back catalogue of videos. --- HELP TOPICS We have reviewed and updated our Help page for new users of HOPS: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/new-user We hope this will be useful for Admins to send to new users of the system to explain the first steps. ... And our guidance on managing occurrences of two (or more!) users with the same name at the same railway: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/handling-duplicate-names --- RETAIL SYSTEMS A set of new reports has been added to Reports & Export to assist with auditing products. This will be especially useful to railways preparing their product itinerary ready for online sale. Reports: 135 Products without Names 136 Products without Descriptions 137 Products without a lead time 138 Products with a retail price of zero (free) 134 Products without URL Slugs 139 Products with a weight of zero (Method A) 140 Products with no postage volume limits (Method A) 142 Products with no postage group (Method B) 141 Products with no postage price (Method D) 143 Products that can be purchased when out of stock --- PURCHASE ORDERS The New HOPS purchase orders system will be back soon. When it launched a couple of weeks ago there was a suggestion that permissions were not being applied properly so it was taken offline. It transpired that permissions were working correctly, but there has not yet been the opportunity to re-release it without affecting the smooth-running of the existing system. It was intended that both old and new systems would run side-by-side for a period, until development work on the new system was no longer back-compatible with the old system. This point has now already come and gone, so there will now be a changeover between old and new systems when the time comes. We will give further info when that is about to take place. --- HERITAGE RAILWAY DISPOSALS GAZETTE https://www.hops.org.uk/disposals GNR Double Bolster Wagon No. TIC 1352 The East Anglian Railway Museum is looking to dispose of 1920 built GNR Double Bolster wagon number TIC 1352. The vehicle is thought to have been built by Cravens Railway C&W Co. LTD in Sheffield. The vehicle was previously known to be at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and the National Railway Museum Shildon. No work has been carried out on the vehicle at Chappel and it’s offered free of charge to parties intended to restore/re-purpose the vehicle with the buyer to remove the vehicle from site at their own cost. Viewings can be arranged. The museum will prioritise any interest from other accredited museums/railways and then heritage/preservation groups/societies. Other interested parties are invited to enquire. If no interest is reached by 9th September the vehicle will be cut up on site. The Heritage Railway Disposals Gazette is available free to all heritage railways. Thank you to all the railways who have worked together to provide this facility for everyone's benefit. If you would like to subscribe directly please visit the Disposals Gazette (link above) and then the 'Subscribe' tab to subscribe. [Note we do not commit to promoting items for disposals via this System Updates system every time, this is a rare occasion to promote its existence. Please subscribe via the disposals link above if you would like to be sure of receiving notifications for new items.] --- "EXCELLENCE" IN RM3 SAFETY CIRCULAR https://www.hops.org.uk/safetycircular It has been a quiet period for Safety Circulars recently. It would be nice to think that that was due to there being no safety lessons to learn, but... perhaps that is wishful thinking. Please do remember the existence of Safety Circular, a good opportunity to show a high level of safety maturity, and RM3 "Excellence", and helping to share lessons learned, both with pain and with pride. Circulars do not have to state the railway from which they originated. ---
Update 1232 8 July 2025	Drugs & Alcohol Screening | Medication Checking This is a reminder that HOPS offers Chemistry Services for Drugs & Alcohol Screening (post-incident for-cause, and random), and Medication Checking. Both services are provided by external specialist suppliers that conduct the same work for main-line railway companies. Railways can subscribe to either or both of these schemes. In both cases, contact details to call-up the services and a PIN number are provided to railways to make use of the services 24/7 without HOPS's involvement. A cost-saving is achieved by railways being part of this scheme rather than all contracting the service individually and all paying the full subscription fee to the supplier. (Regrettably we are only able to provide this service in the UK.) --- DRUGS & ALCOHOL SCREENING SERVICE Details of the Drugs & Alcohol Screening service can be found here: https://www.hops.org.uk/drugs This can be used for post-incident screening or random checks. This is a very useful statement to staff/volunteers of safety culture intent that is especially important for heritage railways. It also helps the railway's defence after an incident to be able to