Read the Docs newsletter - December 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

Company highlights

  • We successfully deployed mitigation measures against spam, and we are happy to report that the amount of abusive projects has dramatically decreased.

  • We started tracking usage of different parts of our application in a more systematic fashion which will enable us to make better product design decisions going forward.

New features

  • We revamped our support for webhooks: now they have a dedicated section in the project settings, you can customize the payload, and you can inspect the status of each webhook delivery. Interested in receiving build notifications on Slack or Discord? Now you can!

Revamped webhooks

Revamped webhooks

  • On Read the Docs for Business, we improved our security audit logs to show information from all the organization according to its plan.

Organization audit logs

Organization audit logs

Thanks to our external contributor Rok Roškar.

You can always see the latest changes to our platforms in our Read the Docs Changelog.

Upcoming features

With the Christmas holidays coming up, we will have a few slow weeks ahead.

  • Ana will keep working on the complete redesign of our community site, which is already making good progress.

  • Anthony will work with Ana on the structure of our new community site and document our upcoming new user interface.

  • Eric will continue working on our commercial SSL provisioning and CDN with Santos.

  • Juan Luis will continue promoting our Embed API as well as wrap up his work on the Sphinx tutorial.

  • Manuel will adjust the new logging and spam fighting systems, and continue making progress on the new metrics infrastructure.

  • Santos will do the final bits of CDN work on our commercial site, finish moving our development documentation to a separate project, and continue unifying our commercial and community codebases.

Possible issues

Last week we accidentally banned a small number of legitimate users and they saw their projects temporarily blocked. As soon as we noticed this we apologized to the affected users and rolled back the ban, and the documentation is now serving normally.


Considering using Read the Docs for your next Sphinx or MkDocs project? Check out our documentation to get started!