Product Updates

At inSided, our aim is to maximize the value you get out of our product. We do that by constantly making improvements and delivering on your feedback. Recently however, we’ve had to invest a lot of time in stability and bug fixing. Unfortunately, as a consequence, we’ve spent less time on innovation.In this update I’d like to share the challenges we’re facing and what we’re doing to get back to a healthy balance of innovation and maintenance. Content types architectureOur recent releases of Product Updates and Ideas have been built as separate system components. This makes them different from the existing content types you’re familiar with, such as Questions, Conversations, and Articles. We unfortunately found inconsistencies in how the data is handled between the newer and older content types. An example is when trashed Questions are filtered out from the overview in Control, but trashed Ideas are not. In retrospect this could have been prevented with clear technical agreements early on. We have since created these agreements (a.k.a. technical contracts) that help to avoid data inconsistencies and we're implementing them bit by bit while thoroughly testing. There is inconsistency in behavior from one content type to the next. An example being that Articles support scheduling and file attachments, however, Product Updates don't. We’re steadily working towards having these “missing” behaviors be available for all content types. This will also have a positive effect on the previous point about data consistency. You can soon expect to be able to edit some of the newer content types as well as highlight content. We are actively working on the above problems and have already stabilized the platform to a large extent. We will continue to make further improvements in the coming months while we also work on some new features.Federated search (integration)We’ve had issues recently related to the Federated search integration. Because of this, we’ve made reloading the data more robust in the previous sprint. Additional improvements are planned in the upcoming sprints. Extra monitoring and logging have been added to continuously keep things in check and discover more ways to improve.Quality-related practices Our test groups (beta-testers) for some new features were not large enough to effectively identify issues prior to full roll-out. Product Updates is an example of this. As we keep delivering features, we agreed internally to take more time to test what we build. Many gaps have been found in our automated test suite, especially in the newer features, and we are adding more automated tests. We have upgraded our test suite and improved the continuous integration processes to always keep it up to date.How we’re improvingThe above problem areas along with their fixes are only one part. To make sure that we don’t end up in this situation again we have taken additional steps. These include: Refreshing the Engineering team’s vision and guiding principles to reflect the importance of keeping things simple, adhering to various standards as well as cultivating a healthy mindset around quality; Focusing on increasing skills/knowledge around sound software design, and finding a sustainable pace for innovation The inSided Product-Engineering team has undergone a recent reorganization. We formed new multi-disciplinary scrum teams with a greater focus on business outcomes. This process was wrapped up a couple of weeks ago and we’ll start to see the teams come into full stride in the upcoming weeks with more focus and accountability than before. Clear ownership boundaries will have a positive impact on both quality and the rate at which you can expect improvements and further innovation. With the above, we will not only improve the current product but also get to a more stable situation where we can consistently innovate. The majority of effort for the remainder of this quarter will still be on improving the quality and finishing earlier releases.We expect to go back to prioritizing ideas and feedback from our community at the beginning of Q3. As a community-led company that’s what we believe has the biggest impact and what we enjoy spending time on the most.

The aim of the review is to highlight what’s changed on the inSided platform in the last quarter based on the ideas that you have submitted, voted for, and to which you contributed replies. Our ambition is to deliver more of your ideas, but as quality is the main priority we needed to shift priorities. We’re still working on improving the quality and the following releases. In Q3 we’ll focus more on your feedback and ideas. Also from now on, we’ll do the roadmap update and ideation review once at the beginning of the quarter. So we’ll be back with another update at the beginning of July ☀️Quick stats for inSpired ideas in 2021 Q1 9 ideas delivered 108 new ideas created 54 votes delivered 552 votes added   So once again, a big thank you to everyone on inSpired who has shared ideas and voted on other customer ideas - the product team massively appreciates the insights and feedback you’ve given us over the last quarter Ideas we deliveredThe following 9 ideas you submitted on inSpired have been delivered or partially delivered, with a total of 54 votes delivered in Q1 2021. Thanks to all of our brilliant idea contributors : 

