Product Updates

We’ve released brand-new & improved dashboards in public beta for all community managers and admins.Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know:We’ve rebuilt the Content, User, and Success dashboards with an improved user experience. We aim to completely replace the old dashboards with the new dashboards by Wednesday 23 September 2020, so we’d really like your feedback to understand whether the rebuilt dashboards work well for you. Until then the old dashboards and the new dashboards will be available side by side in Control (the new dashboards have a blue ‘BETA’ label next to them in the menu). The metrics visualised on the new dashboards are mostly the same as on the old dashboards, with a few key differences (check out the ‘Key differences’ section below for more details).Why are the dashboards being rebuilt and replaced?We heard feedback from many of you that the current dashboards had an unintuitive user experience, especially when it came to filtering. Now, the filters are conveniently available at the top of each dashboard . We also saw that on larger communities, the dashboards sometimes took an exceptionally long time to load. Now, they’re a lot speedier ! By changing the underlying technology powering the dashboards, we’re also in a better position to iterate on your feedback / requests for new metrics much faster than before ‍♂️.Key differences between the old dashboards and the improved dashboards Here’s a quick summary of the key differences between the old dashboards and the improved dashboards, focusing on the elements that we do not currently plan to rebuild (highlighted in the blue callouts).For more information, read our detailed guide to changes on the new dashboards.Content dashboardThe improved Content Dashboard (not pictured: likes given over time chart, topics created per user role/content type charts, and popular topics/popular categories tables).Widgets that we do not currently plan to rebuild on the new Content Dashboard:Detailed topic/category table viewsUser dashboardWidgets that we do not currently plan to rebuild on the new User Dashboard:Rank changes Activated accounts Ranks table and detailed ranks table view. Success dashboardWidgets that we do not currently plan to rebuild on the new Success Dashboard:Marked answers Active users per topic created Avg. replies per topic Number of replies per topic All-time activation funnel.Known bugs (to be resolved) When filtering on ‘Published in’, choosing a ‘reported posts category’ can cause the results to become inaccurate (i.e. the category that stores reports of when end users have ‘flagged’ content). Let us know what you think A great big thank you to all the customers who gave us early feedback in the private beta of the improved dashboards: @Kgastaldo @m4rc @Suvi Lehtovaara @koles @stanislav.fedoseev @Marina Perminova @lila_meyer @James Scott @Kasper86 @Rudi @Hendrik Jan We’re excited to hear what you think of the improved dashboards. We know a lot of you are actively using the current dashboards, and we want to make the transition period as effortless as possible for you. Please reply with your feedback, especially if:You encounter unexpected behaviour There’s anything you’re really missing from the old dashboards. You already prefer the new dashboards! (we’d love to hear what you like, as well as what else you’d like to see improved in the future).

Update 31 Aug 13:05 CESTThe new moderation overview is now the default moderation overview for all Control users. Please let us know any feedback you have in the replies!Next week on Monday 31st August at ~11AM CEST we will bring the new moderation overview out of beta and make it the default moderation overview for all Control users.Read on to find out:What improvements we’ve made since launching the beta. Whether you can still use the old overview for now (spoiler: yes). What’s next for the moderation overview.What improvements have been made to the new moderation overview since the launch of the beta?Here’s a recap of the improvements we’ve delivered since launching the moderation overview in beta at the beginning of June: Improved reliability of the data on the overview (for example: when topics are trashed, or moved). A responsive table design and UX, and the ability to customise the columns to display. Even more filters and columns, including old favourites: unread by team (‘status’) column, moderation label column, filter by ‘unassigned moderator’, filter by best answer marked, sort by publish date, and more. Bulk actions: close, trash, and change the category of several topics at once. Ability to delete custom views.Our most important investment since launching the beta has been to improve the data reliability of the new moderation overview. Thanks to your feedback during the beta, we identified where we weren’t keeping topics up to date. We’ve now resolved all of these issues. Topics are up to date instantly, meaning you can focus your moderation efforts on the right content.Can I still use the old overview?Yes, for now you can still use the old overview. Simply press ‘switch to old version’. We’ll remember your preference for the duration of your browser session.Hit ‘Switch to old version’ to use the old moderation overview.Your old saved filters are also still accessible. These are now displayed in a combined list alongside your custom views saved via the new overview; old saved filters are identifiable via a grey warning sign.Old saved filters are still accessible, and marked distinctly from new saved custom views.What’s next for the new moderation overview?We don’t yet have a locked-in date on which we’ll completely phase out the old moderation overview. Our ambition is still to provide a better set of capabilities and an improved design first, and then to phase out the old moderation overview once it’s convenient to you.We hope you enjoy using the new moderation overview, and we’re looking forward to continuing to improve it even further with your feedback.Please let us know any questions or feedback you’ve got in the replies!

