Third Quarter 2026 Recap – Foxy Quarterly Newsletter

Welcome to the Quarterly Newsletter!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our third quarterly newsletter of 2026! Summer has come and gone, and we spent it on the quiet-but-important stuff: keeping bots out of your booking form, making sure you hear about it right away if Google Calendar disconnects, and tightening up security across the plugin.

Most of this work happened behind the scenes, but every bit of it means fewer “wait, why did that happen?” moments for you and your clients. Let’s get into it!

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Simply Schedule Appointments News for the Third Quarter of 2026

Here’s a roundup of what we’ve been working on between July and September.

Keep Bots Out of Your Booking Calendar

Ever had a flood of junk bookings show up out of nowhere? Bots love an open booking form, and this quarter we showed them the door.

There’s a new Enable rate limiting setting that stops anyone from booking a suspicious number of appointments in a very short time. Real visitors won’t notice a thing, and your own team is never affected. It’s turned off by default, so flip it on if junk bookings have been a problem. Our Developer Settings guide shows you where to find it.

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Google Calendar Sync Now Tells You When Something’s Off

If you sync with Google Calendar, this one’s for you. Sometimes Google quietly disconnects from SSA (a changed password or revoked permission will do it), and until now you might not know until a double booking showed up.

Now SSA shows a clear “reconnect needed” message in your dashboard, and if you have a team, it tells you exactly which team member needs to reconnect.

We also fixed a confusing bug where SSA’s own appointments could show up as “busy” time from Google, blocking slots that should have been open. If that ever happens on your site, the Availability Detective will spot it and give you a one-click Fix these events button. Bonus: checking your availability against Google is faster now too. Here’s our Google Calendar sync guide and the Availability Detective guide.

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Keeping Your Site Safe

We closed several security holes this quarter, including one where team members could see more customer details than they should, and a few reported by the security researchers at Patchstack and Wordfence. We also finished the quarter with a full security review of the plugin.

Nothing to do on your end – keep SSA updated to the latest version and you’re covered.

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Bug Fixes and Improvements

A healthy round of tidying-up this quarter:

• Fixed buffer times being ignored on some hosting setups, which let clients book back-to-back into time you meant to keep free. If you see fewer open slots after updating, that’s your buffers working the way they should
• Fixed a rare case where a client could pay through Stripe but the appointment never got saved, so they’d get charged again on a second try. SSA now checks the time slot is free before charging the card, and always saves the appointment once payment goes through
• Fixed rescheduled appointments not checking that the room or equipment was actually free at the new time (Business edition resource booking)
• Fixed the admin area running out of memory when viewing a large range of appointments
• Fixed giant emoji showing up in appointment type titles (fun, but not that fun)
• Fixed customer names and emails going missing from the backup file created before purging old appointments
• Fixed a stray upgrade prompt showing up in the wrong place for Basic edition users
• Made Google Calendar sync less chatty behind the scenes, so it does less unnecessary work
• Fixed a background cleanup task that was getting stuck
• Updated our timezone data so time slots stay accurate wherever your clients are
• Added support for the newest version of PHP, so you’re ready when your host upgrades

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Falling Into Q4 – Keep Booking, Keep Growing! 🍂

That’s a wrap on the third quarter of 2026! It was a quarter about peace of mind – knowing your calendar shows what’s really available, knowing you’ll hear about it if Google disconnects, and knowing the only bookings in your inbox come from real people. As always, our support team is here if you need a hand – just reach out and we’re happy to help.

Thanks for booking with us – here’s to a smooth run into the end of the year!