---
title: "Forum Improvements, Environment Selector, A Note About Incidents"
date: 2023-12-15
number: 0164
url: https://railway.com/changelog/2023-12-15-forum-improvements
---

# Forum Improvements, Environment Selector, A Note About Incidents

It’s almost the end of the line for 2023 and at Railway we’re busy planning a banner 2024. 

As a programming note, we’ll be on limited PTO for the next two weeks.

While we’ve been heads-down retroing the last quarter and getting ready to bring you some exciting new features in 2024, we wanted to take the opportunity to let you know about some improvements to our [Community Forum](https://community.railway.app/?sort=highest_votes), ask for your feedback on [Staged Changes](https://docs.railway.app/guides/environments#staged-changes), and in case you missed it, let you in on the technical details of a couple of [recent](https://blog.railway.app/p/2023-12-01-incident-report) [incidents](https://blog.railway.app/p/2023-12-13-incident-report).

Let’s go!

## Community Forum Improvements

[Image: The Community Forum is quickly becoming the go-to place for the Railway community]

We’ve been hard at work building-out the [Community Forum](https://community.railway.app/?sort=highest_votes) and we wanted to share some recent updates:

- We improved search and added fuzzy search
- We improved filtering (Recent Activity, Highest Votes, Newest)
- We improved tagging (Announcement, Planned, In Progress, Solved, etc)
- We improved tooling for our wonderful Community Forum mods

On a meta note, if you have feedback on the Community Forum itself, please [let us know](https://community.railway.app/discuss/thread/community-forum-preview-fe921684)!

We’re excited to continue shipping big improvements to this property.

## Staged Changes Feedback

As a reminder, [we shipped Staged Changes to Priority Boarding](https://community.railway.app/discuss/thread/staged-changes-720f7804) last week and we’d love your feedback on this new feature. 

To refresh your memory, Staged Changes brings a new way to review one or several changes together before triggering a redeploy of your application. We already caught a few bugs in this rollout and need more of your feedback.

We’re excited about this feature since it brings a new level of precision to the application development workflow on Railway. 

To enable this feature, [toggle the feature on in your Account Settings](https://docs.railway.app/guides/environments#staged-changes). 

And be sure to [let us know](https://community.railway.app/discuss/thread/staged-changes-720f7804) how this feature works for you in the [Community Forum post](https://community.railway.app/discuss/thread/staged-changes-720f7804)!

## A Note About Recent Incidents

As much as we like to brag when things are going well, we equally want to be forthright when the platform sputters. We know that for many passengers on the platform the past couple of weeks there was a bit of turbulence while we were performing some track maintenance, so we wanted to let you know how we’re changing a few operating procedures moving forward.

After the team came together and performed a giant retro, [we now have a new section in our docs](https://docs.railway.app/maturity/incident-management) that share our philosophy on communications, measuring impact, and how we attempt to avoid future collisions. 

Your business depends on how we run ours, and we never take that for granted.

We also published an additional report here:

- [Incident Report: Dec 13th, 2023](https://blog.railway.app/p/2023-12-13-incident-report)

## Fixes and Improvements

- [Nixpacks upgraded to v.1.20.0](https://github.com/railwayapp/nixpacks/releases/tag/v1.20.0)
  - Support added for Go 1.19, 1.20, 1.21
- We improved the environment selector that separates PR environments and normal enviroments
- We fixed an issue where Private Networking was hidden on settings pages
- We fixed an issue with the Vercel integration to sync fully rendered variables
- We now support square brackets in variable references