We’ve released brand-new & improved dashboards in public beta for all community managers and admins.Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know:We’ve rebuilt the Content, User, and Success dashboards with an improved user experience. We aim to completely replace the old dashboards with the new dashboards by Wednesday 23 September 2020, so we’d really like your feedback to understand whether the rebuilt dashboards work well for you. Until then the old dashboards and the new dashboards will be available side by side in Control (the new dashboards have a blue ‘BETA’ label next to them in the menu). The metrics visualised on the new dashboards are mostly the same as on the old dashboards, with a few key differences (check out the ‘Key differences’ section below for more details).Why are the dashboards being rebuilt and replaced?We heard feedback from many of you that the current dashboards had an unintuitive user experience, especially when it came to filtering. Now, the filters are conveniently available at the top of each dashboard . We also saw that on larger communities, the dashboards sometimes took an exceptionally long time to load. Now, they’re a lot speedier ! By changing the underlying technology powering the dashboards, we’re also in a better position to iterate on your feedback / requests for new metrics much faster than before ‍♂️.Key differences between the old dashboards and the improved dashboards Here’s a quick summary of the key differences between the old dashboards and the improved dashboards, focusing on the elements that we do not currently plan to rebuild (highlighted in the blue callouts).For more information, read our detailed guide to changes on the new dashboards.Content dashboardThe improved Content Dashboard (not pictured: likes given over time chart, topics created per user role/content type charts, and popular topics/popular categories tables).Widgets that we do not currently plan to rebuild on the new Content Dashboard:Detailed topic/category table viewsUser dashboardWidgets that we do not currently plan to rebuild on the new User Dashboard:Rank changes Activated accounts Ranks table and detailed ranks table view. Success dashboardWidgets that we do not currently plan to rebuild on the new Success Dashboard:Marked answers Active users per topic created Avg. replies per topic Number of replies per topic All-time activation funnel.Known bugs (to be resolved) ✅Fixed: When filtering on ‘Published in’, choosing a ‘reported posts category’ can cause the results to become inaccurate (i.e. the category that stores reports of when end users have ‘flagged’ content). Let us know what you think A great big thank you to all the customers who gave us early feedback in the private beta of the improved dashboards: @Kgastaldo @m4rc @Suvi Lehtovaara @koles @stanislav.fedoseev @Marina Perminova @lila_meyer @James Scott @Kasper86 @Rudi @Hendrik Jan We’re excited to hear what you think of the improved dashboards. We know a lot of you are actively using the current dashboards, and we want to make the transition period as effortless as possible for you. Please reply with your feedback, especially if:You encounter unexpected behaviour There’s anything you’re really missing from the old dashboards. You already prefer the new dashboards! (we’d love to hear what you like, as well as what else you’d like to see improved in the future).

For some time we have been working on a new ideation proposition to make it easier and more fun to co-create ideas from your community users. Today we are very pleased to share that the new ideation module is previewing here on our very own InSpired community! View the new inSpired ideas section What is Ideation?inSided Ideation is a new platform module that allows your company and product teams to gather and co-create on qualitative insights from your community users. Unlike community ideation, which is a category type nested within the community category structure, this new module is a dedicated place within the platform with purpose-built features around ideation. Your community users will be able to submit ideas, vote on ideas, and respond to ideas with a full-powered WYSIWYG editor. As a Moderator or Product person, you will be able to manage these ideas from Control.  Why did we build the Ideation Module?This is a step towards our goal to have specific modules (like we did for our Knowledge base and Events already) for a more tailored experience for you and your end-users. This new module aims at improving the way you collect and manage ideas from your communities. It also serves as communication to show ideas posted lead to concrete improvements in your product(s).  What exactly will be available?The core elements of ‘community ideation’ as you know it will be there. On top of that we developed a lot of improvements: As a moderator you'll have: A dedicated Idea overview page in Control (similar to the article overview page) The possibility to merge ideas and add upvotes in the process Improved filters for Idea status and "Product areas" A way to export ideas  Your end-users will: Have a dedicated space where they will navigate and search for ideas Receive notifications when the status of an idea is modified Of course, they will still be able to subscribe, upvote and reply to ideas More features are coming to enrich this module especially on the end-user side, we'll keep you updated regularly. How will this impact my existing ideas?All your existing ideas, which are posted in community categories, will be migrated to the new Idea overview page with specific functionalities. You will be able to select which idea categories you want to migrate and which one you would want to keep (e.g. internal idea categories for your employees only). Idea categories that you do not want to migrate will be set to read-only, users can view the ideas and respond to them, but are no longer able to post ideas in these categories. We will be in touch with you in the coming months to guide you through this migration.  Please check out our new Ideation page for Inspired and don't hesitate to create an idea yourself to share your feedback.

