Skip to content

Changelog

This document logs the changes made in each UB Autolab version. You can view the detailed commit history in the GitHub repository.

2025.0.5

Deployed 2025-06-17

  • Bug fix: Assessment dates are validated to be compatible with MySQL TIMESTAMP type to prevent soft-locking the course.
  • Bug fix: Code difference viewer now supports non-ASCII files.
  • UX: Handin form is reset when navigating with browser back button.
  • Literature: Documentation links throughout Autolab have been updated to refer to this interactive documentation site.
  • New feature: Add support for Matomo Analytics.

2025.0.4

  • Performance improvement: Assessment page loads much faster (~700 ms to ~100 ms).
  • Performance improvement: Manage course page loads much faster.
  • Literature: Update VM images hint to refer to our new Autograding Images repository

2025.0.3

  • UX: Lines of code longer than 80 characters won't be highlighted by default. (Some users were confused about what this meant.)
  • Literature: Footer includes a link to our new status page, and the contact page has more information about source code.

2025.0.2

  • Bug fix: Previewing GitHub submissions has been fixed.
  • UI: Updated favicon on error pages to be blue instead of red.

2025.0.1

Deployed 2025-01-27

  • Literature: Display warning about not sharing MOSS results with students.
  • New feature: Import assessment groups from CSV file.
  • UX: Manage Submissions 2.0 search is now case-insensitive and suggests matching users while searching.
  • UI: Fixed orange writeup badge and red attachment section header to be blue.
  • Convenience: Course/assessment logs are no longer rotated (instructors want all logs in one file).
  • Bug fix: GitHub submission URL has been fixed.

2025.0.0

Deployed 2025-01-13

This update merges upstream updates from CMU version 3.0.0. Notable changes include:

  • A difference viewer has been added to highlight changes between submissions.
  • Students can export all of their submissions globally for archival.
  • Students can optionally self-enroll in courses with a join code.
  • Courses can be exported.
  • Breadcrumbs and page titles have been improved.

2024.1.3

  • Bug fix: "Dropped course" message will not display on the next page loaded after viewing a dropped course.
  • Security improvement: Prevent HTML injection on "grade submissions" page. (Advisory)
  • Security improvement: Prevent instructors from updating grades in an arbitrary course. (Advisory)

2024.1.2

  • New feature: GitHub submission metadata will be included in settings.json.

2024.1.1

  • UI improvement: Maximum total score is rounded to 3 decimal places in submission history table.
  • Bug fix: Autograder feedback will be updated upon regrading a submission even if the autograder has an error. preventing grading. (Useful for instructors to debug their autograders.)

2024.1.0

  • Bug fix: Course and assessment attachments will be ordered explicitly.
  • Security improvement: The session cookie explicitly sets the secure and same_site attributes.
  • Bug fix: Fixed maximized code preview bug where the customizable layout wouldn't load properly after refreshing the page if you maximized the code panel.
  • Literature: Removed legacy Autolab message.
  • Literature: Mention that CSE IT doesn't control course enrollment on contact page.
  • Performance improvement: Manage Submissions 2.0 filters to latest submission by default to avoid loading more submissions than are usually necessary.

2024.0.9

Deployed 2024-03-16

  • Bug fix: The "Group options" link under "Options" on an assessment has been corrected.

2024.0.8

Deployed 2024-03-09

  • Bug fix: Submissions can now be sorted by individual problem scores on the "Grade Submissions" page if there are students who haven't made a submission.

2024.0.7

Deployed 2024-03-02

  • Logging improvement: When a student makes a submission, it will be logged to the assessment log. This is in addition to the existing autograded score logging.

2024.0.6

Deployed 2024-02-24

  • Bug fix: When submission archives are extracted to send to MOSS, add a prefix to all file names to avoid dotfiles not being included in the glob.

2024.0.5

Deployed 2024-02-17

  • Convenience improvement: Unique assessment names (used for URLs) are generated more intelligently.
    • E.g., "Lab 1: Intro to Git (practice)" will become "Lab-1-Intro-to-Git-practice" instead of "Lab."
  • Logging improvement: When a student downloads an attachment for an assessment, it will be logged to the assessment log.
  • Bug fix: Existing users' first and last names will not be updated from roster uploads.

2024.0.4

Deployed 2024-02-10

  • New feature: Scoreboards can optionally include instructors.
  • Bug fix: Attempting to RegEx match an integer for pluralization (ApplicationController#pluralize) will no longer raise an exception.
  • Literature: Messages for when downloading attachments is restricted to section times AND handins are disabled for an assessment have been clarified for both students and instructors.
  • Literature: The prior courses message has been updated to reflect our plans to shut down the previous version: "Courses prior to fall 2023 are still available on our legacy site at autograder.cse.buffalo.edu. You must be on a UB network to access it. The legacy site will shut down during the summer of 2024, so please download any work you'd like to keep before then."

