We’re going to be changing how we do release notes (and indeed releases) from here on. In short, we’ll let you know when an update to the site has occurred, and the major new things you can see there, but we’re going to list fewer of the small fixes. So if you want to follow along on the minutiae, you can find all you want at bugs.freebase.com.

So, on to what’s new.

The biggest thing, from my perspective at least, is the return of the Discuss hub. This got dropped from our top-level navigation when we redesigned the site back in November, but is now reinstated as part of Help. There are two broad-ranging discussion forums, General support and Developer support, where you can ask for help on any Freebase-related topic.

You can also see all discussions across Freebase, if you’re interested in keeping up with recent happenings on the various bases, commons, and even topic pages. We’re hoping to add an RSS feed for this shortly.

Other points of interest in this release:

• Base newsfeeds go back further. We were finding that if a base hadn’t been updated in a few days, the newsfeed on the right would be empty and say “No recent activity”. That’s strictly true, I guess, but not helpful. Now, at least, it will show whatever the most recent activity was — even if it was quite a long time ago.
• Badges for staff and experts. Now, wherever you see a Freebase staff member or one of our experts posting to discussions, making changes to topics, or whatever else, they’ll always appear with a little badge saying “Staff” or “Expert” over their userpic.

Those are most of the changes you’re likely to notice, but if you want all the gory detail, Jira has it.