The second quarter of the year has ended, and we wanted to share our second 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 commented on. We also want to highlight prominent community ideas that are still on our radar.Quick stats for inSpired ideas in Q217 ideas delivered  146 votes delivered  46 new ideas created  241 replies to ideas  351 votes on ideas Once again, a big thank you to everyone on inSpired who shared their own ideas as well as voted on other customer ideas. The product team LOVES the insights and feedback you’ve given us over the last quarter Ideas we deliveredWe’re happy to share that the following 17 ideas you submitted on inSpired have been delivered or partially delivered, with a total of 146 votes delivered in Q2 2020. Thanks to all of our brilliant idea contributors :​@Ilse @Rodion @Ditte @josh-sp @Jurgen @EricF @OVOdarran @mafe.pelaez @Tanja @banthonisz @James Scott @freydrew    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 and will be communicated via the roadmap updates.Separately to this update, we’ll publish a review of all of the top open ideas on inSpired with a short update about 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!

At inSided we are slowly moving back to the office, and even had our first party (keeping a 1.5-meter distance, of course!) in the park this week to celebrate inSided’s 10th anniversary 🎉 All our client meetings and events are still taking place online. We are really thankful to you for keeping engaged with us: In conference calls, on webinars, via email, and of course especially over here at our inSpired community. Many of the items we have been working on over the past few weeks directly came from your feedback and are optimized because you have participated in our beta programs and provided your feedback on the releases 🙏 Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll continue to work on the moderation experience. Plus, we’re working on ideation, product communication, analytics and mass messaging.  Here’s a quick look at our releases since the previous update: Make style changes in just a few clicks with our new 'Theme' configuration mode Public tag improvements SEO (Search Engine Optimization) improvements Community navigation sidebar widget Improved Moderation Overview: public beta feedback thread Team overview: see who has access to Control & invite new colleagues Improvements to the Events Module New topic list view XML Sitemap Excluding search and member pages via Robots.txt Notify colleagues via email when they're assigned a new topic Highlight the latest company response to an idea with pinned replies Coming up: What we’re working on Upgrades to ideation We’re working on a new approach for ideas. Rather than having a community category dedicated to ideas, we’re creating a separate space in our platform with a clear focus, and purpose-built features for ideation Dedicated ideation overview in Control with advanced filtering capabilities Moderation improvements: It will be possible to transfer votes from one idea to another with a merge tool and to automatically inform interested users on idea status updates Product updates Close the feedback loop with your customers using a new topic type: product updates Much like articles, this topic type empowers you to write beautiful updates from inside the Control environment Product updates will be available in a single place in the platform that your users can subscribe to Product areas A new type of metadata that can be assigned to ideas and product updates Manage (add, edit, delete) product areas in Control Filter content on product areas More improvements to the moderation overview (currently in beta) Thank you to all of those who have given feedback on the new moderation overview - shout out to  @ErikT @aluciani @bjoern_schulze @Koen Sterken @Suvi Lehtovaara @Patomiäs @josh-sp @lila_meyer in particular! We’ve got plenty of input to kickstart our second major iteration on the new overview, which will include: More columns visible on the overview (including the ‘status’ column showing whether at least one moderator on the team has read a topic). Ability to customise the columns that display on the overview. An even further improved UX for speedy and convenient moderation. Bulk actions for topic moderation. And a couple of bug fixes for issues you helped us find! Messaging and inviting improvements We’re looking into improvements to help you increase the reach and engagement of your community via messaging and invites. We’re still in the early stages of product research—stay tuned for more information! Analytics improvements We’re investigating ways to improve reporting and analytics on inSided, helping you show the value of the platform to your management team and stakeholders. Skilljar Federated Search Integrate with Skilljar Show Skilljar courses in your community live-search dropdown and search result page Filter search result pages between community results and Skilljar courses Update on personalization In the previous roadmap update we mentioned that we started to investigate personalization capabilities. We’ve concluded our research, but as a result of COVID-19 we prioritized other improvements and decided to move personalization further down the roadmap as a result. We hope that you all will find something valuable coming in the next few weeks. As usual, we’d love to hear your thoughts so that we can take them into consideration.