We’re excited to announce that our Zapier app is now available publicly in the Zapier app directory!With our Zapier integration, you can trigger workflows between inSided and 3,000+ apps based on community and moderator activities, as well as use those apps to trigger behaviours on inSided. The possibilities are endless, but we see many customers successfully use Zapier to improve internal collaboration with messaging tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, automate workflows for ideation with product tools like JIRA and Productboard, and forward community member registrations and activity to marketing automation/CRM tools like Marketo, Mailchimp and Hubspot.For this public release, we’ve ironed out some issues with creating Zaps, like making sure there’s always a sample available for testing. We also added some improvements, such as including a plaintext version of content in triggers, and adding the ability to revoke the API key used for Zapier integrations as a security measure, in case a colleague leaves your company.With our Zapier integration, you can:  Use new topics, replies, and likes from users to trigger workflows in other apps.  Push user data to other systems with triggers on newly registered users and new event attendees.  Trigger app workflows based on moderator actions like updating idea statuses and moderator tags.  Add new replies to topics based on triggers from external apps (e.g. post a reply from Slack to a topic).We’ve included some inspiration directly in Control, by embedding premade ‘Zap templates’ to help you quickly get up and running with Zapier. You can find these in Control on the Integrations > Apps page.Some new faces in the inSided apps page! Get started with the following guides: As always, we’d love to hear your feedback or any questions you have about this release.

Update Thu 8 April:This change was successfully released on Tuesday 6 April 2021. Changing the category of a topic no longer sends a ‘new topic’ notification for users who are subscribed to that category. We’re changing the behaviour of the ‘change category’ moderator action. When any topic is moved to a different category, a ‘new topic’ notification will no longer be sent to users who are subscribed to the category.The aim is to enable you as moderators and community managers to silently move content between community categories. That means no more stress / worries about spamming end users when you’re doing a category restructure.This new behaviour applies both when changing the category of a topic from the moderation overview, as well as directly from the topic moderation page. Changing a topic’s category via the moderation overview (bulk action)Changing a topic’s category via the topic moderation page (for an individual topic)Some of you may remember that a long time ago we published the following product research article on this topic.We concluded that the notification behaviour was generally unhelpful except in a few edge cases where superusers could see email notifications about new topics. As a result, we decided that it would be most effective to completely remove the notification. In addition, we felt the notification that the topic is ‘new’ is simply not accurate, since it’s  been moved from another category and has not been newly posted.Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions.

We’ve delivered this highly-voted idea to convert articles back to conversations.Accidentally converted a conversation to an article? No problem - now you’ll never be stuck or have to message our support team. You have the freedom to convert topics back and forth between the two content types to your heart’s delight.Note: the following article data will be dropped and lost forever upon converting an article to a conversation:Featured image Article labelYou can find the convert to conversation option under ‘More options’ on the topic moderation page of the article.Please leave us a reply if you have any feedback!

Our team has been hard at work in the past months to deliver a better customer experience when it comes to managing product feedback and closing the loop. That’s why we were excited about launching Ideation and Product Updates last week. With the increased number of use cases that our product facilitates, the next step on our roadmap is to better integrate those use cases into the navigation and homepage. And making sure that everything integrates with the tools you already use to improve your workflows. Read more about these below.Released Coming up Ideation portal We released the Ideation portal a few days ago. Following that release we plan to add a few final touches to make it really great 🔥 For moderators: Allowing questions to ideas conversion and vice versa, automatically close ideas for votes based on status, For end users: Being able to subscribe to the ideation modules,  maintain UX consistency around replies and the avatar display  Mega MenuA couple of months ago we released the new Mega Menu widget in Beta. Currently you to have to configure the Mega Menu on on the Homepage as well as the Ideation and Product Updates overview page. We want to make sure you only have to configure the Mega Menu once. We will work on the feedback we got during the Beta tests, add more functionality, e.g. color settings, sticky nav options, permissions applying to the menu, etc.  Knowledge Base and Community landing pageAs our platform is more and more structured around multiple use cases and modules. We see that many end-users are struggling to find the right information from the homepage. With a knowledge base landing page, there will be more space to show all categories and relevant content for the different use cases (we invite you to give feedback in this topic on our designs for the new KB landing page). For ideation, groups, events and product updates we already are offering dedicated landing pages to discover and navigate through those modules. Now the next step is to do the same for the knowledge base and community.  Workflow integrationsWe’re going to invest in enabling you to integrate with more tools to support additional use cases. For instance, to help you close the product feedback loop, we’re exploring integrations with Productboard and JIRA. You’ll be getting a survey soon from our CSMs about what technology you organisation is using. In the meantime, we’d love to hear any ideas you have for integrations - submit your idea for an integration on our ideas board! Public Zapier appTo help you integrate with over 1000 tools, we’re also (finally) going to bring our Zapier app out of private status and welcome it into the public Zapier app directory. You can expect a smoother experience using Zapier as we iron out some issues. In addition, we’ll showcase key use cases you can accomplish with Zapier, giving you a source of inspiration to quickly build your own workflows.

