Three Rings

Today we welcomed our 100th Samaritans branch to Three Rings, meaning that half of all Samaritans branches in the UK are now using the system. It’s good to know we’re even more popular than the old favourite of pens and paper!

A view of Leicester branch, painted by local artist Sue. Used with permission.

The 100th branch is Leicester, who run a managed rota and have been using a DOS-based program to automatically assign shifts for the last 20 years, showing a serious dedication to making life easier on their rota secretaries! Thanks to the Autopopulator functionality we introduced in Milestone Iridium, Leicester are now trialling Three Rings against an updated version of their DOS program to see which one best matches their needs.

While they’re making their choice, Leicester are making use of our standard one calendar month free trial to see how well Three Rings suits them without any obligation until the 1st of March. That’s fine by us – while we love it when the organisations come to us are already sure Three Rings is the right choice for them, it’s equally wonderful to see a branch taking the time to experiment and make absolutely certain that they’re getting the system that best suits their style.

We’ve only been offering Three Rings to Samaritans since 2008, and we’d like to think that reaching the milestone of supporting 50% of branches in so little time is speaks for the quality of our features itself, but no matter what organisation you’re from, if you’re not sure Three Rings is right for you, you can always follow Leicester Samaritans’ example and use both the standard free trial and our special Anniversary Discount to find out!

There are 200 bricks-and-mortar Samaritans branches spread throughout the UK and Ireland, and an increasing number of them are using Three Rings.

We encourage our users to get in touch to suggest new features for future versions of the system, but sometimes branches just have great ideas of their own!

Each Samaritans branch in the UK gets a Branch Visit every few years, where two Samaritans from a different part of the country visit the branch. Partly this is to help ensure Samaritans offers a unified service (so if a caller rings Telford one night, and Preston the next, they’ll be listened to just as carefully as if they’d called London), but it’s also a chance for branches to demonstrate what they’re doing well, and what ideas they’ve had that other branches might be able to benefit from.

Normally that’s an internal process, but we were recently contacted by Jayne from Warrington, Halton & St. Helens branch, who found she was able to use Three Rings to make their branch visit a lot easier:

We find the filestore an incredibly useful feature of 3Rings. We upload Committee minutes, OGT material, branch bulletins, meeting powerpoints etc so that everyone can have access to them where ever they are. As a Caretaker Director, living an hour away from the branch, this is particularly helpful for me.

However, when preparing for our Branch Visit and gathering all the paperwork to be sent to the Visitors, 3Rings really came into its own!

We created temporary accounts for both of our Visitors, with permission to ‘view’, so they could then log in to look at all the documents in the filestore, see our rota, our directory of volunteers and all the news and updates from the overview page. They were able to get a really good feel for the work of the branch and I didn’t have to send out a single piece of paperwork, which saved a huge amount of work. It couldn’t have been easier for us or for our Visitors.

Not one of us here at Three Rings had thought of using the system that way, but we think it’s brilliant: Branch Visits can mean a Director has even more on their plate, and to use Three Rings to make the visit easier on both the visitors and the branch is such a great idea we couldn’t help but share!

Thanks to Jayne for letting us know – and if any one else has found a clever way of using Three Rings that other people might not have thought of, we’d love to hear from you!

Here at Three Rings HQ we want to offer you more than just great features to help manage your helpline: we want to offer you easy ways to keep in touch with us, too. We do this though our contact form, the Discussion List and Chatroom and, of course, this blog.

Up to now, you’ve been able to follow blog posts either by checking in now and then, or by using our RSS feed ( either with a RSS reader built into your web browser, or a free online RSS reader like Bloglines or Google Reader).

However, RSS can be daunting for some people and, if you’re not regularly following other RSS feeds, asking you to start just so we can talk to you seems a bit pushy! Instead, we’ve launched an account on Twitter, @3RingsLtd, which we’ll update each time we make a post here on the blog.

So if you’re on Twitter, and want to get links to new blog posts without using RSS, follow us here!

Summary:

Three Rings’ documentation website was exposed to a malware attack over the New Year period. Thanks to the high level of security countermeasures we have in place data on the live site remained entirely secure during the attack, however some users attempting to access Three Rings by running a Google search for the specific term ’3r.org.uk’ may have been exposed to malware going by the name ‘Windows Vista 2012 Security’, or similar variations.

Once installed on a computer the malware creates fake warnings about viruses it claims are on the user’s computer, and asks them to pay for the ‘full’ version of the tool. Users should not pay for this, since there are no viruses, and paying will simply cause the program to cease faking warnings once it has their money.

Any users that are concerned are advised to run an antivirus check. While Three Rings does not specifically endorse any one antivirus or security system, users who do not already have antivirus software installed can find free versions of both AVG Antivirus and Microsoft Security Essentials which should work perfectly well.

That’s the key information. However, in line with our commitment to open and transparent operation, we’re also providing you with the details of this attack, so that you can see exactly what happened, who may have been affected, and what we’ve learned and are doing about the incident:

What happened:

The Three Rings system runs on its own dedicated server, at 3r.org.uk. Other websites are also hosted on that server, including the ‘corporate’ site – www.threerings.org.uk – and the Documentation site, docs.3r.org.uk. You may notice that the web address for the Documentation site is almost the same as the address for the live site – it’s just got ‘docs.’ written in front of it. This is technically known as a ‘subdomain,’ because it is part of the larger ’3r.org.uk’ website.

TinyMCE version 2.1.2 is an off-the-shelf application that was used in one of the other websites hosted on the Three Rings server (and was nothing to do with the ‘live’ site that hosts our clients’ data). A vulnerability in TinyMCE came under attack from a ‘botnet,’ an automated network of computers based in Russia.

This was not a targeted attack on Three Rings: the botnet was trying random addresses, in a bid to make money from malware victims, and – like any Internet server could be – the Three Rings’ server simply got caught in the line of fire.  Using the many computers under its control to ‘brute force’ the password on that application, the Botnet kept guessing passwords repeatedly until one worked. This took place over the course of three days, but was not detected because the botnet used it’s network distribution to switch IP address every three attempts, and thus evade our countermeasures designed to detect multiple password attempts from one location.

Having cracked the password, the botnet was able to exploit the vulnerability in the TinyMCE application to upload malicious code to the Three Rings server. Thanks to our particularly hardened security policies, the live site 3r.org.uk was protected from this code, and no direct damage to any data stored on Three Rings took place. However, the malicious code did allow the botnet to ‘poison’ (ie, corrupt) the .htaccess file in the Documentation website.

What it did:

The effect of this poisoned file on the Documentations page meant that users in a specific set of circumstances could be exposed to the ‘Windows Vista 2012 Security’ malware. This affected those users who:

1. Were running Microsoft Windows, and
2. Using vulnerable versions of Internet Explorer as their web browser, and
3. Ran a Google search for ’3r.org.uk’ rather than accessing the site directly.

The live website, 3r.org.uk, uses what is known as a Robots file to prevent search engines from showing it in their search results. However, because of a quirk in the way Google treats subdomains, searches for 3r.org.uk incorrectly generated links to the documentation site, at docs.3r.org.uk.

Because the .htaccess file at docs.3r.org.uk had been corrupted by the botnet’s malicious code, users who googled ’3r.org.uk’ while using Internet Explorer and running Microsoft Windows and subsequently clicked on the link to the Documentation website provided in the Google search results will instead have been forcibly redirected to a site called ‘Spacer Float’. That website then took advantage of a known vulnerability existing in some versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer to install the ‘Vista Security 2012′ malware onto their computer.

How we’re responding:

We’re fairly confident that the impact of this attack will have been minimal: the crucial data on the Three Rings live site was protected thanks to our robust countermeasures, which kept the data secure even after the botnet managed to add one file to the server, and the set of circumstances required for the malware to infect a user’s computer are very specific, and likely to be comparatively uncommon. However, there’s still a lot we’ve been able to learn, and steps we’ll be taking to prevent this sort of problem from happening again:

• Countermeasures on the Three Rings server designed to detect attempts to brute-force passwords were thwarted by the sheer scale of the botnet: it looked like lots of different users were accessing the server, not like a single controlling network was mounting an attack from multiple computers. We’re currently investigating ways we can better-detect this sort of attack without erroneously blocking genuine users who are accessing the system from different computers.
• Some of our users are evidently more comfortable accessing Three Rings through Google and other search engines, rather than using a Favourites or Bookmark link, or typing 3r.org.uk into their browser’s address bar. Because this led to their searches returning links to the Documentation site (and thus to forced redirects due to the corrupt file), we’re looking into ways we can generate more relevant search results for such users, to ensure they find results better matching the pages they’re actually looking for.
• The compartmentalised nature of the Three Rings server helped to keep the live site, and all its data, safe throughout this attack. We’re now in the process of adding further safeguards to the system, isolating the separate websites into distinct user groups. This alone would have foiled the botnet attack, limiting it’s capacity for damage to the TinyMCE program alone and protecting the Documentation website from damage. Implementing this now will ensure no further attacks of this nature are effective.

What users can do:

Just because we’ve stopped this attack from damaging Three Rings doesn’t mean other websites will have been so careful! However, there are a few things users can do to limit their exposure to both Vista Security 2012 and other malware when using the Internet:

• Use a virus scanner. If you’re not using one already, it’s worth the investment – especially with effective free solutions such as Avast, AVG, and Microsoft Security Essentials joining the ranks of commercial products like McAfee, Norton, and others: as long as you’ve got up-to-date antivirus software, you should be warned of any malware threats before they can do any damage.
• Keep both your operating system and your web browser up to date. Automatic updates and new versions will help to prevent malware from exploiting loopholes or bugs in your software: install new updates as they become available, rather than ignoring them or waiting until the last minute.
• Where possible, consider increasing your system security by using a more-secure web browser. All web browsers can be vulnerable, and the more out of date a browser is, the greater the risk. This can be particularly true of older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. For more information about getting the best and most-secure browser for your computer, see BrowserHappy.com.
• Always try to enter the web address yourself, if you know it. You can use a search engine to find the page for you, but this can be more risky: hackers may attempt to poison search results or will buy fake advertisements on search engines in order to try to lure you into clicking on the wrong thing. If you’re at a computer you use regularly, you can add bookmarks/favourites for your most-visited sites, so you never even have to search for them, and won’t need to keep typing the address each time.
• If you have been seeing warnings for Windows Vista 2012 Security, you can get instructions on how to remove it from your computer from SpywareRemove or from BleepingComputer.

Finally, just in case you’re not sure, here’s a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer that shows what Windows Vista 2012 Security looks like if it’s on your computer (remember – it’s malware, so these ‘Viruses’ aren’t on the computer shown, they’re just made up to scare you!):

This does look pretty convincing (apart from the spelling mistake!). Click for a larger view.

We’d like to apologise once again for any problems this has caused: while the key data on Three Rings was indeed kept secure by our various defence systems, it’s very unfortunate that this exploit was able to happen on our server. It’s precisely because this shouldn’t have happened that we’re taking the time to tell you how it did: so you can not only see the steps we’re taking to prevent such a problem repeating, but also be assured that – if there ever is a problem like this – we won’t try to hide it from you.

For the past three years, Three Rings has sent out a Christmas Card to every organisation using the system. Where we can, we like to use this opportunity to recognise the amazing work that’s being done by those volunteers we support. Of course the organisations using Three Rings do great work all the year round, but at Christmas – which most studies show can be a particularly tough time for those in distress – it’s amazing to reflect on how many volunteer take time out from their own time with friends and families to try and make life easier for people that have no-one else to turn to.

We tried to convey this with our Christmas card from last year, which showed a volunteer absorbed in a call even as Santa made his rounds, but this year we wanted to reflect the fact that there are people all around the world offering crucial support services, as well as having something that just looked a bit more fun!

So we got in touch with a fellow volunteer, who also happens to work as an artist, and gave her a few ideas about what we’d like to see. (If you like the final product, her name is Eleanor Reed, and she can be contacted by emailing  eleanorhr[at]gmail.com – just replace that “[at]” with the “@” symbol). Here’s a few photographs showing how the cards made it to your door!

Our artist gets to work:

Sketches based on early ideas (and tempered by the size of a Christmas card!)

Once the sketches were done, it was time to fill in the background colour using Photoshop:

Things are starting to take shape behind the glare of the monitor

Thanks to the number of organisations now using Three Rings, we needed to get quite a lot of cards printed out…

Signing and addressing all of these took a while!

We had Paul, the company secretary, get the cards in the post (although he didn’t actually do them one-at-a-time):

Paul's still holding that box full of cards. Apparently it was quite heavy!

All in all, it probably took more effort than last year’s card – although a lot of that work was Eleanor’s! – but we’re really pleased with the result. So we thought we’d share it here, too:

Notice the fundraising robins! (As with all the photos in this post, click to see it bigger)

So from all of us here at Three Rings, have a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

Three Rings is 10 years old in 2012! And, to celebrate our birthday and our Nightline roots, we’re giving every organisation using Three Rings a discount: every invoice issued in 2012 will be at our ‘unaffiliated Nightline’ rate of just £40!

Back in 2002, Three Rings was a tiny project intended to help the 10 or so volunteers that ran Aberystwyth Nightline. But word of mouth soon spread, and more and more Nightlines began to adopt Three Rings, and each new organisation wanted to tell other organisations about us…

The login page for Three Rings v0.721. Codenamed "Aloha", this was the first version to provide the Wiki feature.

…Now, ten years later, Three Rings supports over ten thousand users, at more than a hundred and twenty separate organisations, including Nightlines, Samaritans, and similar support networks around the UK and Ireland – and some even further afield.

Throughout that time, our aim has been the same: to streamline helpline administration so that volunteers can devote more time helping their callers, and less time to paperwork. We’ve aimed to provide the highest quality service, and the best, most flexible system we can make, at the lowest price we can afford so that every Three Rings client – from the largest Samaritans branch to the smallest Nightline – gets the best deal available, and can save more resources to devote to things like training and publicity.

We’ve always been open about our pricing structure: individual Samaritans branches pay £150 a year, with no extra set-up charges or support fees, and Samaritans regions get a discount rate of just £120 per branch and access to our powerful suite of Regional Tools to support collaboration between neighbouring branches. Meanwhile, we support the Nightline Association by providing Three Rings free to affiliated Nightlines, and for £40 a year to non-affiliated Nightlines.

We’ve been able to keep these charges low thanks to our own dedicated team of unpaid volunteers – including our grassroots champions and advocates amongst our users – and through the use of the same free, trusted technologies used by Internet giants such as Amazon and Google. Right from the start, we worked to ensure a scalable architecture and a strategic business model that meant Three Rings would become increasingly sustainable as its popularity grew, rather than risking the company overreaching itself with rapid expansion.

With our scalable business model, and over 120 organisations using Three Rings, we're able to continue to improve the system and still reward your faith in us so far.

Thanks to that scalable structure, each new organisation we bring on board helps to sustain and improve Three Rings for all the others and, as we enter our 10th year, we think it’s time we gave something back. We’ve been planning to do this for a while, and it’s the best way we can thank you for helping us to help everyone:

To celebrate our 10th Birthday, and to reflect our support for the Nightlines that helped inspire and improve early versions of Three Rings, every invoice we issue during 2012 will be for the ‘unaffiliated Nightline’ rate of just £40 per organisation. That means our standard rate for Samaritans Branches, for non-affiliated Nightlines, and for any other comparable organisation, will be just £40 for the whole of 2012 (unless you’re a Nightline affiliated with the Nightline Association, in which case we still won’t charge you anything!).

If you already use Three Rings, you’ll be invoiced on your usual date. Every organisation will be issued an invoice for just £40, as if they were an unaffilitated Nightline, even if they’d normally pay £150. Samaritans Regions will be invoiced at £40 per branch, instead of the usual discount of £120 per branch. And, if you’re an organisation that decides to start using Three Rings in 2012, you’ll still get our standard full calendar month trial, and an invoice for £40 if you’d like to keep using the system after that.

An early version of Three Rings being presented at a Nightline conference in 2003

A decade ago, we never dreamed this project could get so popular with Nightlines, let alone with organisations like Samaritans, but our aims haven’t changed: we still want to make it easier for you to get volunteers on shifts. It’s thanks to the support of our existing clients that we’re doing so well in achieving that goal, and it’s thanks to our future clients that we’ll be able to build on our successes in the future.

So this is our way of saying thanks, not just to the Nightlines that nurtured us in the past, but to the Samaritans that continue to suggest enhancements today, and to the organisations curious about what we can do for them over the coming months. It’s a thank-you not just for the support you’ve given to us, but for the assistance you’ve given your fellow Three Rings users, and the vital support you continue to give your callers. Enjoy this year’s celebratory discount, and have some cake on us!

This Saturday saw the successful release of the latest version of Three Rings, Milestone Iridium. Thanks for bearing with us over this longer-than-average release cycle while we implemented some of our most challenging – and valuable – features so far!

Everyone here at Three Rings HQ would like to offer our sincerest thanks to everyone on the testing team; the people who volunteered to explore the new system ahead of everyone else and give us their thoughts on the new features. Thanks to their efforts – whether they found a range of problems, or just wrote to say they’d looked around and found everything worked the way it should do – every user of Three Rings can be assured of a smoother experience, and improved features, confident in the knowledge that they aren’t walking into uncharted territory. It makes a massive difference to see how our testers would use the system ‘in the wild,’ and Three Rings wouldn’t be the excellent system it is today without their time and dedication.

We’d also like to thank everyone who was able to join us in our IRC chatroom for the online launch party: it was wonderful to see members of different branches and organisations chatting and networking with one another, on topics ranging from training exercises, though listening styles to the marketing reasons behind 3D cinema! Even if you only looked in for a couple of minutes, it was great for us to get a chance to chat with clients, and to see how many people stayed up to ‘see in the new Three Rings’!

Three Rings volunteers celebrating the completion of the Autopopulator, Milestone: Iridium's biggest new feature.

We’re done showing off new features until the next version, Milestone Jethrik, goes into beta testing (although we’ve not started feature planning yet, so if you’ve got a suggestion for a feature you’d like to see, please get in touch!), but that doesn’t mean we’re done with updates to the blog: we’re hoping to make an exciting announcement towards the end of the week, so be sure to watch this space!

Our aim here at Three Rings has always been to help streamline your organisation’s administration whilst enabling you to keep doing things in the way that works for you. We want organisations using Three Rings to find it makes their current practices simpler, rather than changes those practices to suit itself. But one of the practices where the system hasn’t always helped as much as it can is where helplines are using a ‘managed’ rota, and one or two volunteers assign shifts to everyone based on their availability.

If your organisation uses a ‘managed’ rota (as opposed to the ‘self-signup’ model Three Rings has traditionally worked better for), you probably find that it’s  the best way to ensure your volunteers get the shifts that suit them thanks to the Rota Secretaries in charge of matching the shifts to individual’s availability. Which is great for your volunteers, who don’t have to worry about unfair allocations, but can be a serious headache for your rota managers when they try to work out who fits where! That’s where Milestone: Iridium comes in.

This small purple button represents one of the biggest changes we've ever introduced.

Iridium’s flagship feature is Rota Autopopulation. A lot of the features we’ve already looked at, such as the New Rota Rules, the ability to Order Rotas, and, crucially, the Improved Availability Functions have all grown up around the changes we’ve made to enable automatic population of the rota based on the preferences of your organisation and the availability of your volunteers. This has been an incredibly complicated bit of software to implement, but as far as we can tell, Three Rings now provides the most sophisticated rota population tool of its kind anywhere in the world.

That’s because the Autopopulator doesn’t simply assign people at random, or even cycle through volunteers and sign people up to the first shift they can do. Instead – just like your real rota secretary – it tries to sign people up to the shift that’s best match for both them and the rest of your branch.

There are two key parts to this process: the setting of ‘preferences’ which enable you to tell the Autopopulator more about your organisation’s culture, and the way your rota secretaries work, and the Scorer/Allocator, which matches your volunteers to your open shifts based on those preferences. Strictly speaking, your preferences are a small part of an Autopopulation Ruleset, because you can have multiple Rulesets (so if you want to Autopopulate the Day Rota according to one set of preferences – such “It is very important that people do shifts at the same time” – you can keep that separate from your preferences in your Night Rota Ruleset – where one preference might be “It is very important that volunteers do not get lots of shifts close together”).

Setting up Rulesets, and specifying your preferences for that Ruleset is simple enough, but to actually understand what the Autopopulator does behind the scenes is a bit more tricky. That’s mainly because it does a lot of things all at once, which is excellent for big computer servers like the one behind Three Rings, but harder to explain to humans, who are used to thinking through problems one step at a time! So to take a closer look at how Autopopulator fills a rota, let’s image you’re Pat, a dedicated Rota Secretary at a fictional Samaritans branch in the small town of Nantway.

Autopopulation rulesets can be accessed via 'Your Rota' in the Admin panel

We’ll imagine you’re setting up Autopopulation for the very first time after the Iridium release on Saturday November 26th. Your first step is to create a Ruleset for the Day Rota. Nantway always plan shifts six weeks at a time, because that fits everyone’s commitment, so your first step will be to tell the Autopopulator to calculate six weeks at a time.

At Nantway, the Rota Secretaries have always tried to give people the shifts they’d most like to do, so you’ll want to set a preference for that, by checking the appropriate checkbox and moving the slider most of the way up. Equally, you doesn’t want anyone to have to do a lot of shifts all bunched together, so you’ll make some adjustments to the slider for ‘Shift Count Weighting’. Finally, your Branch policy in Nantway asks that volunteers try to vary which shifts they do, so you’ll also want to change the slider for ‘Favour Variable-Pattern’. (Of course, when your counterpart at the neighbouring branch in Gedstow comes to do this, she’ll make different choices – for a start, she’ll be populating up to 30 days at a time, rather than six weeks – but this setup is what works for your branch, and that’s the pattern Three Rings is going to work to.)

Once the Ruleset is in place, the Autopopulator can get to work. Just move to a date on the rota that you want to Autopopulate, and click on the purple Autopopulate button to get the magic going.

Now you’ve set it going, the Autopopulator starts to assign shifts, working in ’rounds’, giving all active volunteers one shift per round.  Firstly, it examines every shift, and works out all of the people who have said they are available to cover that shift. Then it scores volunteers by how available they are to do a shift, with higher scores meaning ‘more available’. At this point it also considers the preferences in the Ruleset, meaning a high availability might still result in a low score on a shift immediately after a shift that volunteer is already doing, or which they did the week before. Of course, volunteers prevented from doing a shift by Signup Rules – such as New Volunteers, or Probationers, or volunteers signed up to another rota with incompatible Exclusivity Rules – are also going to be scored deliberately poorly at this stage!

Once the Autopopulator has scored each person’s availability to work out which shift is best for them, it then works out if there are any other shifts for which they are a better match than anyone else. So if Bob is a 99% match for the Thursday afternoon shift, he’ll probably get it… But if Alice and Colin are 90 and 85% matches for that shift, and if Bob is also the best match for the Thursday overnight shift, then he’s still the best person to cover the Thursday overnight (even if he only matched at 70%, it’s better to give Alice the afternoon shift than to let Bob do it and make Colin cover the overnight with his very low score of 20% for night shifts).

This diagram clarifies the situation described above: Green represents the best match, Yellow a possible match, and Red a bad match. You can see Bob is the best match for the Thursday Overnight, and this makes him a worse match for Thursday afternoon (because otherwise he'd have two shifts in a row). Click for a bigger version.

Once every volunteer has got the shift that’s the best match for them (matched, like Bob, against everyone else’s scores), the scorer goes round again, and gives each volunteer the shift that is their next best match. This part of the process can be thought of as being similar to picking teams for games at school: if you imagine every volunteer is a ‘Team Captain’, and all the shifts are ‘players’, the system is automatically giving each Captain the shift they most want on their team. Once each Captain has a player, they go round again until their team is full, and there are no shifts/’players’ left to pick from! That’s not quite right, of course, because some volunteers aren’t allowed to pick certain shifts, and most shifts can be picked by more than one volunteer, but it’s a good way to think about what’s happening.

Once the Autopopulator has worked through each shift – and saved you some serious number-crunching – it will have created Nantway’s rota for the next six weeks, and given everyone shifts they can do. There might be a few quirks – it’s possible Bob will complain that he has to put off his trip to the cinema on Thursday! – but there shouldn’t be any major problems.

Of course, no system is perfect – not even a real live Rota Secretary! – but we’re confident that Three Rings’ autopopulator is as close to perfect as we can make it. Sometimes people’s availability will change, or they’ll have to pull out of a shift at short notice, and that’s fine: you and your organisation’s Rota management team can resolve that internally the same way you always have.

We’re not going to deny that it’s been a massive effort, but we hope this powerful new tool will make life substantially easier for your rota secretaries to keep your volunteers listening. And for us at Three Rings HQ, that’s what really matters.

The next upcoming release of Three Rings - Milestone: Iridium – is nearly upon us, and one of the things we’ve been working to improve is the “drag and drop” functionality in the Rota. We first talked about Drag and Drop back in March, and it’s proven so popular – especially among organisations that partly- or wholly-manage their rota centrally (e.g. by a Rota Secretary) – that we’ve decided to make it even better.

Drag-and-drop in the Rota.

One of the things that Three Rings users often tell us is that they’d like to be able to tell, at a glance, which volunteers haven’t yet been signed up to a shift this week, so they can concentrate their efforts on finding shifts for them.

The new "Drag and Drop" volunteer bin, with highlighted numbers of shifts alongside each volunteer.

Now, when you start using Drag and Drop to fill your rota, you’ll see that each volunteer has a small number to the left  of their name. This number is the number of shifts they’re signed up to in the rotas you’re looking at right now. If you uncheck some rotas, you’ll see the numbers change, right in front of your eyes, as the numbers update to reflect what shifts people are signed up to on the rotas you just selected.

A close-up of some volunteers, ready to drag-drop, showing their numbers and colours.

To make instant recognition even easier, the numbers appear in colour-coded boxes. Volunteers with no shifts are red, with one shift are yellow, with two shifts are dark green, and with three or more shifts are light green. Now it’s easy to see at a glance who’s the right person to add to any given shift.

We’ve also improved the compatibility of the Drag and Drop feature: it makes use of some very modern web technologies, so we were cautious about making it available to certain less-standards-compliant browsers. From Milestone: Iridium, Drag and Drop will work on even more computers than ever before and behaves more-predictably. We hope that these changes will make it even even simpler for you to manage the rota at your organisation.

To give you even more control over the rota than ever before, the new upcoming release of Three Rings - Milestone: Iridium – will provide you with two new kinds of rota rules: Rota Exclusivity Rules, and Minimum Distance Rules.

Configuration of the Rota Exclusivity Rules.

Rota Exclusivity Rules are pretty simple: they prevent volunteers from being signed up to shifts if they’re already on duty in different rotas at the same time. So for example, you might not permit a volunteer to be the Shift Leader for a shift where they’re On Duty, and vice-versa. But it’s flexible, so if you do allow them to be the Deputy Director On Call for the day while they’re On Duty, you can still allow that. It’s entirely up to you.

The rules can also be configured one-way,  so if you can think of a scenario where a volunteer could sign up to both rotas if they do it in a particular order (but not if they do it in reverse order), then you can. We had at least one organisation contact us to suggest that feature, so hopefully it’ll come in handy: it’s always good to be told what people would like to see in future versions, so if you’ve got a feature suggestion, why not get in touch to let us know?

The interface panel for the new minimum distance rules, among others.

Meanwhile, a Minimum Distance rule can be used to prevent volunteers from doing too many shifts in too-close proximity. If your rules require that volunteers leave 6 hours between their shifts, for example, then you can now mandate that. You can customise this on a rota-by-rota and experience level-by-experience level basis, so you can even set rules up that express more-complex conditions, such as, “New volunteers must leave at least a week between their Night Shifts”.

And of course, like all rules, these new ones can be overridden by Rota Managers just by clicking a checkbox. When you’re a Rota Manager, rules are meant to be broken (okay, they’re not actually, but we know that there are times that it’s necessary!).