July 2023 update
Submitting for IOTD/TP consideration now requires some equipment and an acquisition session
Due to popular demand, and in line with AstroBin's core principle of sharing knowledge, experience, and information, since the beginning July images without an imaging telescope, an imaging camera, or one acquisition session are not eligible to be submitted for IOTD/TP consideration.
The AstroBin community loves AstroBin because it's an endless trove of information, and extremely useful if you're in the market for an equipment upgrade. We should all strive to keep it that way, and I agree with the sentiment of the many people who requested this, in feeling a sense of loss when an image gets an IOTD or a Top Pick, and it's lacking information about the equipment used or the acquisition details.
Other changes worth mentioning
As always, thanks to your feedback, I've implemented several bug fixes and minor improvements.
Here's the bug fixes and small improvements in June, in no particular order:
Added support for downsample_factor and use_sextractor options to the basic plate-solving.
The @ character may not be used anymore for usernames in new accounts. Existing accounts that have this symbol in the username are not affected by this.
Fixed an issue where the advanced plate-solving annotations were still shown on the full-size view of images even if the mouse-hover property was set to Nothing.
Moved some files from external CDNs to the internal one, to improve deliverability.
Fixed gallery image counter to include collaborations.
Improved some aspects of the authentication workflow, to add more information about the OTP token.
Made the asynchronous tasks architecture more robust: now the worker servers automatically scale up and down depending on the size of the queue: this fixes the issue that sometimes (2-3 times a year, from memory) a worker server crashed and emails and other async tasks would pile up until I noticed and restarted it.
Fixed things so that no notifications by shadow-banned users make their way to you.
Added support for sub 1ms exposure time in solar system acquisitions.
Improved some error reporting in the image data editor form.
Fixed issue where you could create an empty equipment edit proposal.
Improved formatting and added some action buttons to equipment popovers. Additionally, added a delay before them appear on mouse- hover.
Added option to disable slide-in transitions in slideshows.
Allow log in with "real name" when it's unambiguous.
As usual, several security improvements, dependency upgrades, and small UI improvements.