What’s New — August 28–31, 2026

Improved

  • Download changes now show the numbers behind the percentage. Every percentage in a read and in your weekly email carries the actual daily figures beside it, so “up 41%” reads as “up 41% (27 to 38 a day)” and you can judge whether the move is real.
  • Small plugins get read too. Rivale used to stay silent on download movement below a daily threshold, which hid every early-stage competitor. It now reports growth, decline or a flat line at any size, and phrases a move off zero in plain numbers rather than an unusable percentage.
  • One download card per plugin. A short-term spike and a longer-term slump used to arrive as two cards that contradicted each other. They are now reconciled into a single read that carries both windows.
  • WordPress compatibility tracks new releases on its own. The list of WordPress versions Rivale measures against is now maintained daily instead of by hand, so a new WordPress release is picked up the day it ships.

Fixed

  • Security updates you already saw stop coming back. A plugin’s changelog carries its whole history, and Rivale matched against all of it, so a fix from 2024 was announced as new on four separate 2026 releases. Only genuinely new changelog text now counts.
  • Release summaries cover the release you’re reading about. A new-release preview could run past the new entry and fold several older releases into one summary.
  • Security update cards say what changed. The card shipped as a bare headline with no body, because it carried a date and nothing else to cite. It now quotes the changelog line that triggered it.
  • Leaving the waitlist works for everyone. Only some new signups were removed from the waitlist mailing list, so the rest kept receiving waitlist email after creating an account.

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