Hi Everyone, 

Version 2.52 of Metro Retro is here.  Highlights in this release are Anonymous Mode (beta) and better sharing options for guests:

• Anonymous Mode is here (in beta).  Anonymous mode lets your participants write stickies and vote without it being tracked back to them. You can use this in a variety of scenarios - such as to reveal hidden issues in your next retro, prevent bias while brainstorming, or even to play icebreaker guessing games.
  
  Turn on anonymous mode whenever you need from the meeting controls. From then on, anything written or voted on during anonymous mode stays anonymous, forever. Nothing can ever be tied back to an individual. Turn it off to go back to regular mode.
  
  This feature has been requested multiple times since the launch of Metro Retro.  It was a difficult concept to implement both technically and from a UX perspective. We are feeling good about the way it works, but have labeled it as "beta" because we would like the opportunity to for everyone to try it and feedback on how it works, just so we can be sure it's the right way to do it.

• Boards now have more sharing options.  We've added the ability for you to allow guests to "auto join" a board instead of always requiring an approval via the waiting room. In the sharing menu, choose 'Can be joined by: anyone with the link'.
• We've also removed the 24h expiry on guest access.  Once approved or joined, guests will have access until revoked directly by a team member.

• Gestures widget has moved into the toolbar.  Originally we thought it would be better for the Gestures to be away from the "mutate the board" tools, but in reality it was confusing and for a whole load of reasons just not a good idea.  So, it's now in the toolbar at the bottom.

• Shadows removed on Shapes & Zones.  Until this release all Shapes and Zones were rendered with a slight drop shadow.  Rendering the shadows is relatively expensive and contributes to lag during panning and zooming in complex layouts.  We've taken the decision to permanently remove shadows from Shapes and Zones in order to improve rendering performance of the app.  This should have very little noticable impact on your board designs, though in some cases bounds between shapes may be less visible and require tweaking.
• Disable Shadows setting added.  In addition to the changes on Shapes and Zones, you can now disable all shows on all objects (Stickies, Cards, etc) under Settings > Controls & UI > Disable Object Shadows.  If you are suffering from poor performance when panning and zooming we recommend enabling this setting.
• Festive decorations are now enabled.  A little later than we would have liked - festive decorations are now on.  As usual you can disable these by enabling Scrooge Mode under Settings > Controls & UI.  Don't forget to press the snowman's belly!

Note On Service Stability & Connection Issues:

Over the past month or so we have seen a growing active user base in V2.  This has caused strain on or system that we should have been on top of, but in a few instances we were not and it caused either notable degraded performance or short outages at peak times.  

In the past two weeks we have taken steps to mitigate these problems by upgrading hardware on our primary database, app-servers and web-gateway servers.  We also identified and have patched two bugs that were causing dropped connections to not reconnect properly, which often resulted an "unstable connection" popup while on a board.  These fixes and infrastructure upgrades should prevent further stability problems in the service.  

We will continue to monitor the situation and add capacity where required.  If you or any of your colleagues are seeing service problems, please check the status page at https://status.metroretro.io or contact us at contact@metroretro.io.

That's all for now - cheers all!

Steve & Jamie