RECAP 2.0: Appellate Support!

Highlights:

• This is a big release that finally launches appellate support in RECAP. We expect bugs and shortcomings, but the basics are finally here and we can't wait to get your uploads.
• We added a new button to district court docket pages that lets you buy just the stuff from PACER that we don't already have on RECAP. You'll see it. It's great!

Features:

• Add support to upload documents from appellate courts (#316, #296 ).
• Add banners to advertise RECAP Email in appellate courts (#313, #295).
• Add links to review RECAP in the extension Popup (#286, #303)
• Upload free documents from Appellate PACER (#322, #305)
• Add button to autofill docket query form in district courts (#311, #190)

Fixes:

• More robust uploading of case query pages(#321, #2419,)
• Add the caseId parameter to doc links in Appellate Pacer (#324)
• Remove checks that were disabling the extension (#325)

For developers:

• None, sorry!

Beta Appellate Support!

Features:

• Beta support for the appellate courts is finally here. It's missing a few parts, but will start uploading docket and attachment pages now. We'll collect those and work on merging them into the RECAP Archive, and the next version will add support for uploading documents and telling you when we have content in the archive. For now, we thank you for being so very patient over the many years, and we're excited to start collecting something! The real deal is coming, and feel free to report bugs if you find them.

• Add an actions button to PACER docket pages (#308, #282)

• Adds annual tab popup asking for support from all users (sorry).

Changes:

• Remove option to "Confirm before opening RECAP documents". This option really just slowed down our users, so we finally removed it. (#216)
• Now we upload iquery.pl docket summary page from district courts, so we can get even more information into RECAP. (#251)

Fixes:

• Tighten security by verifying the sender's identity in communication between Window objects. This prevents a theoretical attack vector that might, with a lot of care and effort, have been able to send bad data to the RECAP Archive. We have no evidence of this ever being abused. (#236)
• Fix logic to handle links from appellate PACER to district PACER (#222)
• Fix logic to avoid duplicating RECAP banners (#318)
• Better case ID capturing on district court docket pages (#319)

@recap.email is the new thing, plus fixes!

Features:

• Add banners to advertise @recap.email. If you're a filer, check it out! (#309)

Fixes:

• One of our oldest and most frustrating bugs, the scrambled docket bug, is fixed. Nobody could reproduce this for years, until finally we did. (#305, courtlistener #2211)
• More robust uploading of attachment pages (#304, #238, #291)
• Docket reports accessed through the reports menu are now properly uploaded (#249)
• Failing tests are fixed (#311).

For Developers:

• Migrates from Travis CI to Github Actions
• Adds Puppeteer as a dev dependency to use its Chromium binary to run the tests in headless mode.
• Updates the configuration file used by Karma to change the default browser used to run the tests.

Safari and More

What's Changed

• Now supports Safari on macOS, iPhone, and iPad!
• One-time fundraising popup
• Dependency updates

Appendix I

Small new version today to fix bug freelawproject/recap#290, which uploaded Appendix files from some PACER websites as zip files (they don't all support it). We were able to catch and fix this within a few hours of when it happened the first time!

Fix zips again

Messed up the versioning string somehow, so this is same code as 1.2.24, but with correct version.

Fix zips

Small version bump to fix zips as identified in freelawproject/recap#289.

Now you can make alerts from PACER

For a long time now, we've had alerts on CourtListener for federal district court cases. This release finally integrates those alerts into the RECAP Extension so that you can easily create alerts from PACER itself.

On docket report, docket, and docket history pages, you'll now start seeing things like:

And:

Fix bankruptcy uploads

This is a small bug fix release to fix an issue with how we parse the goDLS function in bankruptcy courts. This will help us get the pacer_case_id more consistently, and without crashing.

The "Big" Version

This is a release that's been cooking a long time and which brings an overhaul of numerous parts of the RECAP system. For Free Law Project, that means that RECAP is getting better under the covers. For users, that means:

1. "Big" PDFs: We now support PDFs with no known size limits. In the past, we've hit limitations in Chrome and Firefox that prevented us from handling really big PDFs. No more. We went through the RECAP Archive, found the biggest PDFs we've ever seen in PACER and made sure they work. Now they do.

2. "Big" dockets: Some dockets are so big that they warn you before they load and say something like, "Are you sure you don't just want the most recent week of entries?" In the past, this messed up our system and we were unable to upload anything we saw after that warning screen. Now we can.

3. Zips!: First requested in 2013, one of the top feature requests we hear is that people want us to support zip files when they press the "Download Documents" button from the attachments screen. We couldn't do this without supporting really big PDFs because zips are big too, but once that was fixed, we could finally fix this. RECAP will now upload zips!