The new spam overview that we recently launched in beta is now publicly released and fully upgraded.All user-generated content types are now protected against spam when you enable the spam filter (questions, conversations, ideas, and replies).With the new spam workflow: No category subscription emails are sent to end users when spam topics are created. No topic subscription emails are sent to end users when spam replies are created. Anything detected as spam is automatically hidden without also being trashed (previously content could be marked as spam and trashed/restored).On the new moderation and spam overviews: You’ll see a refreshed design, in line with the new moderation overview. You can mark as spam any topics missed by the spam filter in bulk.My wish for all of you is that you never have to use our spam workflow tools and that you only ever see the picture below. Unfortunately, the spammers who want to push your customers to buy pills, sign up to get-rich-quick schemes, and find love...these spammers have a different dream. What you’ll see when you have no spam to moderate. For more information, please see our updated documentation.Please let us know if you have any feedback on this release.

We’re very proud to announce the launch of the new ideation module! Why did we build the Ideation Module?We built this module as a step towards our vision to have a platform composed of several modules (knowledge base, events, groups, product updates) for a more tailored experience for you and your end-users.This new module was built to: Offer end-users a great experience when creating and voting on ideas Improve the way you and your Product team manage ideas Give you an actionable way to prioritise ideas   What’s new?The following features are only available in the new Ideation module: DestinationCustomization modeYou can configure the look and feel of widgets that are displayed on the ideas landing page. The new "Pipeline widget' has been built especially for this new page. Learn more hereProduct areasCategorize ideas with Product Areas. Product areas are used to communicate which product type, version, or model is discussed. Users can easily create and filter ideas using product areas. Learn more hereMega Menu [Beta]Link to the Ideation overview page using the Mega Menu. Note that the Mega Menu is still in beta. Learn more here  ControlDedicated moderation page in ControlHave a dedicated space in Control with only ideas to get a complete overview of the idea pipeline.Merge ideasDid you spot similar ideas, or did a user submit an idea that already exists? It’s easy to merge the votes of two ideas together. Learn more hereAuto repliesWhen merging an idea or updating the status a reply will be posted automatically. :) Learn more hereExport ideasIn case you need to perform some spreadsheet magic with ideas, you can easily export a list of all ideas from Control. Learn more hereDashboard [Beta]You can measure the % votes you’ve delivered with our new product feedback dashboard, which shows how well you’re delivering on the ideas that your users vote for and submit. Learn more hereAPI & WebhooksYou can use our Ideas API to create new ideas, vote for ideas, update the status of ideas and more. In addition, you can use webhooks to react to events like idea merges and idea status updates.  How to get started?Reach out to your CSMYou CSM will organize your transition to the new ideation module and plan the migration of your existing ideas to the new ideation module.Explore our Knowledge base articles Start by reading this getting started guide.  Explore all articles related to the new ideation module here

If you’re communicating any form of product updates to your community on a regular basis you will be happy with this - we worked on a new content type, specifically focusing on this use case:  Meet Product Updates! 🥂 Why did we build the Product Updates Module?We built this module as a step towards our vision to have a platform composed of several modules (knowledge base, events, groups, product updates) for a more tailored experience for you and your end-users.With product updates, you can close the product loop between you and your customers around the product and functionalities that you offer. Product updates examplesWondering when you should write a product update? You can use product updates in the following scenarios: New product or feature releases Announcing a new product or feature Ideation reviews Bug fixes and improvements Changelog Roadmap updates  This new module allows you to  Create a new topic type “Product update” in Control View all product updates on a centralized page in Control Have a dedicated customizable overview in Destination Subscribe to product updates Assign product updates to product areas (e.g. Product A, Version X, Premium only) Collaborate with colleagues on the perfect product update with draft and preview How to get started?  Start by reading this "Get Started with Product Updates guide" Check out best practices for writing Product Updates Create your first product update and you’re good to go :)  Please share any feedback you have on our ideation section on InSpired.

