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

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Time Date	System Updates
Update 1106 1 December 2024	A new 'Internal Remarks' facility has been added to turns on rosters. This shows only on Construct Rosters and is intended for the roster clerk to make notes to themselves, eg where a person has been rostered for a specific reason such as to avoid lapsing or following a specific request. The internal remarks can be edited in 'Quick Assign' or 'Edit Turn Details'.
Update 1068 4 September 2024	Adjustments have taken place in connection with gradual conversion of Rosters to New HOPS format - User Roster and My Roster are in the new format. Improvements have been made to ensure these pages reflect Railway Time (regardless of the physical location of the viewer). At the same time, improvements were made to the Next Operating Days widget on the home page to ensure that respects Railway Time correctly.
Update 1069 3 September 2024	Update reporting on ticket system developments commenced.
Update 1067 24 August 2024	The diagrams, locos and staff working each train is now shown on train list tab of the daily page, with links to the appropriate roster and the user details page (for obtaining phone numbers etc) Eg https://www.hops.org.uk/operations_date.php?d=2024-08-22&t=t
Update 1064 5 August 2024	A warning has been added in the 'Add New User' page if a user with the same firstname and surname already exists. This will hopefully reduce the volume of duplicated users being added.
Update 1065 5 August 2024	The 'Save as Draft', 'Publish' etc buttons at the top of Members' News have been separated out to make their operation clearer.
Update 1066 5 August 2024	The Competence Element Requirements section of the Role Editing page has been overhauled to make it easier to search and find the desired element, especially where the number of elements on the railway is very large.
Update 1061 30 July 2024	Various updates to My Roster and User Roster have taken place. Please let us know if you find any issues.
Update 1062 30 July 2024	A tooltip has been provided on the Accommodation Bookings chart to enable the full details of very short bookings to be seen at-a-glance.
Update 1063 30 July 2024	An 'Unattribute' button has been added to Spot Reports to enable attribution errors to be undone.
Update 1060 6 May 2024	There will be two HOPS Annual General Forums for HOPS Admins and senior managers at Advanced HOPS Subscribers this year. Event 1 and Event 2 are identical. There are two events to offer maximum flexibility to 9-5 staff and volunteer staff with day jobs, UK staff and Australian staff. Staff from either country may attend either event. The meeting will be via MS Teams. There will be: - a presentation about the developments of HOPS in the last year - plans for the coming year and future developments - changes in the heritage railway landscape - HOPS staffing arrangements - fees and costs - long-term plans - an opportunity for questions and comments. This is (one of) your opportunities to steer the future development of the program. Attendees need to please register to gain access to the meeting. Please email alan.johnson@hops.org.uk to register. More than one attendee per organisation is permitted.... but please not hundreds! * EVENT 1 The first is on Tuesday 11 June 2023 at 9.30am (British Summer Time), and is timed for the convenience of UK employed staff for whom it is during work time, and volunteer Australian staff for whom it is in the evening. This meeting is at 9.30am UK time. The UK will be on British Summer Time at the date of the meeting. 0900 BST is: 1100 SAST in South Africa 1100 CEST in Italy 1830 ACST in South Australia 1900 AEST in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales Attendees from the UK or Australia are welcome to attend. * EVENT 2 The second AGF event is on Thursday 20 June 2023 at 7pm, is timed for the convenience of volunteer staff in the UK who have day job during the day. Event 2 is at 7pm (UK time). The UK will be on British Summer Time at the date of the meeting. 1900 BST is: 2100 SAST in South Africa 2100 CEST in Italy 0330 (21/6/24) ACST in South Australia 0400 (21/6/24) AEST in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales Event 1 and 2 are identical, and staff from any country may attend either event, but Australian staff may prefer to attend Event 1 which is at a more convenient Australian time.
