V210 | Release Notes - March 2025

Narrowcasting has a brand new slide option: Upcoming events. This slide will automatically show a list of up to 7 upcoming events with a visible status. The list layout is based on your existing styling settings, and should work out of the box. Please reach out on our Support Portal if you need help setting these up.

Behind the scenes we are working on an exciting new Digital Signage package that will include our new Wayfinding application. We plan to launch before the summer and will pave the way for a brand new Narrowcasting application! We can’t say exactly when this new Narrowcasting will be released, so we decided to include the top feature request (upcoming events slide), early, in our current application.

Any feedback or ideas about the current Narrowcasting, and specifically this new slide, are welcome and will be used as input for the further development of the new Narrowcasting application.

Since our last round of improvements for the queue we have been closely monitoring website traffic, especially when queues were popping up during times where they were not expected. This enabled us to get a good look at all that unexpected traffic and what is causing it. As we expected, there are a lot of bots and other automated processes constantly roaming the internet and loading/scraping your website.

In the current queue set-up all these bots count towards the max capacity of the website, and will influence when a queue will become active. This is by design. We can now offer a more accurate queue traffic graph and protect websites from unexpected and potentially harmful bot traffic.

During our analyses we concluded not all bot traffic is harmful, and some bots should be able to access the website to gather data (like Google, Meta etc), as long as they behave themselves and do not put unnecessary strain on the webservers. From this, we created a whitelist of nice and useful bots that can safely be allowed on the website without counting towards the maximum concurrent sessions.

Starting in Release 210, those bots can quietly gather their data in the background without affecting queue behaviour. They no longer count as sessions, as they pose no threat to performance or capacity.

New queue stats have been added to display the measured activity of whitelisted bots:

For websites with an integrated purchase path the Session stale time has been lowered to 8 minutes in the Control Panel (default was 15 min). This means a Visitor session now will be regarded as “stale” after 8 minutes of inactivity. Since we can measure activity within every step of the Peppered purchase path, a default of 15 minutes was concluded to not be necessary. For external purchase paths, where we can not measure activity, the default will, for now, remain at 15 minutes. If you want your queue to clear up faster, the Session stale time can be reduced. For more information, please refer to the queuing article.

Genres (and tags) are now hidden on every Event card when the Control Panel setting Cards with genres (or Cards with tags) is set to No.

This used to be a setting for each Part where events were shown in a list, slider or grid, resulting in some cards showing genres (and tags) while others were not.

Thank you to all our testers for the New Dashboard layout and UX updates. Following your feedback we have made the following updates:

When something happens outside our control, like an internet outage at our hosting partner or a DDOS attack, this can cause websites to go offline unexpectedly. In those rare cases, a general message will be displayed to visitors*

These messages are now fully multi-lingual and can be edited in the Template text module. We think the default texts are fine, but they are editable nevertheless.

These are the new Template texts:

*This is not something you can manage yourself in the Maintenance module, since this will happen outside of your (and our) control and any general maintenance message will no longer work in these cases. If all goes well, we will never see them.

New support articles and Community updates

Our vigilant users have started to notice additional menu items in the Digital Signage Module, these are part of our imminent release of the new Wayfinding Module, a powerful extension to Peppered's Digital Signage solution, enabling arts and culture venues to guide visitors seamlessly throughout their facilities while integrating real-time event information. For now you can ignore these, when they are ready there will be a whole bunch of updates with all the juicy details!

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