demonstrate that those involved were clear of drugs and alcohol. ** Annual retainer fee: £40 ** For-cause screening call-out (test up to four people): £250 ** Random screening call-out (test up to 16 people): £230 ** Results analysis, per person: £65 --- MEDICATION CHECKING SERVICE: Details of the Medication Checking Service can be found here: https://www.hops.org.uk/medication The medication checking services is useful where there is doubt about whether a member of staff/volunteer should conduct safety-critical work when taking medication. It is especially useful for occasions where a member of staff is taking more than one medication at the same time, where there might be impact that isn't apparent from the individual advice on the label for each medication. ** Annual retainer fee: £40 ** Per medication check: £16.50 --- Thank you to railways that are already subscribed. The annual retainer fee has increased this year, reflecting the increased cost of providing the service. This will be billed in the August invoice unless you let us know you don't wish to renew. The cost for a medication check has increased by 50p, and the drugs and alcohol screening fees are unchanged for this year. Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1229 7 July 2025	Links to Privacy Policy etc New options have been added to the General Retail Systems page for some links that appear at the bottom of all public-facing sales pages: * Privacy Policy [required] * Cookie Policy (this is the same link as is shown on the cookie popup for organisations that have this) [required if using non-essential cookies] * Terms and Conditions [recommended] https://www.hops.org.uk/retail_systems.php?t=1 All of these accept a URL that can be outside of the HOPS environment, eg to the appropriate pages on the main company website [This is preferable to storing the policies in more than one page]. When set, the links appear in the footer at the bottom of public-facing pages in all parts of the system (travel, events, shares, membership, shop, etc). Thank you
Update 1226 4 July 2025	Email Sending We apologise that email sending crashed yesterday evening. It is now running again. All emails will be delivered, but it will take some time to clear the queue. The cause of this happening is related to some huge emails being sent, overwhelming the email sending system. Usually large attachments in HOPS-comms messages. We will be making some changes to the attachments system to improve this, more info on that will follow. For info, HOPS sends about 20,000 emails a day, usually at a maximum rate of about 50 every 30 seconds. The recipients for nearly all emails is controlled by the railway via permissions, or the user themselves via opting in and out. There are two YouTube videos that may be useful here, on how to control email opt in/outs for users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUW7JYgcUIU And for Admins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13woTU4MNQk Thank you Danny S.
Update 1223 3 July 2025	Defect Reporting ASSET MANAGEMENT - DEFECT REPORTING Significant work is taking place on asset defects over the next week or so to enable better use on mobiles etc, including uploading photos from phone cameras in a similar way to what currently exists on Spot Report. There should be no disruption but please let us know if you find any problems.
Update 1218 2 July 2025	Postcode / Address Lookup Facility The Postcode/Address Lookup service trial has now ended. Thank you to everyone who has signed up to use it on an ongoing basis. If your organisation would like to subscribe to the facility, to both save time and improve accuracy, from now on please let us know via a support ticket or email. It is provided: - when adding or editing a user's address (themselves or a manager entering details of another user) - when adding/editing emergency contacts - for public customers making online ticket purchases - for public customers making online shares sales - for public customers making online membership sales - for public customers making online shop sales There is a cost to HOPS in providing this service, so the lookup feature is an optional add-on for railways for which a small fee (£5 per month) will be charged. Thank you. Full details: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/address-lookup
Update 1214 25 June 2025	Force User Log Out A new "Force Account Log Out" button has been provided on the 'HOPS Account' tab of a user profile (P415 required, so generally only visible to admins). This will end all the user's logged-in sessions. The next time they try to browse to a page they will get either 'access denied' or 'you have been logged out' on all devices that they use. This is useful if a user's access or permissions are reduced and you require that change to take place immediately. The user will be able to log back in again (unless the change you've made prevents this), and their new permissions etc will be applied. This is in response to feedback, and also in preparation for the upcoming multi-factor authentication work.
