In the past quarter, we focused on delivering your feedback across several areas of the platform. We tackled some of your top pain points and wishes around groups, such as editing group type and inviting users to groups. We also improved the community member experience, making it possible for community members to log in with their email and helping users find relevant content on the community with an optimised search algorithm. Plus, if a community member submits product feedback as a question, then you’re able to easily convert the question to an idea (and vice versa!). Finally, we simplified authentication for the Salesforce integrations, providing one less headache for your Salesforce admin.
For the final quarter of 2021, we’re doubling down on our focus to deliver your feedback. Improvements to groups will remain a priority. We’ll also ship solutions to some really popular ideas on inSpired: adding a table of contents to topics, submitting content on behalf of another user, and a more granular way for users to subscribe to product updates, based on product. In addition, you can expect some small but powerful optimisations including a better end user signup UX for events, and connecting ranks and points.
Read more about our plans below.
Coming up
Hidden groups
Hidden groups are one of the most common requests we hear around groups. See this idea. We will tackle this feature and allow you to have groups that are only visible to its members. You will be able to invite only selected users to join these groups.
Group overview page
The current group overview in destination suffers from a few limitations that we would like to tackle: reorder groups, organize groups in sections, allow to show more groups at once to limit the scrolling, and make it more straightforward to join groups for end users.
Other Group improvements
We will tackle smaller improvements on groups aimed at improving the overall UX for end users and moderators:
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Notification for private group join request. See idea
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Become a member automatically when replying to a public group topic. See idea
Customisable RSVP button on Events:
We have taken your feedback on Events very seriously and we want to improve this part of our platform to better serve your needs of promoting online & offline events on your communities. The biggest challenge you voiced was a better user experience when the event registration lives outside of our platform. To tackle this, we are looking into a way for you to customise the RSVP button by inserting an external link to the registration page.
Get context about a community member from Salesforce
We plan to deliver this great idea from @Ilan B. As a B2B community manager, you’ll be able to take action and craft better responses to customers by gaining more contextual knowledge about the community member you’re speaking to, without having to go hunting through Salesforce for the right Contact and Account.
Award ranks based on points
Ranks and points will no longer be standalone gamification systems. You’ll be able to mark individual ranks as “point-based,” widening the paths a community member can take to rank up on the community, and ensuring your engaged users are recognised and activated. Plus, any external points you’re awarding via an API integration will be taken into account!
Product update subscriptions for multi-product companies
We plan to take a first step towards delivering this idea from @Moller Toma. Right now, subscribing to product updates is all or nothing. That’s not logical if your customer only owns one product out of your offering, or if they only use a certain set of modules on your platform. We’ll enable your community members to subscribe only to relevant product releases that interest them, based on product areas.
Table of Contents
Our text editor will receive a new piece of functionality that will allow content creators to insert a table of contents capturing the headers added to that content piece. Readers and contributors will be able to quickly navigate through the content and jump to the section relevant to them, or copy and share the links to a specific part of the topic.
Submit on behalf of another user
It is one of the most requested features in our ideation section and we’re happy to announce that we will be adding this new functionality to the content creation flow in Q4. A user who has access to control will be able to pick another user as the author of a content piece when publishing new content. If you’re interested in this functionality, please make sure to review our research article for this new feature and share your thoughts.
Moderation improvements
You’ve probably asked yourselves why the old moderation overview is still available in your control environments. That’s because we need to pay up some technical debt that will improve the performance and accuracy of the new moderation overview. This will also enable us to more easily add new functionality like filters, data points, and bulk actions.
Newly-released since the previous roadmap update