​We tend to forget the past - sometimes for a good reason. We also seem to overlook how fast-paced innovation is changing the tools and websites that we are using every day. Remember how Facebook and Google looked like just a few years ago? inSided is celebrating 10 years of building communities - bringing likeminded people together to achieve greatness. We thought it would be just the right opportunity to show you where we come from and how our platform has evolved over the years. While some of us might feel old looking at it, we hope that it will give you an idea of all the milestones, learnings, wins and failures that we’ve went through over the years.   Note that this is just a very shortened summary, it is impossible to include each milestone, all side-stories and the hundreds of annecdotes in an article you’d be happy to read. ;)   Where it all started   Most of you probably won’t know a secret of inSided: We were building communities even before inSided existed! Well, mostly our two founders @Robin and @Wouter, who spend most of the late 00’s with geeking around the internet about the latest smartphone innovations. This was when pocketinfo.nl became successful in the dutch internet as the go-to place for all latest information. It also had a community functionality, something which was heavily adopted by many heavy-users who wanted to learn more about what’s the next big thing.   2010 - homepage of forum.pocketinfo.nlThe hype was so big that larger brands started to notice the value. Within just a few years after launching this platform, T-Mobile Netherlands approached Robin and Wouter and said “We want that too!”. And this was the moment when the two decided to take a shot at the online community business (not sure if they knew what they were getting in to).    The very first inSided community   Needless to say, we are extra proud that the T-Mobile community is still with us today, being successful as ever! Back in the days however, the platform was not full of the shiny features you are enjoying today. It lacked many things which became an industry standard over the years - but it did the job: bringing people together to achieve greatness.   Growth: Blood, sweat and tears   As Robin and Wouter really believed in the value of communities back then, they were super motivated to grow their platform and their customer base. Countless hours of development, beers and meetings were invested to create the next cool community platform - all customized to the wishes of the customers. It worked really well, for a while.   Homepage view of a demo community, 2012While more and more telcos adopted the inSided platform within the Netherlands, the goal was to get other, bigger brands in which are not in the telco business. And also this was achieved with big brands like Soundcloud, Sonos and TomTom. However with the growth, it also became more and more apparent that customized requirements for each community slowed down the innovation: In order to release a new feature, it had to be customized for each community to avoid performance problems or other difficulties. This massively slowed down the progress, which put Community Managers in a tough spot: They knew a new feature was on the way, but it took months for their end users to actually seeing them on the community.   Live Search Mock-up, years before it actually going liveThere was a need for a universal, more easy-to-update platform which enabled inSided to deliver new features in a much more scalable way. This was when the idea of a unified, branded template first came up. In the meantime however, the community needed to become more mobile friendly. It has not been carried over which iPhone models were used for this design exercise.   The previous mobile view vs. the first mobile optimized versionThe inSpired community   At this point, another elephant entered the room. Why does inSided not have an own community? How can we claim to understand what a community needs to have if we do not use it ourselves with our customers? This was the moment that the inSpired community became to live, first only as an idea. If you look closely, you can see some frustrated test-content about that universal platform the product team started dreaming of.   A mockup of the inSpired community, 2014Branded templates (finally!) & self-service Next to a branded, unified platform from inSided, one thing everybody wanted to achieve was to be a true Saas (software-as-a-service) company. This meant that each Community Manager or Admin should be able to change everything on the community her/himself. A true challenge, given that the platform by now had grown to a massive set of features and settings. But together with the universal template, it just made perfect sense.   First version of our branded template designSome time around 2017, the first fundamental steps were taken towards a more unified platform template which would enable inSided to release a bunch of new, cool features like actual dashboards or @-mentions (really groundbreaking stuff ). I actually was still a Community Manager (= customer) back then and was stoked about the idea of finally getting more ownership of the platform I was working on each day. For way too long I had to wait for others to change something tiny like the color of a button. In 2019, the major milestone was achieved that each community was now using the unified, branded templae. And since then, the pace in which new features can be worked on has really increased a lot. An entire Knowledge Base module has been introduced, we are doing fast steps in building more and more easy-to-install integrations, and even allow you to fully self-service install your SSO login (something which was a month-long project for you and for us before).   Where we are going After focussing on self-service support, we are now shifting more and more to what can be called a Customer Success Approach to your community. To be clear, this does not mean we are neglecting support or core community functionality - it is actually truly embedded in our overall vision: We are successful when you can make your customers successful with their products through our platform. In terms of platform improvements, this translate to many things that will give your users an awesome community experience - motivating them to come back. Think about better features to engage with your customers (e.g. better notifications, improved customization), getting product feedback (ideation) as well as better ways to communicate with your users (e.g. via more ‘official’ content types for your company). As mentioned before, true awesomeness is achieved by bringing likeminded people together. Naturally, we believe it is crucial to continue to stay in close contact with you. That is why we will always listen to your challenges and needs, realizing your ideas submitted here, and strive together with you to make your community wildly successful!   On a more personal note I want to close this article by thanking all users who have contributed to the inSpired community so far. The few years which I have been allowed to call me the Community Manager of inSpired have fullfilled me with joy, working with such an awesome community within such an awesome company! The inSided vibe has always impressed me as a customer as well as an employee, but it is all fueled by making a difference for all the users of our platform. Cheers & on to the next 10 years!   P.S: As a bonus, here some more milestones & embarrasing screenshots from the past. :)   InSided internal milestones part 1inSided internal milestones part 2Research & co-creation module with surveys, did not survive the times  A demo community page, 2012  Blogs (now articles) and how we visioned them  KPN (biggest telco in NL) migration from Lithium (now ‘Khoros’)  Sonos community migration   