2024.0.3

Deployed 2024-01-18

  • Security improvement: Instructors cannot upload arbitrary Ruby scripts for courses or assessments anymore. This feature is still available if you contact CSE IT, but it poses too much of a security risk if left unsupervised.
  • Literature: The wording on 404 and 500 error pages has been updated, and debugging information is shown to admins only.

2024.0.2

Deployed 2024-01-16

  • New feature: The "Manage Submissions 2.0" page can now filter to latest submissions only.
  • Performance improvement: The "Edit Assessment" page loads much quicker because we are no longer scanning each submission to see if there are any annotations.
  • Security improvement: Course email features have been disabled.
  • Bug fix: The OAuth app authorization page title is set correctly instead of "Authorize @pre_auth.client.name".
  • Literature: Authorized application permissions have been explained better.

2024.0.1

This version was never officially deployed into production.

  • New feature: Introduce UB versioning separate from CMU versioning. The UB and CMU versions are included in the footer of nearly every page.

Prior to UB Versioning

Before implementing UB versioning separate from CMU versioning, there were many improvements made to UB's variant of Autolab.

January 2024

  • CMU Merge: Updates made upstream by CMU from May 23, 2023 through January 8th, 2024 have been merged into UB Autolab.
  • Security/performance: Schedulers were disabled to improve both security and performance. Nobody ever used this feature, but it posed an arbitrary code execution risk.
  • Bug fix: For group submissions, the submitter is the owner of the Tango job, rather than the first member of the group.
  • Literature: The capitalization of "Autolab Self-Service Portal" was standardized.
  • Literature: The capitalization of "Autolab" was standardized. (There was only one location where it was incorrect.)
  • Performance: Heap analytics has been removed. We never used this, and it was only causing silent client-side errors.

December 2023

  • New feature: The "Manage Submissions 2.0" page has been implemented with much faster performance than the previous version (~78x faster).
  • Convenience improvement: After a bulk grade import, instructors are offered to release all grades immediately.
  • Bug fix: Update the frontend to allow annotations without a problem specified (for general comments without scores).
  • Bug fix: IP addresses from UB VPN users will be logged correctly.

October 2023

  • Bug fix: Semantic feedback won't be parsed as JSON unless it's a Ruby hash (JSON object).
  • Convenience improvement: If a user was created automatically without having their first name specified, their first name will automatically be updated the first time they log in.
  • UI improvement: The maximum total score is included in the submissions table header.
  • UI improvement: The "since" datestamp formatting has been improved on the Tango jobs page.
  • Bug fix: Instructors can view detailed information about Tango jobs for their own courses.
  • Bug fix: Submissions can always be downloaded, even if handins are disabled.
  • UI improvement: A detailed error message is shown if a student submits when they aren't allowed to.
    • Perhaps they loaded the page before the due date, but clicked submit after the due date.

September 2023

  • New feature: UB Course Sections have been implemented to granularly specify assessment start and end times for each section.
  • New feature: Attachments can be restricted to only be available during a student's lecture/section time.
  • New feature: Per-assessment section offsets can be specified.
  • Literature: Documentation for the UB Course Sections feature has been linked in the relevant settings panel.
  • Bug fix: The author of an annotation will not be updated if the annotation is moved.
  • Bug fix: Annotation authors cannot be spoofed.
  • Security improvement: The handin directory and handin filename are validated more strictly.
  • Security improvement: The writeup and handout cannot be set to a file. Resolves this path traversal vulnerability.
  • Bug fix: Tango will receive a unique settings.json filename to avoid collisions between students.
  • UI improvement: GitHub submissions will be the default handin tab, if available.
  • UI improvement: 100 GitHub repos (API maximum) will be queried from GitHub instead of 30 to make it easier to find one in the dropdown list.
  • API update: Course section management (non-public) endpoints have been added.

August 2023

  • New feature: The Grader Assignment Tool (part of the Autolab Self-Service Portal) API endpoints have been created.
  • Convenience improvement: Multiple problems can be added to an assessment rapidly without returning to the edit page.
  • Bug fix: First and last names have a maximum length enforced.
  • Convenience improvement: Instructors are warned when an assessment has an autograder but no problems.
  • UI improvement: An "extra credit" warning displays when manually grading a problem with a higher score than the maximum. This doesn't prevent saving because some professors want to assign extra credit.

July 2023

  • Bug fix: Rapid submissions won't result in duplicate version numbers.
  • Literature: Links to general documentation have been added to the contact/resources page.

May and June 2023

We began working on the new version of UB Autolab in May 2023. The previous version was over 5 years old and very outdated. CMU added many new features and fixed many security issues since our original deployment.

This major renovation included:

  • Restyling the entire application to fit UB's blue color scheme
  • Updating wording and links throughout
  • Implementing Shibboleth authentication
  • Improving logging
  • Adding settings.json to every submission
  • Disabling self-registration
  • Configuring the Docker environment (spanning 7 different servers!)