Company highlights¶

• The team keeps growing! Ra will join us next week to do account management for EthicalAds.

• We reworked our deploy procedure to almost remove the need to interrupt builds. Therefore, you should see less build retries during our deploy timeframe, normally Tuesday morning Pacific time.

• After some careful deliberation, we started the process to deprecate recommonmark in favor of MyST, a better maintained alternative. We are excited to see that some projects have already migrated without effort, and we are looking forward to helping MyST-Parser thrive! Thanks to the Executable Books Project folks for creating this project.

• Our frontend developer position is still open! We are actively looking for candidates, if you know people that could potentially be interested feel free to forward them the link above.

New features¶

• We improved several areas of our contributor documentation: we added more detailed steps on how to contribute to our docs (both from the GitHub UI and from your own computer), and we expanded our development installation guide with more clear instructions for static assets and some extra verification procedures. Thanks Coco for this contribution!

• We rolled up a new keyword detection algorithm in our ad client, which should make the ads you see more meaningful and useful.

• We are about to disable Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) on our dashboard as well as on documentation sites because of privacy concerns. On Read the Docs and EthicalAds, we maintain our commitment to avoid user-targeted advertisement, and use only contextual targeting instead.

You can always see the latest changes to our platforms in our Read the Docs Changelog and Ethical Ad Server Changelog.

Current focus & known issues¶

• We are working with the Sphinx maintainers to help testing the upcoming Sphinx 4.0.0 release and decrease the risk of breakage. It is an ongoing effort that requires finding a balance between stability and maintainability, and we hope we can do the best for our users and the Sphinx community. Read the release notes to check for any breaking changes, and if in doubt, pin your declared dependency to <4.

• Cloudflare has changed how their SSL works, so we’re figuring out how that might impact users of custom domains on our Community site. It will likely only impact projects that are proxying to us, not domains that follow our recommended custom domain configuration.

Upcoming features¶

• Anthony will keep working on releasing sphinx_rtd_theme 1.0, start getting users to test our new user interface, and iron out our Data Processing Agreements.

• On the EthicalAds side, David will be improving the KPI reporting for our publishers, and onboarding Ra on the team along with Eric.

• Eric is focused on onboarding our new hire on the EthicalAds team, finishing a CZI grant proposal for funding in 2021-2022, and figuring out how the team can handle growing from 5 to 8 folks in 2021!

• Juan Luis will work with Eric on the new CZI proposal, continue discussing with the Sphinx community about the new tutorial, and have more Customer Development calls with existing users.

• Manuel will continue improving our operations and deployment procedures, make single sign-on discoverable by users, and release a new version of sphinx-hoverxref compatible with newer versions of Sphinx and MathJax.

• And finally, Santos will wrap up our new infrastructure and configuration changes allowing users to install custom apt packages.

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