We’ve made some improvements to public tags, making them easier to manage and improving the UX for adding them to topics. We’ve already rolled out tools for managing public tags in Control and an improved tag interface for moderators in Control.Coming up next week (Thursday 2 July 2020, in the morning (CEST), we’ll rollout the new public tag UX to your end users. We’ve done this release separately in order to:Give you a chance to tidy up your tags before end users can choose from them on the frontend. Let you inform your superusers or other members about the change ahead of time.What’s already available for you to use right now: Tidy up your tags in Control: see all tags, add new tags, edit tag titles, delete tags, search tags (lightning-fast), and bulk merge tags. Better UX for moderators to add tags to existing topics, or when creating articles with a fast autocomplete/search. API endpoints for managing tags, so you can create/edit/delete tags and keep them in sync with external systems.What’s rolling out towards the end of next week (Thursday 2 July 2020, in the morning (CEST)): Better UX for end-users to tag topics, with a fast autocomplete/search. Improved quality and quantity of end-user tagging with autosuggested public tags based on topic title. Keep control over tags by (optionally) preventing end users from adding new tags.^ You can preview all of the above on the inSpired create new topic page.Find more details about how the features work in our knowledge base article: And check out best practices on managing tags from @Julian in this guide: Let us know any feedback you’ve got in the replies!

When we released our Knowledge base, with its own optimised UI/UX, we introduced a navigation sidebar widget that showed the category structure. We’ve received a lot of feedback since, the main question: “Can we have such a widget for our community structure as well”. Today we’re happy to share that we developed a new sidebar widget that allows you to show the community category structure in your community category pages.  Categories that the user is allowed to see will be displayed in the sidebar widget (e.g. when a user is not logged in then he will not see ‘private’ categories in the sidebar widget). You can see this widget in practice here on inSpired.   Example of the community sidebar widget for inSpired. The category that a user is currently visiting is highlighted in bold and with your brand color.  This widget allows you to  Add a Community navigation sidebar widget to the General Sidebar Configure a widget title (e.g. Categories, Navigation, Go to) Show your community category structure in your community (parent) category pages Note:  This widget will only display on Community (parent) category pages.  This widget is restricted to the General Sidebar   Get started You can find the new widget “Community navigation” in Control → Customization → Sidebar. You can only add this widget to the General Sidebar. We hope you like this new widget. If you have any questions, feedback or would like to use this widget on topic pages as well let us know in the comments below

Did you arrive at this topic via the moderation overview, but don’t yet have an inSpired account? Make sure to sign up for an inSpired account and leave a reply on this topic with your feedback We’ve released a brand-new moderation overview in public beta for all community managers and admins. Moderators can also access the beta if your community manager has opted you in. The moderation overview is getting an overhaul, both in terms of design and capabilities. New filtering options, editable custom views, refresh without reloading the page, and an improved designRead on to find out what’s available right now and for whom, learn about the next steps and planned items, and find out how you can contribute to improving the new moderation overview.   What’s already available in the new moderation overview? The following capabilities are available in the new moderation overview:  Save, edit, and share custom views.  Improved page load times and a quick refresh button to reload the topic stream without reloading the whole page.  Improved filtering UX and an improved title/content keyword search.  New filters, including: relative time filters for last active/publish date, filter by ideation status, and a multiselect filter for moderator tags. As an administrator/community manager, you can opt-in to allow your entire moderation team to participate in the moderation overview beta. Just click the ‘enable for team option’ and flick the switch on our new experimental features page. We’ve done this based on early feedback that we’re still lacking key features in the new overview, and that it would add complexity for larger moderation teams to have the beta suddenly available for the entire moderation team.   Of course, we couldn’t build these improvements without all the fantastic input from our community - so here’s a couple of shout outs to those who inspired us with their ideas. Thanks to @Jurgen for submitting this idea about editing advanced topic filters (13 votes) and (partially delivered) dynamic date filters (4 votes) , @lila_meyer for this idea to share saved views / advanced filters with other users (3 votes), EricF for this idea (partially delivered) New topics should populate automatically on the backend (no refresh required) (8 votes), and @josh-sp for this idea Add "Ideation Status" to Advanced Filters under Content Overview (2 votes). (^ that’s 30 inSpired votes!)   What’s next / planned for the new moderation overview? Latest update: https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16/improved-moderation-overview-public-beta-feedback-thread-2182?postid=8622#post8622 We have no short-term plans or a set date on which we’ll get rid of the old moderation overview. Our ambition is to provide a better set of capabilities and a better design on the new moderation overview, and eventually phase out the old moderation overview, based on your feedback and usage.   How can you contribute and help us build a great moderator experience? We’ll use this topic as a megathread to collect feedback from you and to provide updates on new features/changes as we iterate over the new moderation overview further. We’ve included a feedback button on the beta overview page in Control, which takes you directly to this topic. We’re excited to hear your first impressions!