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We often hear that you’re pulling traffic metrics from tools like Google Analytics to combine with community data from inSided for your monthly reporting.To help you simplify your reporting, we’ve delivered a first step towards helping you understand your community traffic: the Audience Dashboard.With the Audience dashboard you can: Track page views on your community, to get a helicopter view of user behaviour trends. Track unique visitors to your community, to understand how your audience is growing over time.Check your community page views and unique visitors, without having to go to a tool like Google Analytics.These metrics will be used to power our upcoming Engagement Dashboard and Monthly Active Customers metric - learn more below!How are the Audience Dashboard metrics defined?Page viewsThe total number of community pages loaded or reloaded in the selected time period. Page views from bots are automatically excluded.Unique visitorsThe total number of unique visitors within the selected time period, identified by tracking cookie. Both logged-in and anonymous visitors are included. Visits from different devices are counted as separate, unique visitors.Our metrics are filtered for bots. We see that when compared to tools such as Google Analytics, our metrics have a definitive correlation, although they typically report higher numbers. This difference can be attributed to the fact that a subset of users block Google Analytics using privacy-enhancing/ad-blocking browser extensions.Any plans to improve the Audience Dashboard further?As a next step, we’re planning to add scorecards to the dashboard, so you can see the aggregate number of page views and unique visitors over a specific time period. Other than that, we’re also considering (although it’s not planned yet) to add the ability for you to select the date interval (day/week/month) on the charts. Let me know in the feedback if you’d like to see this, and how it would help you.Shout out to @Danila, who managed to submit an idea about this dashboard before I even published this product update 😅Please let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or any other ideas to gain more insights about your community audience.

Engagement is a crucial component of making your customers successful. And while customer engagement is an important indicator for product adoption, growth, and retention – tracking engagement can be hard.Measuring engagement should start with getting insight into the percentage of customers that are engaging every month before diving into more detailed metrics. For many companies, their customer community is becoming the central hub for all engagement. This makes measuring engagement in your customer community a great starting point.See the full picture with the new engagement dashboardUp until now, community success was only analyzed by looking at active users. But this creates a biased view on growth as the users could only come from a specific segment of your customer base. It’s more important to look at overall engagement across your entire customer base.With our new Salesforce integration, you can see how many of your customers (on a company level) are actually engaging in one single dashboard. By looking at the percentage of Monthly Active Customers (MAC), you’ll have a powerful way to understand usage across your entire customer base.By getting insights into the levels of engagement of specific customers, you can define strategies to improve your content, how to distribute it, and to whom. For example, you might discover that some customers are only active during a specific phase in their journey, or are not aware of the existence of your community. With these insights available, you could improve the way you promote your community and enable more customers to engage with your content as well as their peers.By mapping users from your community with contacts and companies in Salesforce, you can: Get insights into the percentage and number of active customers. Analyze data of companies that are the most and least active to help inform your strategy.  See trends over time as the number of users in the community and your customer increases. New engagement dashboard coming soonThe new dashboard is only the beginning of the power of connecting your CRM with inSided. By using company entities we’re planning to further extend our other dashboard, for example by understanding which of your customer segments are voting on product ideas, if they are reading your roadmap updates, etc. Want to enable the new dashboard? Reach out to your CSM to get started. Our Product Specialists can help your Salesforce admin set this up in 30 minutes. Or check out the article below: 

We’ve taken the heavy-hearted decision to indefinitely postpone the email campaigns feature - read on to learn more.Stability issues and investigationBack in December 2020, we announced the public beta for a new email campaigns feature.During the beta we encountered stability issues, which resulted in multiple emails being sent unintentionally to the same users. As a result, we immediately disabled the email campaigns feature across all of your communities, since we no longer considered the feature ‘beta ready’.We investigated the root cause of these problems, and identified significant architectural changes that we’d need to make to ensure the quality and reliability of the email campaigns feature.Investment paused in email campaignsAs a result, we’ve decided to pause further investment in the email campaigns feature for an indefinite period, and instead prioritise other capabilities (more details in our next roadmap update, coming soon on inSpired). That means the email campaigns feature is no longer on our roadmap and will not become available for use anytime soon.When we decide to reprioritise this functionality, or have any updates at all around this feature, we’ll let you know via this topic.Apologies and some suggestions other tools to use as a substituteWe apologise for any disappointment caused and the delay in following up on this. We will certainly be taking learnings into our future initiatives (for example, more rigorous testing for scalability, before attempting to release).For now, if you’d like to send email campaigns we’d recommend using our user export or Salesforce/Zapier integrations to build mailing lists and send emails to your community via tools such as Hubspot, Marketo, or Mailchimp.We hope this clarifies how and why we've come to this decision - if you have any questions or feedback, please us know in the replies.

No one likes having to deal with lots of passwords and accounts, even if you’re using a password manager.That’s why we’re happy to share that it’s now possible to set up Google SSO on your community as a registration/login method. Once enabled, end users can choose to sign up to the community using their existing Google account.With Google Single Sign-On, you can:✅ Enable end users to register using their Google account on the community, alongside any existing sign-on methods you’ve enabled.✅ Test that everything’s working before you go live with Google SSO as a new authentication method, using our built-in SSO testing tool.See it in action on the Looker community!Enable end users to sign in with Google.Learn more about how to set up Google SSO for your community: 

What’s the new Spam ‘BETA’ tab in the menu?If you have our new ideation module enabled, you may have a noticed a new spam ‘beta’ tab in Control. This ‘beta’ spam overview is where you can process any spam detected in posts published in our new ideation and product updates modules.Okay, but why are there two spam tabs in the menu?’We’ve already enabled this new spam overview available alongside the ‘old’ spam overview is to ensure that you’re able to process any spam caught on ideation/product updates content.We still need to rework the other content types (questions, conversations, articles) to use the new spam overview and workflow - whilst we’re doing that, we’ve left the ‘old’ spam overview in place so you can still handle any spam on these content types that makes its way to your community.When will there be a single spam tab in the menu?Our aim is to unify the two spam overviews within the next month, so you can handle spam from any content type in a single location.  In addition, there are a few improvements you can look forward to that will apply to all content types, as a result of rebuilding our spam workflow from the ground up.Improvements coming alongside the new spam overview: No category subscription emails will be sent to end users when spam topics are created (long overdue, but better late than never!). Refreshed design for the spam overview in line with the new moderation overview. Simplified spam workflow (this is a bit more technical, but anything marked as spam will be hidden from community users without also having to be ‘trashed’).The improvements above currently only apply to ideation/product updates. In the upcoming weeks, these changes will also apply to questions, conversations, and articles. Let us know if you have questions or feedback in the replies!

This is a small article to inform you that we will be removing two features from Control in a few days. We looked at the usage metrics of the following features and noticed they are very rarely used. In an effort to keep the our platform simple and user-friendly, we decided to remove them.  The Favorites overview in ControlThis page is a saved filter page of the overview filtered on subscriptions The Favorites filter on the old OverviewIn the advanced settings, we will remove the possibility to filter on "is favorite" or "is not favorite" These two features will be removed on Tuesday the 23rd February. 

If you are using Salesforce as your Knowledge base you will be happy about this release. As of today it is possible to index and show Salesforce Knowledge base articles in the inSided search with our newest federated search integration.Using our federated search integration with Salesforce, your community members will be able to simultaneously search through your community content AND your Salesforce knowledge base. This integration will save your users valuable time and increase your self-service resolution rate. With this integration you can Show Salesforce articles in your community live-search dropdown and search result pages Directly navigate to a Salesforce article from the community Filter the search result pages between community results and Salesforce articles You can enable the integration yourself in Control → Settings → Integrations. We created this guide to help you setup the integration and how to activate federated search: Salesforce Federated Search - a brief tutorial  

Sometimes community questions can’t be solved by other community members, or even members of the community team. You can now quickly create Salesforce Support Cases from any community post, enabling you to save time, instead of manually submitting issues reported by your customers through the community (on a Case-by-Case basis, heh🙈).After you set up the integration, all end-user-created topics and replies will gain a new ‘Create Salesforce case’ button in Control, via which you can effortlessly escalate the post to your Salesforce Support team’s inbox.With this integration you can:✅ Create a Salesforce case in Control directly from any community post.✅ Navigate to the Case you created directly from the community post in Control.Learn more about how to set up the integration:You can enable the integration yourself via Control → Integrations → Apps. If you already have the Salesforce CRM integration set up, then all you need to do is turn on the toggle!