Update 865 4 May 2022	HOPS FREE SMS Virtual Workshops No 25, via Facebook Live screencast, on the subject of the the DfT's proposed changes to signage at private crossings. We are delighted to say we will be joined by Dominic Beglin, chair of the minor railways section of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers for this workshop. The consultation can be downloaded here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1067720/improving-signage-at-private-level-crossings.pdf (Note this is a change to the previously advertised topic for this workshop, which will be re-scheduled for a future date) https://www.hops.org.uk/workshops This workshop concentrates on the development of safety management systems in the context of a heritage railway. Following an excellent suggestion after the first workshop, we invite all participants who wish to to sent in their current SMS overall document to HOPS HQ. This will enable us to read all of them before the Workshop and combine all the best practices. Thank you for this great idea which will help make the workshop even more widely-considered and demonstrate inclusion of input from a wider range of railways! All content will be anonymised before inclusion, so please don't be concerned that you're exposing yourself or your company to liability. --- HOPS has been involved in writing, reviewing or updating Safety Management Systems on a number of railways and is often asked for help on the subject, so we have arranged to continue our successful live online workshops programme in 2021 with the series of SMS Best Practice workshops. The Workshops take place at six-week intervals at 7pm on Tuesday nights. They are live discussion videos, freely available to everyone to attend and ask questions live which we will try our best to answer as we go along based on our experience of SMSs and the management in general of heritage and main line railways. The videos will also be available to watch again later on YouTube. While all railways are different, there are many opportunities for overlap in SMS wording and a majority of overlapping SMS principles that can be applied. The six-week interval between workshops gives time in between each session for the local review and, where railways wish to, adaptation of the output to suit their local needs, before moving on to the next subject. Whatever the strength of your current SMS, it is always good to review it, and good to be able to demonstrate you've reviewed it and engaged with the peer-reviewed best practice. So please do join in the HOPS workshops, share your knowledge, and see what you can learn from other organisations too! --- HOPS has a great many tools to assist in the management of volunteer and employed staff at heritage and volunteer organisations. Previous HOPS Workshops are available to view on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeritageOps/videos/ and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRu_xPovYjpBegbwS-89jUg EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO JOIN IN. We will respond to comments and queries raised via the comments section during the live video. The video will start at 7pm and last approximately 90 minutes. https://www.facebook.com/events/4872208979571955/
Update 547 15 February 2019	A Facebook Group has been created for HOPS Admins. https://www.facebook.com/groups/HOPSAdmins/ A group for HOPS Administrators to have discussions, ask questions of each other, share best practice, etc. Only genuine HOPS Admins will be accepted to maintain the integrity of the discussion. This group runs in parallel to the discussion forum for HOPS Admins in HOPS itself (permission 106/110). This is *not* a mechanism for raising support requests or bug reports "officially". I (Danny) will post here more admin-oriented updates about HOPS developments than it sensible to post on the main page, I'll also post what I post on the System Updates list (HOPS > System > System Updates), with pictures, etc. The Facebook Group is different from the Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/HeritageOps/ which is available to everyone and contains more 'public' updates.
Update 286 17 February 2015	Hello Some users may not realise that, apart from a small number of advanced features to some specific railways, the HOPS system is provided to railways totally free of charge. And always will be. The demands of delivering HOPS support to railways has steadily grown in proportion to the usage of the system, but my ability to provide that support has remained constant. Unfortunately it now way outstrips the time I have available to provide it in a timely manner. I am aware that a number of enquiries have received poor or no responses recently, and I am now running about a backlog of several weeks of support enquiries in my inbox. Railway HOPS Administrators can help this situation by raising things to do with the operation of the software that other Railway HOPS Administrators might be able to help with on the forum provided for the purpose (Accessible only to railway HOPS admins, permissions 106 and 110 required). Many of the same queries come up on different railways and have been solved or answered before on there and a number of railway admins are happy to share their experience with pride! Anything personal or specifically to do with your railway I am afraid will have to wait in the queue. (I normally /read/ everything that comes in to make sure any emergencies are dealt with). Unfortunately I have a "real" day job to attend to, and only have evenings and weekends for HOPS. I also run the shop, which helps pay for the expenses of HOPS's services. In order to help the situation from my end in the long-term, I am looking into devising a support licensing system. This will guarantee a service level agreement (and off the back of it some long-awaited future developments). Several HOPS railways have indicated their wish for a scheme such as this to be community-funded in the same ethos that HOPS exists for the community. As small crowd-funded investment in this context could return value a great deal more than the sum of its parts. I envisage that the scheme will provide a full-time employed person for HOPS maintenance, support and further development or operational and commercial components of the system. HOPS has grown into a great tool for the operational management and governance of heritage railways (and other heritage organisations) all over the UK, Europe and as far afield as Australia - like any developing system it has to take some painful steps as it matures, and hopefully this next step in the development of the HOPS system will facilitate a strong future of support and developments for railways. Please don't be think that I am about to pull the rug from under HOPS's 'free' status. Railways who wish to continue to use the software without joining the support licensing scheme will be very welcome to do so. More info will be circulated to Railway HOPS Admins when it is available! Thanks Danny Scroggins
Update 106 4 October 2011	I have implemented validity dates for timetables. This is to allow the creation of 'next' year's timetables, without clogging up the current list of timetables and confusing everyone (ie, by having 'Blue 2011' and 'Blue 2012', etc. I haven't done it specific to a year, because otherwise it would get confusing as each railway has it's own idea of what a 'year' is, and sometimes they overlap! So I have allowed each timetable to either be valid for 'all' dates, or 'from' and 'to' specific dates. Only timetables that are currently valid will be shown to users in the list of timetables, users with edit privileges will have options to show past and future timetables. When assigning a timetable to a date in the operations calendar, only timetables that will be valid on that date can be selected.