Update 1208 24 June 2025	Purchase Orders | Helpdesk Tickets | YouTube | Defect Reports PURCHASE ORDERS PURCAHSE ORDERS Work on the Purchase Order system has been taking place over the last few weeks. This is to both improve the interface, integrate it with Retail Systems, and also make possible future developments to do with spending limits etc that have been requested. The existing menu option for Purchase Orders has been re-labelled "Purchase Orders (Old)" and a new menu option has been provided "Purchase Orders (New)". Users are encouraged to use Purchase Orders (New) where possible, and report any issues to your HOPS Admin for reporting to HOPS HQ. Purchase Orders (Old) is still available for the moment in case of any issues with the new system. There should be only minor changes to functionality between the old system and the new system. Please let your HOPS Admin know if you find any issues with the new system. For users of HOPS Retail Systems - new functionality in the new purchase order system: - Selection of a stock item when creating purchase order lines - POs appear in POS machines for checking-in once stock arrives. Checked-in POs are automatically added to the stock level in the stock control system. - The delivery destination of stock can be set when creating the PO so that the incoming stock shows to the correct stock location (eg station, shop, etc). === SUBMITTING HELPDESK TICKETS Please could I beg and plead with everyone that raises HOPS Helpdesk tickets to please follow the guidance when raising tickets? It really helps us to help you more promptly and saves a lot of time. Particularly providing a name of a user affected and a link to the affected page allows us to immediately admin-login as the affected user on the affected page. This not only saves time, but also gives us a better chance of responding even if we're not at a computer and can use a phone etc to see the issue. The pre-populated questions also help us obtain the information required and avoid several to-and-fros for us to understand the problem. The demand on HOPS support time is high, so please help us to do the best we can and respond as promptly to tickets as we can. Thank you. === YOUTUBE VIDEOS We are making progress uploading videos to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HOPSHeritageRailways Recent videos include information on entering details and events for public display in the Raildays app: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6GXYdV8KgfsydmmfOddRkzQ_2Tyy3vln We are limited in what we can do with the new channel until it gains some credibility, so please do subscribe to the channel and that will help it gain credibility and unlock additional functionality. Thank you === ASSET MANAGEMENT - DEFECT REPORTING Work will be taking place on this over the next week or so to better use on mobiles etc, including uploading photos from phone cameras in a similar way to what currently exists on Spot Report. There should be no disruption but please let us know if you find any problems. === Thank you Danny Scroggins
Update 1205 11 June 2025	Max Limit on Voucher Purchases A max limit of £2,000 has been applied to the purchase of vouchers. This is to satisfy risk mitigation for card payment providers. Note, there is nothing to stop the same customer making more than one order for £2000 of vouchers each. https://www.hops.org.uk/retail_systems.php?t=9&t2=6 For ease, this limit has been applied to all voucher purchases, including by other payment methods such as cash. If it is required to sell more than £2000 of vouchers by cash, this can be done by making several orders for a maximum of £2000 each.
Update 1202 11 June 2025	Purchase Order System Work Heavy work will be taking place on the Purchase Order system over the next week or so. This is in connection with its upgrade to New HOPS and integration with the Retail Sales system. We will closely monitor any errors arising, but if you find anything not working properly please do let us know via a support ticket. There should be no change to functionality at this stage. Thank you -- Reminder - any user can subscribe to HOPS updates such as this via www.hops.org.uk/updates HOPS Admins, please encourage users with management roles to subscribe for the updates and service announcements.
Update 1199 10 June 2025	Card Payments - Chaneg to Process Hello A change is being made to the processing of card payments. Currently, once a customer taps their card on the card device, the money in the account is ring-fenced, and only captured when the transaction is completed in POS and uploaded to HOPS. This has caused an issue whereby poor internet connections might mean inconsistencies arise between the card machine and POS, leading to the potential for lost payments. The new system captures the money as soon as the customer taps their card, rewardless of what POS subsequently does. This arrangement more closely matches the behaviour that might be expected from an independent card terminal. The one change to clerks is this: If a customer asks to make a part-payment by card (eg on an order for £20 they taps their card to pay £10 with the intention of paying the rest by cash) if they then change their mind and what to cancel the whole order the VOID ALL button will not be available. Instead, a REFUND button adjacent to the payment in the basket is required to be pressed to give the customer their £10 card payment back, then the basket can be voided off. [Note, a enterprising booking clerk could get round this by closing the browser, etc, but that risk also existed previously. Previously the risk was that there'd be an order with no payment, now the risk is there'll be a payment with no order, which I hope you will agree is preferable.] I imagine the occurrences of making part-payments is low, so I hope this will have low impact. Please let us know if you have any queries or issues. Thank you