The fourth quarter of the year has ended, and we wanted to share our quarterly review to run through the great ideas on inSpired which we investigated, worked on, and delivered in the last quarter  The aim of the review is to highlight what’s changed on the inSided platform in the last quarter based on the ideas that you have submitted, voted for, and to which you contributed replies.Quick stats for inSpired ideas in Q412 ideas delivered  71 new ideas created  94 votes delivered 202 votes added Over 2020 we have delivered exactly 50 ideas!So once again, a big thank you to everyone on inSpired who has shared ideas and voted on other customer ideas - the product team massively appreciates the insights and feedback you’ve given us over the last quarter Ideas we deliveredWe’re happy to share that the following 12 ideas you submitted on inSpired have been delivered or partially delivered, with a total of 94 votes delivered in Q4 2020. Thanks to all of our brilliant idea contributors :    What’s next?You can expect more updates on your ideas - we’re about to start on our quarterly review of all the open ideas here on inSpired. This also means that we will be closing more ideas, most likely because: We don’t see much demand, It doesn’t fit our vision Or we want to improve something in a different way. We are also looking into new ideas which we can implement in the future. These ideas will be marked as ‘under construction’ when we are actively working on them.If you have any feedback, ideas, or thoughts around our ideation process please share them with us, and help us build a better product!

 If you have a Skilljar Academy set up you will like this release. As of today it is possible to index and show Skilljar courses in the inSided search with our newest federated search integration.This integration allows your community members to simultaneously search through your community content AND your skilljar courses. Providing all valuable information in a single place.Gainsight using Skilljar federated searchWith this integration you can Show Skilljar courses in your community live-search dropdown and search result page Directly navigate to a Skilljar course from the community Filter the search result pages between community results and Skilljar coursesYou can enable the integration yourself in Control → Settings → Integrations. We created this guide to help you setup the integration and how to activate federated search: How To Set Up a Federated Search Integration With Skilljar  

We could have almost made an advent calendar out of it but we decided to keep those for celebrating the new year. We added a list of new tools and products that can now be easily embedded in our editor. By simply pasting URLs from those tools, the URL will automatically convert itself in an embed. You will be able to the preview the content and even play videos.  Social networks:TwitterDesign:Canva FigmaVideo:Loom VidYardCode:CodePenLast but not least ...Gifs:Giphy TenorEnjoy!! Don't hesitate to post ideas if you think of specific tools that could be useful for us to embed! You can view here the list of all the embeds we currently have.To note: We use Embedly to add those tools. Currently, Facebook, Instagram, and Github which you requested are not out of the box to implement. We will keep an eye on those to see how we can easily support them

We’ve launched a new dedicated leaderboard page on the community, to help extra-competitive communities emphasise top-performing users, and to encourage users to climb the leaderboard ladder, or to hold on to their crown 👑.The leaderboard page is available by default on all communities - you can find it via /leaderboard (e.g. https://www.community.insided.com/leaderboard). If you haven’t configured the points system on your community, then this page will simple display no users. It’s not linked to from anywhere by default, so end users won’t be able to discover the page, unless they’re page detectives.With the new leaderboard page, you can:  Highlight the top 1000 community users to your community, according to their points earned, as well as their rank and badges, on a weekly and all-time basis.  Show logged-in users their own position on the leaderboard, giving them a clear idea of where they stand and how they can reach the top. Don’t forget to check where you stand on the inSpired all-time leaderboard.⏳Also (optionally) show the logged-in user’s position on the leaderboard homepage widget. Coming this week - see this separate ‘heads up’  article for more information. Logged-in users can now see their own position on the leaderboard, via the leaderboard page. As with the homepage leaderboard widget, you can exclude certain user roles from the leaderboard page. For example, you can hide moderators or employees from the leaderboard. Already using the leaderboard widget? Configure the leaderboard page and add a link to the leaderboard page! Here’s a quick guide on how to add a link to the leaderboard page Log in as a community manager or admin. Go to the frontend of your community, turn on customization mode, and edit the leaderboard widget. Turn on the ‘Show a link to leaderboard setting’Link to the leaderboard page from the widget.You could also consider adding the leaderboard as a link in your mega menu, like @Kseniya did on the awesome Veeam community!Add the leaderboard to your mega menu to make it easier for end users to discover.Configure the users shown on the leaderboard pageWe also recommend that you keep the ‘exclude user’ settings consistent across the leaderboard page and the leaderboard widget. To configure users excluded from the dedicated leaderboard page, log in to Control, go to Gamification > Point System, and configure user roles to exclude via the Leaderboard page setting option. Recap: what’s now possible with the points system on inSided?Configure custom points values for actions within the community. Set up the dedicated leaderboard page. Set up a leaderboard widget on your homepage. Report on points earned by users in a given time period, via the Top Users table on the User Dashboard in Control. Thanks @LizZaps @dan_at_community @Kseniya @ranjan @ChrisPantelis for your feedback during the beta-testing period. Also thanks to @lila_meyer for submitting the original idea to show a more comprehensive leaderboard than just the widget!💡 Our new ideation and product update modules are also now supported in the points system, so that points remains a holistic indicator of a user’s platform-wide contributions.Let us know what you think of the new leaderboard page!

