Changelog

New

Most of a subject access request is about people: who is named, who has to stay in, and who needs blacking out in every document they appear in. Until now that meant searching for each name and redacting it wherever it turned up. This release lets you decide once per person, carries that decision across the project, and keeps a record you can show anyone who asks.

People and identifiers

Open a project, click Tools and choose People and identifiers. RedactBox lists everyone it found: senders and recipients, and names in quoted messages, sign-offs and addresses. Each person is one row, with the number of documents they are in and extracts showing how the name is used.

• Decide once. Redact, Leave in or Skip, or press R, L or S. Redact covers the person in every approved document. Leave in asks for a reason, which goes on the record.

• Several at once. Tick a group, such as the other pupils in a school SAR, and redact them in one run. One Undo takes the whole run back and leaves boxes you drew by hand alone.

• New documents are covered. Approve more documents and the next scan picks them up by itself. Everyone you decided to redact is redacted in them too.

• Must stay in. The requester, and anyone else you add in Request details, is never redacted.

• Identifiers. Phone numbers, postcodes, NHS and National Insurance numbers, sort codes and card numbers, with one decision for each kind.

What gets redacted for a person

Their full name in its usual forms, every other spelling, every email address, and titles with their surname, such as "Dear Mrs Okonkwo".

A surname or first name on its own is not redacted, because it often belongs to someone else, such as a relative or a colleague. The tool tells you (Not redacted on their own: Okonkwo, Ngozi) and Find Okonkwo takes you to Search & Redact to deal with those by hand.

Titles get the same care. "Mrs Okonkwo" could be anyone with that surname, so a title is redacted only when everyone on the list with that surname is being redacted. Until then the tool shows Titles with Okonkwo held and says who is holding it back. Redact the last of them and the titles follow straight away.

Suggestions in the document you are reading

Open a document in Redact and a small panel in the top right lists the people and numbers found in it that are still to be decided. Redact here covers every spelling on the card in this document only. All approved makes the same decision across the project, and Keep records why a person stays in. Redact here marks the text itself, so the export covers every character, and it tells you when part of a value is not on the page.

Audit Logs, rebuilt

Audit Logs is now the project's record of what happened and why. Everyone you share the project with sees the same record.

• Timeline. Every decision, redaction, export and sharing change, newest first, with who did it, the reason code and any note. Filter it by kind or search it.

• Record. Where the project stands now: who is blacked out everywhere, who only in some documents, who was left in and why, and who is not yet decided. Below it, every redacted value with its reason.

• Schedule of Redactions. The file for the requester: every redaction and its reason code, without the redacted text. It now goes inside every export ZIP (ticked by default), and Audit Logs downloads it for the whole project.

Owners and editors can also download the full audit log for their own file. It contains the redacted text, so never send it to a requester.

Improved

• Tools open in place. Search & Redact, Word Lists, Duplicates, Redactions, Stats and Audit Logs open over your documents, one at a time, each at its own address, so Back and reload work as you expect.

• Pin to top. Pin the projects you are working in to the top of your dashboard from the project's menu. Anyone the project is shared with can pin it for themselves.

• Exports say what they left out. If items you picked by hand are not in an export, it says how many and why, for example in the trash or not approved.

• Cc on the PDF. Items imported from now on show who was copied in, so the PDF is a complete record of the message.

• Boxes that cover the whole word. If a box placed over text stops short of it, the export now grows the box to cover every character.

• Less of your data in our logs. Our service logs no longer record redacted text, search terms, names, email addresses or document text.

Fixes

• In Search & Redact, a reason code picked just before you confirm is always saved with the redactions.

• The NHS number pattern no longer picks up UK phone numbers, and the UK phone pattern no longer picks up reference numbers that contain a run of digits.

• After a file uploads, its card counts the items as they are read and then says Ready, instead of sitting on "Processing in background".

Full guidance lives in our Knowledge Centre: https://help.redactbox.co.uk/en

As always, hit the feedback portal to tell us what is missing or what could be sharper: https://feedback.redactbox.co.uk/

New
Open RedactBox and you now land on a dashboard rather than an empty console. Every project you own or have been given access to is on one screen, ordered by what is closest to its deadline, with enough of each project's state visible that you can decide where to start without opening anything.