Update 1196 8 June 2025	Discounts & Gift Cards GIFT CARDS https://www.hops.org.uk/retail_systems.php?t=17 * The number of each gift card product sold, redeemed, and not redeemed, has been added to the list of gift cards. This is to help identify, as the year progresses, what the likely demand on remaining event spaces is likely to be. * A tick box mode has been added to the Gift Cards list page to enable easier alteration of settings. --- DISCOUNTS https://www.hops.org.uk/ticket_sales_settings.php?t=13 * Additional tabs have been added to the 'Community Discounts' section to make it easier to see which codes have been used and which have not. (Note there is no difference between a 'normal' discount and a 'community' discount, they are just stored on different tabs for ease of administration.) New tabs are provided for codes that have been not used at all, and codes that have had some use. The 'Used' list should not be construed as 'Completely Used', as it is not possible to sensibly discern this with a discount code (eg it may not be usable now, but may have a start date in the future). * We have added a 'used on items' column to the 'discounts used' tabs so that it can be seen how many items have been discounted with each code. --- DEFINITIONS As a reminder, 'Gift Cards' are where the customer buys a ticket for a specific event, but not for a specific date. They give the gift card to the recipient, and then the recipient picks the date and pays £0. The purchaser pays the price of the Gift Card (which can be different to the price of the event its valid for). The 'sale' is counted on the day the gift card is purchased. Gift Cards can be valid for a period of months from the date of purchase, or until a hard deadline. You can see an example here: https://nnr.hops.org.uk/giftcards This is different to a 'Voucher', which is valid for an amount of cash. The customer pays some money in return for a voucher, and then spends that voucher at a later date. The amount of money the voucher was purchased for is exactly the amount that it can be spent for. Until they spend it, the value of the voucher is a cash liability for the railway. The original customer pays the amount of cash the voucher is valid for, and that is the amount of cash that can later be spent by the recipient. The 'sale' is counted on the day the voucher is 'spent', and the sale amount is the normal amount. (No sale takes place on the day the voucher is purchased.) Vouchers can be valid for a period of months from the date of purchase, or until a hard deadline. You can see an example here: https://sdr.hops.org.uk/vouchers And, for completeness, a 'Discount' is a code that allows the price of an item to be changed. Eg a 50% off discount code changes the price of the eligible items by 50%. Discounts have no liability. Sales are counted on the date the discount code is used, and the sale amount is the discounted price.
Update 1193 5 June 2025	Donations | Membership Types | Address Lookup DONATIONS Donations can now be collected via HOPS Retail Systems. This uses and early iteration of the upcoming 'shop' system. A donation is managed as a 'product'. Products can be created for '£10 donation', '£20 donation' etc, and/or with no given price so that the donor can enter their own price. Products are added and edited in Retail Systems > Shop System > Stock Items List. When creating/editing products that are donations, be sure to select NOT 'stock manged'. This ensures there is no limit on the number of donations that can be sold, and that sold ones don't appear on the stock value list. Allocate the donations products to folders in the normal way. A product can be in more than one folder, so it will, in future, be possible to achieve: A person who is likely to buy an OO gauge model of a particular loco might also be inclined to make a donation to the restoration fund for that engine, so the donation product could ALSO live in the 'OO gauge models' folder; Conversely, a person who is likely to make a donation to the restoration of that engine might also be interested in buying a badge with the engine on, so the badge product could ALSO be in the donations folder. Where donations are allowed for different specific projects, these can be created as specific products, eg '£10 donation to engine fund', '£10 donation to track fund'. If desired, to assist giving information to customers, they can be places in different sub folders of the overall 'donations' folder. Details of the 'product'/donation can be added to the product details and/or the folder details. This might include suggestions for what a donation is spent on, eg 'Your donation of £10 could buy the railway one sleeper' or 'Your donation of £10m could completely relay all the track on the entire line!'. A 'slug' field is available for giving products 'pretty' urls. If left blank a slug will be created from the product name. Links can be shared to individual folders and/or individual donation products as required. Eg x.hops.org.uk/shop/models/oo/black-fives DONATIONS CARD ON HOME PAGE A card on the Home page of the sales system (alongside events, travel, vouchers, etc) can be implemented via settings in Retail Systems > Donations tab. The colour, text, and image on the card can be set here. (As always, avoid using an image with text on as it is cropped in different aspect ratios in different parts of the system.) Also in these settings, the location of the 'donations' folder can be set. This is the folder that the user will be directed to when they click on the Donations card (or visit x.hops.org.uk/donations ) The card always points to the URL x.hops.org.uk/donations, even if the target folder is changed. Upon visiting the url the user will be directed to the 'Donations' folder specified. The target folder can be set in Retail Systems > Donations tab. The /donations link works even if the card is not enabled on the Home page. GIFT AID To collect a Gift Aid declaration on donation items the following three actions are required: * The railway is set to 'Store Gift Aid' in System > HOPS Config * The Retail System is set to offer Gift Aid declarations in Retail Systems > General Settings tab, 'Offer Gift Aid' setting. * The donation products have a 'Gift Aid Proportion' of greater than 0%. For donations, in most cases, this will be 100%. NOTE The Gift Aid Proportion is the PROPORTION of the overall price that can be Gift Aided, not the amount of Gift Aid or the rate of Gift Aid. Eg for a donation it will be 100%. OTHER NOTES The Shop Interface must be enabled for the railway. Please request this via HOPS. ====================================== MEMBERSHIP SYSTEM The Membership Type editing page has been replaced with a newly-written one, resolving several long-standing niggles. This also now has increased functionality for different membership expiry methods: The 'expires at the same month each year' (Method B) now has a 'years' option, for multi-year membership. The 'months' option now only applies to the 'expires after X months' expiry method (Method A). We hope this helps model the surprisingly-complicated issue of establishing expiry dates! ====================================== POSTCODE / ADDRESS LOOKUP The new postcode / address lookup feature in HOPS is currently half-way through its trial period. It is available to all organisations for a trial period until the end of June 2025. Please opt-in now if you wish to keep access to it after then! This is available: - when adding or editing a user's address (themselves or a manager entering details of another user) - when adding/editing emergency contacts - for public customers making online ticket purchases - for public customers making online shares sales - for public customers making online membership sales - for public customers making online 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). If you wish to OPT-IN to keep access to the Address Lookup service after the end of June please do so now by raising a support ticket or emailing alan.johnson@hops.org.uk We hope this new feature is useful - Thank you to everyone who has worked with us to develop it.
Update 1190 3 June 2025	Address Lookup | HOPS YouTube Videos POSTCODE / ADDRESS LOOKUP The new postcode / address lookup feature in HOPS is currently half-way through its trial period. It is available to all organisations for a trial period until the end of June 2025. Please opt-in now if you wish to keep access to it after then! This is available: - when adding or editing a user's address (themselves or a manager entering details of another user) - when adding/editing emergency contacts - for public customers making online ticket purchases - for public customers making online shares sales - for public customers making online membership sales - for public customers making online 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). If you wish to OPT-IN to keep access to the Address Lookup service after the end of June please do so now by raising a support ticket or emailing alan.johnson@hops.org.uk We hope this new feature is useful - Thank you to everyone who has worked with us to develop it. ----- HOPS YOUTUBE VIDEOS Unfortunately, due to a change in service provider from Google Workspace to Office 365, the HOPS YouTube channel has to be started again from scratch. We will re-upload all the videos that remain relevant, but this might take us a little time. Unfortunately the URLs will be different, but we will update where these are embedded in HOPS as they are re-uploaded. This also provides us with a good opportunity to review them, and highlight them to users who might not have seen them before. Here are links to videos on: * Competence Evidence Assurance Function: https://youtu.be/cVyxmjSw9Bk * Recording Asset Mileages: https://youtu.be/Mizbg-zJDj0 ----- HOPS UPDATES We don't intend that HOPS Updates will be published as frequently as they have been in the last week. There has been a lot going on recently so it we hope you find it useful that we keep you updated. If you are reading this via a forwarded email you can subscribe (or unsubscribe) yourself here: https://www.hops.org.uk/updates Thank you
Update 1187 2 June 2025	New News about News The interface for writing HOPS News stories has been updated, achieving several long-standing ambitions. - Pasted text now retains its line breaks - Each block can now contain multiple paragraphs - The issue asssociated with adding carriage returns in to existing text, and removing carriage returns to combine paragraphs together, are now resolved. - Further formatting options are available such as underline and italic, font colour, etc The new interface is the same as is used in Members' News. The use of a consistent interface across these, the upcoming Shareholders' News (for railways that keep shares registers in HOPS), and enables easier ongoing development of the functionality in the future. The current blocks available are: Titles, Text and Image. Thank you
Update 1184 30 May 2025	Multi-Factor Authentication 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 1181 29 May 2025	HOPS Updates Notifications A new system has been introduced for notifying users when updates to the HOPS system take place. Any user can subscribe/unsubscribe from updates via the links at the top of the System Updates page: https://www.hops.org.uk/updates There are two distinct mailing lists: * HOPS Updates, for updates relating to HOPS compliance tools and services * HOPS Retail System Updates, for updates relating to HOPS retail systems This new system replaces old permission 168, which used to be the mechanism for subscribing to HOPS Updates. I believe all users who used to have 168 (including via groups and depts) have been subscribed to update notifications, so hopefully no action = no change. If you are reading this update BY EMAIL then you are subscribed. This new system will better-enable HOPS to keep interested users updated as HOPS development takes places. If you don't wish to receive these updates, please unsubscribe via the System Updates page (link above). Thank you
Update 1170 28 May 2025	Updates are currently being deployed to News, Members' News and Shareholders' News. There may be some errors encountered in the next 20 minutes. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Update 1167 30 April 2025	Address / Postcode lookup has now been added to POS machines, for use when selling address-required items, or Gift Aid items. It works both on POS machines in booking offices and on PCs for telephone sales. This is part of the free trial period of the address / postcode lookup facility: https://www.hops.org.uk/update/1158
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	(Republished as item 1184)
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 1164 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 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 1163 24 April 2025	Thermal till receipts now include the company logo at the top.
Update 1165 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 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 1150 3 April 2025	Retail Sales Updates: Emails sent in connection with Retail Sales orders now have more comprehensive reporting of status of delivery and, where available, when it was opened and links clicked. Note it is not always possible to report this, so the absense of a report does not guarantee that the email wasn't opened or clicked. Membership Updates: Interlocking between 'date of birth' and 'membership types' is now available, to enforce minimum and maximum age of members purchasing specific membership types. A new attribute is available on each membership type to control how far in advance a member can renew their membership. Default is no constraint, which was what it was previously so no action = no change. Custom checkout questions can now be asked on a per-membership-type basis. POS Updates: Shelf-edge labels / product barcode labels can now be printed from POS.
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 1148 20 February 2025	The discount 'items required in basket' system has been significantly upgraded and now gives the option of selecting any ticket type / journey type / fares scheme / session in any combination. This makes it a lot easier to create discounts such as 'child goes free with every adult' on a SESSION (previously easy on travel but difficult on sessions), and all permutations of 'buy one get one free' and 'buy X get Y free'. These facilities can be accessed via the overall discounts list, when 'Require other items in basket' is set to 'yes'.
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 1138 12 February 2025	The stock system is now in and working. The stock quantities shown in the system should now be accurate, and increment/de-increment in line with sales. All railways have been started at 0 stock today. Incoming stock should now use the 'Re-Stock' facility in POS. (This is also temporary, until the PO system is finished.) Wasted stock should be disposed of via the 'Waste' facility in POS. The purchase prices of items are calculated in accordance with: https://www.hops.org.uk/help/inventory-stock-value-calculation The current values for cost and latest cost can be seen in the Product Details page in HOPS. This will be re-calculated every time new stock is added via the Re-Stock (and later PO) facility. Adjusting quantities of stock controlled items on existing orders, eg when a customer changes their mind, can now only be done in POS, not HOPS. (This is to ensure the stock levels are updated after saving). The 'Transfer' facility in POS now works, for transferring stock between Stock Locations. Unfortunately it only copes with one product at a time at present (multiple quantities are handled). Stock Locations can also be used for things like 'The back of Fred's car' when he takes stuff to trade shows, etc (Hence we used the term 'Stock Location' rather than 'Branch'). A special stock location of 'In Transit' is used when items are transferred between Stock Locations. The item is sent from one Stock Location, and lands in the In Transit location, until it is checked-in at the receiving location by means of the 'Delivery' tab in POS. The number of each item in stock at each Stock Location can be viewed in HOPS > Shop System in the 'Inventory' tab, and in POS in Stock > Stock Levels. When an item is refunded, and POS gives an option for whether it will be returned to stock or not. If it is damaged, so not being returned to stock, it will go Customer > Stock Location > Waste in one movement. If it is being returned to stock it will go Customer > Stock Location. Please let us know if you find any anomalies.
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 1127 16 January 2025	SYSTEM MIGRATION You may experience issues uploading/downloading files from HOPS. These files will be available again when the maintenance work is completed later this morning.
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 1123 6 January 2025	POINT OF SALE A 'reason' field has now been added when a supervisor adjusts the price of an item at the point of sale.
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.