It was a month with ups and downs for the product development team. We had to deal with huge amounts of spam; as a consequence our email system got more than 10% bounces, causing Amazon (AWS) to shut down our email service. We are very sorry about this. Unfortunately, it took longer than expected to overcome this unnecessary action from AWS. We’re working very hard to make sure that this never happens again. On the other side, we had some great releases since our last update: it is now possible to escalate community posts to Zendesk, we released the next version of our embeddable widget (including search and a redesign) and we introduced parent categories. Curious about what’s next? Read the update below.
Manage email notifications
- Empower users to manage email notifications. We will add more settings so that users can determine for which events he wants to be notified by email.
- Our first priority is to add a setting to the settings page in which a user can determine whether he wants to receive an email notification when another user mentions them.
Show knowledge base content in category pages
- At the moment, categories consist of unstructured content: conversations, articles, questions and answers are mixed together.
- We will empower you to add ‘knowledge base’ sections to your category pages. These sections display a list of manually curated topics. In the control environment you can pick topics to promote and reorder them to structure the content.
- Knowledge base sections are separated from the community stream to clearly distinguish them from the community content.
Private message deletion for community members
- We’re addressing this popular idea submitted on the inSpired community.
- Community members will gain the ability to delete private messages they have sent to other users or moderators, enabling them to remove content they’ve sent privately that they no longer want to share.
- Both members of the conversation will see that a message has been deleted, for the sake of transparency.
Create draft articles
- Right now, you have to use a hidden subforum for preparing your articles.
- We aim to replace this workaround with a revamped article publishing flow in Control, starting with the ability to create draft articles before publishing them.
- This means you’ll be able to control the publish date of your articles; we’ll also make the user experience for content writers and publishers a lot smoother!
Core platform improvements update
- We’re continuing to roll out core platform improvements to all of your communities , and getting close to finishing the job.
- Once your community has been upgraded to the new version (you can tell by the appearance of a blue ‘create topic’ button in Control), you’ll be eligible to start using the beta for API 2.0 (containing all key functionality for Conversations, Questions, and Articles), as well as webhooks.
- Thanks again for your patience and continued support!
Completed product improvements since the previous update: