INITIAL

8¼ months ago by Adrian

This work has started, but we did not do a planned work as expected it to be seamless. Sadly that was not quite the case today, so this is more detail on what we are planning over the next few weeks. The main thing is, any problems, please tell us right away.

• Some cosmetic improvements (nicer format phone numbers) in emailed or tooted SMS (done)
• Additional options (such as forcing the email/toots to be E.123 + format numbers) (done)
• Additional options for posting JSON to http/https (TODO)
• Allowing SMS to be relayed (chargeable) to other numbers (done)
• We already allow multiple targets for a number for SMS (done)
• Some improvements for 8 bit SMS, which are rare, as we previously treated as latin1, which is not correct (TODO)
• Some new features for trialling a new SIP2SIM platform (TODO)
• Improve "visible" format for content in email/toot when special characters are used (e.g. NULL as ␀) (TODO)

The 8 bit data format changes are likely to be the least "backwards compatible" changes, but should not impact anyone as they are not generally encountered. I.e. incoming SMS will rarely (if ever) be 8 bit coded, and when they were, we would get special characters wrong. Similarly, sending 8 bit SMS would only show the expected characters on some older phones, and would be wrong on many others as the specification does not say the character set to use. We will, however, handle NULLs much better, which are relevant for some special use cases.