TL;DR: Leaderboard widget has been upgraded at 14:50 on Thursday 21 January 2021 (CET). This release includes some UI updates and a new ‘current logged-in user’ section. Please check your widget if you have custom css applied to leaderboard widget, e.g. change color or shape for the ranking numbers.Alongside our launch of a new dedicated leaderboard page, we also gave a facelift for leaderboard widget, to extend its feature and improve its UI consistency with the leaderboard page.This will be released at:CET - Around 15:00 on Thursday 21 January 2021 PST - Around 06:00 on Thursday 21 January 2021New design for leaderboard widget  What’s new in leaderboard widgetA configurable current logged-in user section: once enabled, logged-in users can see their own position on the leaderboard, if they are included. This gives them a clear idea of where they stand and how they can reach the top.  A consistent UI and layout with leaderboard pageAbout current logged-in user sectionWho is NOT able to see the ‘current logged-in user’ section? A user who is excluded from a leaderboard by ‘exclude user role’ configuration. A guest user who doesn’t login.   How to enable or disable ‘current logged-in user section’? Log in as a community manager or admin. Go to the frontend of your community, turn on customization mode, and edit the leaderboard widget. Turn on or off the ‘Show current logged-in user’s ranking and points if they are included in the leaderboard’ and save.    Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback about the new leaderboard widget. :)

Update Thu 14 Jan 17:19 CEST:We’ve finished rolling out this change across all customers, so you should now have up to date naming for email variables in your email templates (it took us a bit longer than expected, so some of you may not have seen updates until the afternoon CEST).We’ve improved consistency of the naming of variables in system emails, made the meaning of certain email variables clearer, and fixed a handful of misspellings (🙈). The aim is to make setting up or changing the templates for email notifications less frustrating and less error-prone.Tomorrow morning (CEST - Thursday 14 January 2021), we’re rolling out an update that will bring all of your existing system email variables into alignment with the new naming. By doing this we hope to prevent confusion, as well as having to maintain two different versions of the same variable.You don’t need to take any action - your system email templates will be automatically updated with the new variable naming.The only thing changing is the naming of variables - no new variables are being added, and no variables are being removed.We’ve updated @Julian’s handy guide to email notification variables with the new naming for your future reference - this is the source of truth.We hope these changes make your life easier (maybe you remember encountering these kinds of inconsistencies last time you changed your notification emails!).As always, we’d love to hear your feedback in the replies.

Happy new year from all of us at InSided!! 🎉 We have some SEO news to share with you. We made some changes to how we do things in order to improve our overall SEO performance. We started to move customization widgets from CSR (Client Side Rendering) to SSR (Server Side Rendering). In a nutshell, this change will impact on how Google is indexing content from your communities. You can find more explanation about this technology here.  The second benefit that we get from SSR is an improved Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).  CLS is an important, user-centric metric for measuring visual stability because it helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts (i.e. how the page changes as each element loads). A low CLS helps ensure that the page loading is smooth. Learn more about CLS here Another improvement that we are working on while converting widgets to SSR is improving the accessibility of our platform according to commonly accepted best practices. What all this means to you:Most changes shouldn't impact any custom CSS you have made as we haven't changed the main classes.Important information below if you use the Mega MenuHowever, we decided to be cautious and inform you that we will release the switch to SSR on the Mega Menu in a week [on January 20th]. We have NOT made changes to the buttons, but we made changes to the navigation links.  As it is possible that you have made custom CSS changes on the navigation links, we are sharing the new structure with you in advance. Please review and make any necessary adjustments if needed to avoid CSS clashing.If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us.