Your projects, on one screen

The old project menu was a dropdown that told you names and nothing else. The new home screen is a list you can actually read.
Each project shows how many items it holds, how many carry attachments, how far through the review you are, what its status is and when it is due. Overdue work is grouped at the top under its own heading, so the thing that needs you today is the first thing you see.

• Pick up where you left off — a resume bar at the top of the list takes you straight back to the project you were last working in, and says what is waiting there.

• See the shape of the week — a line under the greeting names how many responses need attention and how many are past their deadline.

• Sort, search and filter — order by deadline, name or recent activity; hide everything already complete; search by project or owner name once you have enough projects for it to matter.

• Set a status yourself — Not started, In progress, In review, Awaiting QA, On hold and Complete are all settable from the row. Leave it alone and the status follows your progress, as before.

• Set a deadline from the list — the SAR or FOI due date is editable in place, and the countdown on the row updates with it.

Detailed statistics, per project

Every row carries a statistics button. It opens a breakdown of that project on its own: how many items have redactions, how many were reviewed with nothing to redact, how many are still waiting, and how the redactions were applied — by hand, by area, automatically, or in bulk across the archive.
The same figures are summarised across every project at the bottom of the dashboard, over the last 30 days, the last 12 months, or all time.

Sharing, from the dashboard

Projects shared with you sit under their own tab, labelled with who owns them. Projects you have shared show how many people are on them, and that count is a button — it opens the sharing dialog directly, so access is managed from the same screen as the work.

An export and access trail

A Recent activity panel lists what has actually happened across your projects: exports taken, redaction logs generated, access granted, changed or removed, and scope changes. It is a record you can hand to someone who asks what happened and when.

Background tasks, wherever you are

Exports, conversions and bulk redactions carry on after you leave the screen that started them. The tasks tray is now in the dashboard header too, so you can see a job running in one project while you work in another — previously you had to be inside a project to learn that a different project had finished.
Improved

Project links

A project now has a real address that survives being bookmarked, shared and opened later. Following a link to a project you do not have access to now explains itself, names the account you are signed in as, and offers to sign you in with a different one, instead of dropping you on an empty screen.

Getting started

The first-run screen no longer hides the rest of the dashboard. If a colleague has shared a project with you and it has not appeared, the screen says where shared projects turn up and which address you are signed in as — the usual reason for an invitation that seems to have gone missing.
Fixed

• Collaboration emails — invitations, access changes and ownership transfers — now come from RedactBox rather than the exports address, and replies reach a monitored inbox.

• Deadlines are the same calendar day in every timezone; a date set late in the day no longer saved as the day before.

• The whole of a project row is clickable, and the row says which project it will open.

• Project names that are very long, written in another script, or empty no longer break the row or the screen-reader labels built from them.

• The project list holds its shape at thirty projects, and "Show all" reveals the rest without the page jumping.

• A project stays visible when a status change would have re-sorted it out of view.

• The logo no longer shifts position when you move between the dashboard and a project.

Full guidance lives in our Knowledge Centre: https://help.redactbox.co.uk/en
As always, hit the feedback portal to tell us what is missing or what could be sharper: https://feedback.redactbox.co.uk/

New

This is a big one. The last ten weeks went on two things: finishing the review loop for people working through thousands of items in one sitting, and making the platform considerably harder to break. Here is what landed.

Mark an item as done — not just redacted

If you opened an item, read it properly and decided it needed no redactions, RedactBox counted it as unfinished. Forever. The Redact progress ring only counted items with a box drawn on them, so a careful reviewer doing exactly the right thing made the numbers look worse.

Completion is now a verdict you give, not a side effect of drawing a box. "I have looked at this and it is fine" is a real answer, and it counts.

• Give a verdict and move on — mark an item complete and land straight on the next one.

• Auto-advance after triage — a triage action moves you on automatically, so you can work through a list without reaching for the mouse.

• Send something back from Redact — realised an item should never have been in scope? Un-triage it there and then, instead of hunting for it again in Triage.

• Filter to what is left — show only the items still waiting on a verdict.

Redaction reasons, as codes

Reasons used to be free text, so every reviewer wrote them slightly differently and nothing could be grouped or reported on.