We’ve introduced a new page in Control that lets you see exactly who has access to Control, and also enables you to invite new colleagues to the platform. With this update, you can now:  Quickly see who has access to Control at any time.  Invite any new colleague to join your team as a moderator, community manager, or admin.   This new button in the Control menu takes you straight to the team overview.  You must have the administrator primary role in order to manage your team and invite new colleagues. For more details, check out the following knowledge base articles: How to manage your team on inSided (+ invite new team members!) Who counts as a team member? Let us know what you think of this new update, and please share any feedback you’ve got in the replies!

We are really excited to introduce our new ‘Theme’ configuration mode. Following the release of the ‘Customization’ mode earlier this year we have rebuilt the way on how you can change common styles for buttons, cards, colors and more. Easily adjust the look and feel these styles with just a few clicks. No coding required!   Card styling options in the new ‘Theme’ configuration mode  What can I do with this feature?  Manage, edit and preview the design of buttons, cards, colors, fonts and Custom CSS Preview (design) changes before publishing. No more jumping back- and forth between Control and your Community layout.   What is new? Theme mode A whole new mode for changing common theme styles. You won’t need the control environment to make changes for your buttons, cards, colors, fonts and Custom CSS. Card styling Easily change the design of all card styles elements such as quick-links, featured topics and category cards Preview every page You can access and control theme changes on every page of your platform.    How to get started Simply sign in to a community account with user role Community Manager or Administrator. Go to the homepage and click ‘Theme’ button and select what you want to change. Of course, we also added some guides and how-to’s to help you get started:  How To Change The Color Scheme How To Change The Design of Buttons How To Change The Design of Card Elements How To Configure Fonts How To Add Custom CSS We hope you like the new Theme configuration mode as much as we do

We’ve rolled out some new features for our Events module based on the feedback we’ve received from you over the past few weeks. Read on to find out what’s now available!   Improvements    Publish Private Events via private user groups (currently in beta - message @Yoeri if you’re interested). You can now set up exclusive private events for select groups of users. (thanks @bjoern_schulze for your feedback on the original announcement!)  Quickly add an event to Google Calendar directly from the event page (thanks @rory for submitting a related idea)  See the event time in your own timezone on the event page.  Clearly show that an event is an Online Event vs an In-person Event.   Quickly share an event on social media directly from the event page.  Google Structured Data for events: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/event An example of a private online event in a user group ​​​​​​ Note on ‘Online Events’: We noticed many of you were using the location field to specify that an event was Virtual/Online, or took place in Zoom. We decided to make this more explicit to end users. Now, if you leave the location empty, your event will be shown as an Online Event, with special icon/clear distinction on the event overview, featured topic, and search result cards (you see an example in the screenshot above). Given the situation with COVID-19, we made an assumption that all events since we released the Events Module have been online events, so your past events have been automatically updated to show as ‘Online Events’.  Other events improvements we have in the pipeline: A ‘New Attendee’ trigger in Zapier to enable you to automatically register inSided event attendees on Zoom, Gotowebinar, and more! Please let us know what you think of these improvements in the replies :) We’d really appreciate your feedback!

  Check out our guide: 5 steps to prepare your Community for SEO here!   We have been working on a number of improvements for the SEO performance of our platform. Many of these improvements were based in your feedback and ideas that you posted in our ideation category. Read more to find out which improvements have been implemented.   Meta title and Meta description Inspired by Change meta title and description from @Ilse  The SEO title is displayed on your browser tab and tells you what page you're on. SEO titles and descriptions are also read by search engine robots and seen by users searching the web. We have added SEO settings to the home- and category pages where you can change the meta title and meta description of a page.  Learn how to change the meta title and description for your home- and category pages in this article: Meta title and meta description   SEO Settings for category pages  Archive / Hide old content ​Inspired by Archiving - improve customer experience by showing them only relevant content from @Florian  As your community grows and starts collecting more content over time some content might become outdated and irrelevant. To make sure your users find relevant content you want to hide older content. We have added additional settings to category pages in control to hide old content from search engines as well as your platform search (live-search dropdown and search result pages) Hiding content happens on a category level, which means that an entire category and all the topics inside the category can be archived/hidden at once. Learn more about hiding older content: Hide old content from search engines and your platform search   Structured Data for articles and unanswered questions Inspired by Use Google Structured Data to display enriched FAQs and How-Tos from @bjoern_schulze  We enriched article topics with structured data. Google search results for eligible articles may have an enhanced appearance in search results. Enhanced features can include placement in the Top stories carousel, host carousel, Visual stories, and rich result features such as headline text and larger-than-thumbnail images. In order for articles to be eligible for this enhanced appearance they need to have a featured image and a logo. We’ll reuse the logo that you provided in Control → Customization → Header → Logo for this. More info on structured data can be found here: Structured data for Articles, Structured data for QA   Other SEO Improvements Next to the improvements above we made the following smaller under the hood optimisations: Made various search page titles (recently active, help others etc.) more SEO descriptive Cleaned up URL structure and redirect URLs to improve the crawling budget of search engines Made recently active and help others tabs crawlable Added XML Sitemap Excluding member- and searchpages from Robots.txt That’s everything for this update, we hope you like the new improvements we made.

The way we display a list of topics has been improved. Today we rolled out changes with the goal to make the user experience more consistent across the platform, distinguish different content types visually and make content easier to scan. New topic list view We made some general changes to all topics cards and some specific changes for ideas and articles. Click Learn more! below to see a visual overview of the new topic card design:     General layout changes Smaller author avatar Change the color of user name from brand color to text color (will be overwritten by rank username styling) Display category info next to author, parent category is now shown Distinguish the content types using different verbs next to author information Amount of views are only displayed on desktop for articles Subtle hover effect for metadata Upgraded article card in topic list Remove border around image and content Show content right below the title Show label on image if there is a featured image Upgraded idea card in topic list Highlight the vote action as well as the amount of votes Improve idea status visibility using status label We hope you like the new changes like we do, if you have feedback let us know in the comments below! We are working on more visual improvements and a new way to change generic styles (colors, cards, fonts, buttons, lists) in your platform. Stay tuned for more!

We have added an XML Sitemap that will index all (parent) categories of your platform. An XML Sitemap helps search engines to quickly discover important and relevant URLs.  This feedback was originally submitted by @freydrew in our ideas section, thanks!   Locate your XML Sitemap The sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml  where ‘example’ should be replaced by your domain name.   Updated Robots.txt We also a link to the XML sitemap in your Robots.txt file, only if your Robots.txt file was not configured before!. We advise everybody to double check their Robots.txt file to check if a link to the XML sitemap is included.    How to link to the XML Sitemap in your Robots.txt Locate your sitemap ULR (see above) Go to Control → Settings → Robots.txt Add Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml to the Robots.txt file Press Save changes

We’re taking the ‘Customization’ mode one step further and will soon introduce a new ‘Theme’ configuration mode. In this mode you can configure generic styles that are applied consistent with your entire platform, such as colors, buttons, fonts, card- and list styling and Custom CSS changes. Changing Cards in the new ‘Theme’ configuration mode  What to expect Theme configuration: A whole new mode in the community to allow you to easily change generic styles. You won’t need the Control environment to make changes anymore! Color configuration: Manage, edit and preview your color scheme Button configuration: Manage, edit and preview your buttons and their behaviour for various interaction states (default, hover, click) Font configuration: Manage, edit and preview your font-families Card configuration: Manage, edit and preview the look and feel of cards (used for quick-links, categories, featured topics etc) and their behaviour for various interaction states (default, hover, click). This has an impact on your existing card design: ‘Cards’ are used everywhere in the platform:  • Quicklinks • Featured topics • New featured topics • Events overview • Knowledge base widget • Category widget Currently the styling (title, text, border-radius, border-width, box-shadow etc.) of cards is not the same for all cards. We will align all cards elements and make sure they look and feel the same.    Custom CSS: Write custom CSS styling and directly preview the changes you wrote Blazing fast live-preview! Changes that you make can directly be previewed in the homepage. No more jumping back- and forth between Control and your Community layout.    When will the ‘Theme’ mode be available? You can expect the Theme mode to be launched later this April. We’ll inform you here via inSpired once it’s there.

