SBF 3.0 to 3.1 Survival Guide

STOP!
SBF 3.1 has some fairly major changes from SBF 3.0. Downloading this and logging in 5 minutes before a raid will leave you very grumpy. SBF 3.1 will do a pass at converting your saved variables, but it will almost certainly guess wrong when converting some things. Give yourself time to get into the configuration frame and play with the settings on each of your frames. At the very least you want to look at the General tab (all new settings), the Layout tab (changed the way you set up layout), and the Filters tab (filters are per-frame now; also see the last paragraph in the Filters section below). Don't say I didn't warn you.

No buffs or debuffs showing up at all?
Some people are encountering this when upgrading. Go to the Global Options tab and click the Reset Frames tab. You'll have to re-configure, sorry!

What's New?
SBF 3.1 is focussed around making you able to do whatever you want with effects on units other than yourself. There are, of course, some new features unrelated to filters; bug fixes and things that people have been asking for. New features in SBF 3.1 include:

One of the biggest changes in SBF 3.1 is that when you filter an effect into a frame, this does not remove it from another frame, or prevent it from being shown in other frames. More on this in the Filters section.

SBF Options Layout Changes
The tab layout in the options frame has been changed to better distinguish tabs that are related to settings in the current frame and tabs that have global settings

General Tab
New in SBF 3.1 is the general tab. The general tab defines, well, general settings for a frame

The major elements of this tab are:

Filters
As noted, each frame is now the owner of its own set of filters. This has the benefit of letting you show a particular effect in as many frames as you want, and it allows the decoupling of filters from the player unit, allowing filters to work for any unit you want them to. The filter evaluation system has also been completely rewritten to make it faster (and clean up a memory leak that had been there for quite a while).

Filters have been simplified in SBF 3.1. You can no longer nest filters using parentheses, such as (D>60&n~flask)|a. Instead, break it into two separate filters: D>60&n~flask and a. You can also no longer use the or (|) operator to join filters together. That is, rather than using this filter: d<30|a, you would again just use two separate filters, d<30 and a

Of particular significance are the c and my filters. The c filter filters on spells that only your class can cast (e.g. Arcane Brilliance for mages, Battle Shout for warriors). The my filter filters on spells that only your class can cast, but were also actually cast by you. If you define a frame, set it to show debuffs in a whitelist with unit set to "target", then define just a c filter, it will show you all the debuffs on your current target that were castable by your class. If you change that filter to my, then only the debuffs that you actually cast on your target will be shown.

You can combine this with other filters as normal using the & operator. For example, my mage uses the filter n=living bomb&my for my mage to show the status of my Living Bomb spell (every mage can have a Living Bomb on a mob, but I only care about mine to see when it explodes and I need to refresh it). On the other hand, my warrior uses the filter n~shout&c to show when Demoralising Shout is on my target. It doesn't matter which warrior put it up, only that it is up, so I use the c filter.

Filters work with your blacklist and whitelist settings.

SBF will help you to remember what a frame's settings are by putting a "Filtered effects are not being shown in this frame" or "Filtered effects are being shown in this frame" message at the bottom of the filters tab.

People who are used to SBF 3.0 will notice now that when you filter an effect into a frame, that effect still also appears in frame 1 (buffs) or frame 2 (debuffs) even though it was filtered into another frame. If you prefer to not have effects that are filtered also appear in frames 1/2, you're in luck. Frame 1 is by default set up as a blacklist, and usually your created frames will be whitelists. If you create a filter that causes an effect to appear in a whitelist frame, then the same filter when applied to a blacklist frame will cause that effect to not appear. For convenience, the filters tab now has a Filters in use dropdown. This dropdown will list all the filters in use across all frames, letting you insert quickly insert filters you defined in a whitelist frame into blacklist frames, or vice-versa.

Spells Tab
The spells tab has received some reworking as well.

The most significant change is that using the spells tab causes filters to be created. That's where the filter that magically appeared in the filters tab came from! Since filters are per-frame now, the filers you create using the spells tab are also per-frame. The checkboxes for a selected effect have changed somewhat:

Note that the checkboxes on this tab have been re-labelled to "List buffs" and "List debuffs". Hopefully this clears up any confusion between the checkboxes here - which only affect what is shown in the list at the left, and the checkboxes on the general tab - which actually dictate whether buffs or debuffs are shown in the frame.