June 2023 update
Support for auto-renewing subscriptions completed
At the beginning of June, work to add support for auto-renewing subscription was completed.
These are the most important points:
There are no price increases. Prices are based on the following principles:
Lite is still CHF 20
Premium is still CHF 40
Ultimate is still CHF 60
When prices are converted to other currencies, they are rounded up to the next 0.50 for yearly payments (same as before), and the next 0.25 for monthly payments.
If you have bought a non-automatically recurring subscription in the last 2 years, you may continue to do so.
Monthly subscriptions are about 20% more expensive than yearly subscriptions. You can cancel your monthly subscription if you don't image during the summer because of lack of darkness or other reasons, and AstroBin won't delete anything. In fact, AstroBin never deletes anything any time there's a gap in a subscription, or if you stop paying forever, unless you choose to delete something.
AstroBin will be cheaper in certain countries. I'm using the list of countries sorted by GDP per capita and the top 25% countries get the full price; the next 25% countries get a 25% discount, and the bottom 50% countries get a 50% discount. I hope this is fair.
GDPR compliance improved
Thanks to some help by a fantastic AstroBin user who spent a lot of time helping me, I was finally able to address some gaping holes in AstroBin's compliance to GDPR. I apologies for the fact that I was obviously late in this.
The salient points are as follows:
AstroBin now has a GDPR compliant cookie banner.
Cookie consent is nowsplit in sections (essential cookies, functional cookies, analytics cookies, advertising cookies...)
AstroBin now has a privacy policy and a cookie policy. Please read them.
If you have any questions about your privacy on AstroBin, please get in touch!
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.