What’s New — July 14 – August 5, 2026

New

• Records: every read Rivale makes, in writing. A new Records view shows what Rivale noticed, when, and the evidence behind it. Each entry expands to the facts it was built on, and you can dismiss anything you have already handled.
• Playbooks now compare against your own plugin. Where an honest number exists on your side, cards lead with it: your tested WordPress version instead of a rival’s, your last ship date next to theirs, your download velocity alongside a competitor’s spike. Two new cards call out where you are ahead of everyone you track.
• Rank crossings. Playbooks now flag when you pass a competitor in the directory ranking, when one passes you, and when a plugin enters the top tier.
• Proof of watching. Insights shows how long Rivale has been watching each competitor and what it has read: “Watched for 5 months · 3 releases · 28 reviews read”. Your weekly email carries the same receipt.
• Urgent alerts. A same-day channel for things that need a response now: a low-star review on your plugin, a drop in your forum health, a competitor security patch, a competitor pricing change. Everything else waits for the weekly summary.
• Weekly summaries are on from day one. New accounts start with the weekly email enabled, and a banner on the projects page points anyone with notifications still switched off to the settings that turn them on.
• Empty projects no longer sit silent. A project with your plugin but no competitors yet gets a prompt right after you create it, a nudge in the weekly email, and a reminder a day later.

Improved

• One weekly email, one voice. The weekly summary now reads from the same record store as Playbooks and Records, so the email, the app, and Slack all say the same thing about the same week, with the top headline as the subject line.
• Daily digests are gone. The daily digest has been retired in favour of two channels that each have a clear job: urgent alerts when something needs a response, and the weekly summary for everything else. Anyone on the digest was moved to weekly.
• Slack shows what you actually enabled. The Slack card used to claim both channels regardless of your toggles. It now reflects the channels you have on, and says so plainly when neither is.
• Faster daily syncs. Competitor data now refreshes several plugins at a time, so one slow plugin no longer holds up the rest.
• Your project avatar shows your plugin’s real logo instead of opaque initials.
• Ranking charts read through quiet days. A rank that did not move used to leave a gap in the line; the chart now carries the last known position across quiet dates and only breaks where data is genuinely missing.
• Delisted plugins handle themselves. A competitor pulled from WordPress.org is detected automatically, dropped from the sync rotation, and restored the moment it comes back.
• The archive covers the plugins you track. Long-tail plugins are now recorded in the historical archive, not just the popular ones, so their history builds from today onward.
• Clearer plan and limit copy across billing, the project banner, and the notification settings, so what a plan says matches what it does.

Fixed

• Momentum and Compare charts now show the history you already have. A fault made some charts render as if nothing had been collected, even with months of data stored. Fixed across every surface that reads the same history.
• A failed load no longer poses as an empty account. When something fails to load, Rivale now tells you so, instead of showing an empty state that could look like you had no data at all.
• Website monitoring now tells the truth about what it is checking. A page you had removed the URL for could still claim it was being checked, and “No URLs added yet” briefly flashed on every load. Both now reflect what is actually saved.
• Download history repairs itself. A bad reading on one day could freeze a plugin’s download count or leave gaps in the chart. Rivale now re-checks the last two weeks on every sync and corrects anything wrong within a day.
• Top plugins no longer read “Not in the top 12,500.” A handful of highly ranked plugins were showing as unranked. The most popular plugins were the most affected.
• Changelog alerts no longer fire on work-in-progress. Alerts used to trigger on any repository activity, so a busy plugin could send several that had nothing to do with a release. They now fire only when the released version moves.
• Milestone emails no longer say “Unknown”. Plugin versions render correctly, and ratings show on a 5-star scale instead of a 20-point one, in emails, the onboarding brief, and CSV exports.
• Onboarding briefs wait for your data. The brief used to be generated before the first sync finished, so it could arrive saying there was nothing to report.
• Your first sync tells you the truth if it fails. A failed backfill used to claim 60 days of history had loaded. It now says the data will arrive within 12–24 hours.
• Weekly summary links land somewhere useful. Evidence links pointing at Playbooks items used to open a page that filtered them out.
• A project can no longer be emptied by accident. Removing the last competitor is blocked, with the reason shown, and a failed removal now surfaces the error instead of looking like a dead button.
• Archived competitors no longer count against your plan limit. They were hidden everywhere in the interface but still counted when adding a new one — and re-adding one could be wrongly refused as “already tracked”.
• Weekly summaries reach accounts that were never getting them. Some older accounts were silently ineligible for the weekly email. They now receive it.
• A shipping advantage over a dormant rival is no longer congratulated. If your plugin has been quiet for two months, Rivale stops framing that as an edge over a quieter competitor.
• Fewer reads go missing. An internal formatting check could discard an otherwise good read. It now corrects the formatting instead.

Security

• History limits now match your plan everywhere. How far back you can pull competitor history is enforced consistently against your plan.
• Website capture hardened.
• Support access to your account is logged and alerted on.
• Production builds no longer write diagnostic output to the browser console. An audit confirmed no customer data was exposed.