Now you pick an exemption from your own list — one click, or a keystroke — and it is stored as a code rather than a sentence. That turns the redaction log into an actual schedule: reasons group properly in the Schedule of Redactions, and there is a dedicated Reason column in the exported CSV. If a response is ever challenged, that log is your evidence.

You can still add a free-text note alongside the code. The Redactions Manager shows both, and editing a note no longer strips the code off the redaction.

Choose what is in scope — and change your mind

Not every project needs triage. Sometimes the whole set is in scope and you just want to get on and redact it.

You can now set that per project. Those projects carry an All in scope badge in the header so nobody is ever unclear which mode they are working in, and the setting can be changed afterwards — including pushing everything already uploaded straight through to Redact.

Uploads that survive real life

• Pause and resume — stop a large upload and pick it up again.

• Close the tab — come back later and carry on from where you were, rather than starting over.

• Honest progress — the bar and the time estimate now reflect what is actually happening, including the processing that carries on after the transfer itself finishes.

• Large PST imports resume — an import that stalls continues from where it stopped instead of going back to the beginning.

Teams

Bring colleagues in under a single subscription rather than everyone buying their own. You can appoint a manager to handle who is in the team, and anyone can leave a team they no longer need to be part of.

Annual billing and invoicing are both available — get in touch if either suits your organisation better than monthly card payments.

Sign in with a password, and turn on 2FA

Email and password sign-in now sits alongside the existing Google and Microsoft options, with optional two-factor authentication for accounts that want it.

Improved

Redaction accuracy

This matters more than anything else on this page, so it got the most attention.

• Terms that wrap, split, or carry accents — a term broken across a line, interrupted by inline formatting (a stray bold tag mid-word), or written with accented characters is now found and covered properly. Previously a match could be highlighted in the viewer but missed on export, or the reverse.

• Rotated pages — redactions land in the right place on pages that are not upright.

• Exports fail loudly — if a redaction cannot be applied, the export stops and tells you why, instead of quietly producing a document with a gap in it. An error you can see beats a false negative you cannot.

• No silent fallback — a secondary rendering path could drop area and image redactions under certain conditions. It has been removed outright rather than patched.

• Nothing leaks through errors — when a document fails to process, the placeholder we generate no longer carries any of its content.

Exports

• Mixing whole-file selections with individually picked items no longer silently drops the whole-file ones.

• Exports are blocked while a bulk redaction is still running, so a half-finished document cannot leave.

• Documents converted from Word no longer open on a blank first page.

• Exported PDFs are titled with the filename, and no longer carry the item's subject line in their file metadata.

Staying signed in

A cluster of spurious "Session Expired" messages, sign-in loops and mid-session logouts are gone. A long upload no longer signs you out part-way through, browser back and forward work properly between projects, and a link you followed before signing in now takes you where you meant to go rather than dropping you on the dashboard.

Deleting means deleted

Deleting a file now removes the original upload and any extracted attachments from storage, not just the database records. Deleting a project removes its documents too. Deletion is also far quicker, and no longer intermittently errors before eventually working.

Fixes

• Keyboard shortcuts for triage work across a multi-item selection, with undo and a consistent set of toasts.

• Search finds items in a newly imported project straight away — new projects could previously return nothing at all.

• Word list counts read the same on every screen: the term row, the button and the confirmation all speak in the same units.

• Deleting a single term from a word list no longer shifts your selection onto the wrong terms.

• PST imports from Exchange and Purview show the real sender rather than the system account.

• A partial import says so honestly, instead of reporting that nothing is missing.

• Bulk selection in Triage acts on what you can see, not on a stale ordering.

• The page indicator and navigation in the PDF viewer stay in step while scrolling long documents.

• A document that fails to render shows a clear error instead of an empty pane.

• Settings changes stick, rather than reverting a moment later.

• The redaction toolbar is fully usable with a keyboard and a screen reader.

• Files rejected on drag-and-drop now tell you which ones, and why.

• Double-clicking to create a project no longer creates two.

• Links inside an item body open in a new tab.

Several of the items above came straight off the feedback board — thank you to everyone who logged them.

Full guidance lives in our Knowledge Centre: https://help.redactbox.co.uk/en

As always, hit the feedback portal to tell us what is missing or what could be sharper: https://feedback.redactbox.co.uk/