Development Update — Beta Progress and Security Audit

Hello all, and welcome to our 20th development update. In this post, we’ll be concentrating on the beta progress, stage one of our security audit, and our plans over the coming weeks.

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New signage around Sociall HQ. Downstairs support/administration area (left two images) and upstairs development area (right image).

Beta Progress

The progress of the closed beta has been very successful. Below is a list of the major changes to the closed beta over the last fortnight.

Image upload optimisation. Users can now upload up to 10 images at a time, and can do this multiple times per post (max 200).
Styling improvements application-wide.
Bug fixes and performance improvements application-wide.
New “About” section for information regarding the project and team (accessible through the top right context menu).
Further improved authentication flow.

Please note that some of the features above are still waiting to be pushed to the beta environment, although they are completed and ready to be deployed.

Security Audit

Stage one of the audit is complete. The security firm found a few issues, although nothing major.

The Sociall development team have read through the audit and testing documentation and are already planning fixes. All fixes should be applied within 1.5 weeks from now. Once all the vulnerabilities are patched, the security firm will re-test to make sure that Sociall has in-fact closed all vulnerabilities.

Only after the security firm has signed off on these fixes will Sociall go open-source and open beta.

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Upstairs Sociall sign above the development area.

Marketing & Campaigns

As most of you are probably aware, the #ReplaceFace campaign on Twitter is now over. This went fairly well and we had many participants over the last couple of weeks. Lots of people got involved and came up with creative ways to say goodbye to Facebook.

We have a heap of Sociall merchandise here at Sociall HQ ready to be sent off to the winners, plus much more to be given away in future campaigns.

More than 500 Sociall t-shirts, 500 physical silver plated SCL coins, 12 hardware wallets, 1000 Sociall stickers, and much more! Stay tuned for more creative campaigns coming soon.

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Sociall merch and giveaways — shirts, stickers, coins, hardware wallets.

Roadmap Changes

We pushed an update to our whitepaper and landing page (https://sociall.io) with changes to our roadmap.

These changes were made for a few reasons;

Expanding the development team - we can complete tasks faster after bringing more developers on board.
Prioritising features for user adoption and interactivity.

Things such as the Facebook migration tool and Community section have been bumped up the list. Once these features are done, we’ll be able to start full-scale marketing campaigns as the platform will contain an easy on-boarding process that migrates your data from Facebook, along with the Community section to allow socialising within the application and finding new accounts to follow.

Plans for the coming weeks…

Over the next 1–2 weeks we will be addressing the security audit documentation to apply fixes to any vulnerability that they found. After all fixes are applied to the beta environment, we will have the same security firm do re-testing to make sure all applied fixes work.

After all vulnerabilities are fixed, we will move the platform to an open beta at sociall.io. We will also open source our frontend repo at the same time. We anticipate this to be approximately 4 weeks from now.

All backend code will be open-source shortly after as it takes a longer time since these repos are not on Github and require a lot more configuration compared to the frontend project.