It’s 2021, there are still a very limited number of parkrun events happening around the world - so what’s happening with the Running Challenges extension?

Hiatus

The last release of the extension was in February 2020, and a lot has happened since then. Most notably parkrun stopped worldwide in March, and - to be brutally honest - our enthusiasm to do work on the Running Challenges extension dropped dramatically, and we essentially shelved it while we worked out how to get our lives sorted.

Issues that cropped up

The world of software moves fast, and web browsers are no exception these days - especially when it comes to security. Writing a piece of software so heavily dependent on the integration with another leaves you open to breaking changes that mean things stop working unless you keep up. As a result, the following things have happened while we weren’t looking:

  • Firefox on Android dropped support for the vast majority of extensions submitted to the the Add-Ons store - only a few highly vetted ones are now available as the powers-that-be take a harder line on ensuring that extensions meet security standards. This is time consuming and expensive work - but lots of developers are in the same boat as us, namely that their extension is no longer available, and there is nothing we can do about it. Github issue 276

  • Chrome changed the security policy that broke fetching the volunteer data, so any users of the non-parkrun.org.uk site found it saying: Error: [object Object]. The workaround for this is to use the UK site for the moment. Github issue 277

Changes at home

The number of us here at Team-TC Towers has recently increased from 2 to 3, but unfortunately the new-hire isn’t so handy with Javascript - they are currently only proficient at filling a nappy and providing a background of screams and wails. We’ll have to teach them the ropes, but this will take a lot of our time, so there won’t be any updates to the extension for a while.