Last week, we didn’t push many user-facing changes as we continue to push forward on some major long-term projects, so we decided to look at the data that a lot of people have been asking about: Has the shutdown impacted FOIA responses at MuckRock? The answer was surprising. Plus: Come help us kick off a Sunshine Week special project.

It was another pretty quiet week, with some continued tweaks mostly focused on the backend to help things flow more smoothly. We are looking to once again partner with Code for Boston on a hackathon this coming January.

Currently, our development efforts are focused mostly on overhauling user authentication across our services, making it easier to log in to any of our sites while also simplifying permissions and organization management.

Last week we mostly spent fixing a few bugs that popped up rarely but still needed quashing. Chief among them: A bug that broke request pages if they had multiple communications that each had hundreds of communications.

We launched portal integration with MuckRock a while ago, but have noticed that we are still missing a lot of portals in the system. We’ve made it easier for us to catch when an agency starts using a portal, plus a few other tweaks to speed up getting requesters to their files.