Hi My Opera members! This is your favourite My Opera lead developer speaking :-)

We have scheduled a hopefully short downtime of systems to get a new release out. Tomorrow, at least for some of us here in Old Europe, at 09:00 UTC, 10:00 CET. There were about 60 squashed bugs and all pre-flight checks show green lights.

We hope to have the smallest possible downtime, but we are preparing the ground for really big and exciting new features, to be released gradually in the next few months!

Stay tuned for the changelog of this release and other stuff... Thank you!

Today's release includes several fixes on My Opera. Some changes are visible, while others are not.

• The status field no longer displays your username on the blog-, about-, and info page. We also added support for cancelling a status update (you can either click on the "x" mark, or just hit "Esc" on your keyboard and the status field will disappear).
• We know many of you have received spam in your inbox, so we've added a feature where you can mark selected messages as spam, click on "Mark selected as spam" and they will be removed from your inbox to the spam folder.
• Photo management for albums with many (200+) pictures has now been fixed.
• Fixed member count for groups. Banned users were also counted as members from the "About" page, but they weren't in the member listing. The about page also includes that now.
• Delete comments no longer redirects to top of the blog post, but to the "Comments" section.
• Fixed issue with editing and deletion of comments in your own blog.
• Fixed newsfeeds and notification e-mails for dev.opera.com.
• Fixed the comment text area on the Desktop Team blog. It was sized incorrectly, causing it to overflow the background around it.
• Fixed the issue with forum search only showed one page of results when searching for posts. It was not possible to search for older posts as there was only one page of results. It now shows all.
• If you went to an album you didn't have permission to see, you were shown an empty page (no error message, no "authorization required", no nothing). It now displays correctly that you are not the owner of the album.
• BBcode and HTML is now turned off for anonymous user comments.
• Fixed error when trying to send message to a user with blank in username.
• You can now remove friends who have you on their ignore list.
• Fixed photoblogging watches, at last!
• When logged in you no longer see the signup form, but you can still review the My Opera membership terms and conditions. Also added some text changes.

That's it boys and girls.

As you might have seen on the about page or in the picture from the latest major release, we have some new people on the MyOpera development team. You might have noticed them:

Sverre

After working here at Opera part time for a couple of years, mostly with widgets in some other department, Sverre finally completed his masters degree in computer science, and decided to come work with us full time!

He's been quick to get up to speed and now has his hands full with fixing bugs and improving MyOpera for you guys. On occasion he can be seen wandering the halls complaining about Perl or his cellphone drowning in beer.

Estéban

As our dedicated (more or less) QA guy, he's responsible for testing, following up bugs and issues, and generally poke holes in all our great ideas.

He is a native of Gran Canaria, which ironically is probably one of Norwegians favourite vacation spots. We're happy to say that Gran Canaria isn't only a good place to go on vacation, it seems that it's also a good place to find good QA.

I'm sure you'll see more of these guys in the time to come, and the MyOpera team will grow even more... Btw, we're hiring!