Dear Kanka users, we are as always excited to have a brand new release come out today. We’re introducing user profiles, bulk creating entities in the quick creator, upcoming yearly subscription alerts, and much more.

User Profiles

Sometimes you stumble on a public campaign and want to learn more about its creator. With the new public user profiles, you can do just that and more. You can find your own profile by clicking on your avatar in the top right of Kanka, and clicking on your avatar or name in the dropdown.

You can also find a link to a user’s profile in the history of an entity, or a campaign’s member list.

On a profile page, you can find general information on a Kanka user. For example when they joined Kanka, what subscriber status they have, and Discord if the profile is set up. An editable biography field is also fillable from your profile settings, as well as a link to their marketplace profile. The end of the page displays the public campaigns that user is a member of.

Bulk creating entities in the quick creator

Our March 2022 community vote runner up was to allow multiple entity creation in Kanka. This is now possible in the quick creator. The name field has a new “+” button to add more names for entities that will be created.

Each name has its own duplicate name warning check to avoid confusion.

Upcoming yearly subscription alert

Users who have a yearly subscription will get an email one month before their next payment. This should help in unexpected charges.

Other general improvements

When creating or editing an entity, you can no longer add more attributes than the servers can handle. We’ve also doubled the max number of fields that the servers can process to allow more complex character sheets.

Maps will now always “stick” to avoid being able to pan outside of a map and make it invisible.

Character races now always list in the order they were added to a character, rather than sometimes alphabetically and sometimes randomly.

If an entity only has a death, there is confusion as to what the number represents. We’re adding the cross icon to hopefully better indicate that it’s the number of years since death.

Public campaigns now have their Plugins page visible to all. Admins of a campaign still see all plugins, but non-admin only see activated plugins.

We’ve made changes to “mention” helper link and page for text fields for more clarity.

In an entity’s headers, tags get a new data-tag-slug HTML property to be able to target them with custom CSS.

Changes to ads

We’ve once again made tweaks to ads. We really dislike the unpredictability of the ads that are automatically being injected in the page at random places (including some showing in a popup when clicking on a link). To make the overall Kanka experience better, we are now running experiments where we have more control of where ads are shown.

This won’t affect the overall ad load, but should make it a more predictable and consistent experience across Kanka for users.

Boring tech stuff

Many of the various CSS and Javascript assets of Kanka now live as a single file, instead of having multiple files load on each page.

We also spent time refactoring some of the dashboard database queries to reduce their overall number and stress on our servers, which results in faster loading times during high usage of Kanka.

A lot of pages and information related to Kanka’s pricing and subscription systems are now unavailable to self-hosted versions of Kanka.

Bug fixes

Creating a new ability through a mention is now possible.

When creating or editing a character, opening the quick creator to create a new character would break the race and family field.

Bulk actions on list didn’t redirect to the nested views if those were set.

Fixed a bug where a non-admin of a campaign could add themselves to the admin role. Also fixed a bug where someone removing themselves from the admin role could add themselves back.

Copying a map marker correctly copies its colour and background colour.

Fixed some missing translation strings in the app.

On the marketplace, the number of installs now only counts plugins on boosted campaigns.

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That’s it for 1.24, we hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed working on it! If you missed 1.23, you can head over to the release notes.

As always, thank you to our amazing subscribers who make these frequent updates possible. Come join us and our community on our Discord server!