The first quarter of the year has ended, and we wanted to share our first 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 commented on. We also want to highlight prominent community ideas that are still on our radar. Some quick stats for inSpired ideas in Q1 12 ideas delivered 25 new ideas created 80 replies on the new ideas 99 votes on the new ideas A big thank you to everyone on inSpired who has shared ideas and voted on other customer ideas - the product team really values the insights and feedback you’ve given us over the last quarter    Ideas we delivered We’re happy to share that the following 11 ideas you submitted on inSpired have been delivered, with a total of 121 votes delivered in Q1 2020. 🎉 Allow users to search for all topics containing the same public tagSubmitted by @LPortalupi  Extend community search functionalitySubmitted by @bjoern_schulze  When mentioned in a new comment, only send one notificationSubmitted by @Jurgen  Changing the order of featured topicsSubmitted by @Monique  Assigning a point value to the leaderboardSubmitted by @ChrisPantelis  Schedule an article to be published on a specific daySubmitted by @tomasmouton  Add Preview to draft page to see how unpublished content will look once publishedSubmitted by @freydrew  Content Type "Event"Submitted by @bjoern_schulze  Zapier trigger: New User Registration Submitted by @James Scott  Assigning a post to a moderator should trigger an email notification Submitted by @lila_meyer  Pinned replies Submitted by @Rudi  Partially delivered We also worked on the following 2 ideas and provided parts of the idea or delivered a solution that allows you to achieve the same result: JIRA integrationSubmitted by @Keith M  Members Dashboard: New functionalities to add value to analyticsSubmitted by @bjoern_schulze  Most popular ideas (open/recently delivered) Here’s a quick update on the most popular open and recently delivered ideas (sorted by votes) on inSpired. 1. Schedule an article to be published on a specific day (46 votes / 🚀 Delivered) After we delivered manually awarding badges, this was the next top idea on inSpired. We shipped this last quarter (check the announcement for more details) - we hope you’re finding this feature useful - we find it very handy on the inSpired team as well! 2. Front-end moderation by users (31 votes / Open) We have discussed this idea again but don’t have any concrete plans to work on this. Our current priorities for moderation improvements lay with improving the workflow and ease of use for moderators in Control. Watch this space! 3. Private Messages: Enable attachments (30 votes / Open) We did a technical investigation for this and came to the following conclusion: Attaching images to a private message is complex and requires significant development investment to achieve. This is because the attachment service (for topics and replies) is connected to topics, and can’t easily be reused in private messages. We do not have any concrete plans to work on this. 4. We should be able to include images/pictures in pms (28 votes / Open) Much related to enabling attachments for private messages: We invested some time and resources to build an internal proof of concept around this idea. Based on the learnings from the proof of concept, we decided to postpone the realisation of this idea as we wanted to invest in other product capabilities and improvements in the last quarter. At this point we don’t know when we will be working on this idea (again).    5. Sent and deliver rate of notifications (27 votes / Open) We don’t have any concrete plans to work on this at the moment. It’s something we might consider looking into as we invest further in this area of the platform. 6. Block offensive words when creating threads (26 votes / Open) This is something we will investigate this quarter, but we’re not yet able to commit on a concrete time for how or when we’ll deliver this. 7. Ability to move subforum to another category (24 votes / Open) We plan to tackle this very soon - make sure you’re subscribed to the idea for updates! 8. Changing the order of featured topics (23 votes / 🚀 Delivered) We delivered this idea this quarter together with the release of the new homepage configuration experience. We developed a new brand new featured topics widget with some new perks: Drag & drop reorder topics in whatever way you want Feature an unlimited amount of topics Determine if topics should display as a large or small card Add a title above the topics (optional) Add a call to action button below the topics (optional) What’s next? You can expect more updates on your ideas as we are currently working our way to review 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 and will be communicated via the roadmap updates. For instance, this coming quarter, we’ll be paying particular attention to ideas that improve moderator quality of life. If you have any feedback, ideas (see what we did there? 😉) or thoughts around our ideation process please share them with us, and help us build a better product!

For quite some time we have been thinking about changing the way we display a list of topics. Together with you we’ve brainstormed about changes, improvements and created various mockups. Our goal is to make the user experience more consistent across the platform, distinguish different content types visually and make content easier to scan.  The topic InSide Design: Topic list by @xiaoyu-shen  gives more insights into our thought process and the way we approached this. In this topic you will learn what is going to change for the topic list view and what other design changes we’ll be rolling out to your communities over time. Update April 21: Changes mention in this topic are now available!   New topic list view We made some general changes to all topics cards and some specific changes for ideas and articles. Click Learn more! below to see a visual overview of the new topic card design:     General layout changes Smaller author avatar Change the color of user name from brand color to text color (will be overwritten by rank username styling) Display category info next to author, parent category is now shown Distinguish the content types using different verbs next to author information Amount of views are only displayed on desktop for articles Subtle hover effect for metadata Upgraded article card in topic list Remove border around image and content Show content right below the title Show label on image if there is a featured image Upgraded idea card in topic list Highlight the vote action as well as the amount of votes Improve idea status visibility using status label   Where would this new topic list design apply to?All pages with topic lists will be affected: For example, home page, community (parent) category page, search results, recently active topics, answered questions, etc. Note: topic lists in knowledge base categories will not be updated.   When will these changes be available? Update April 21: Changes mention in this topic are now available! We expect to enable the new topic list view Tuesday April 21 around 13:00 Amsterdam time (UTC/GMT +2 hours). We’ll notify you via inSpired when the new topic list view is available. We are working on more visual improvements and a new way to change generic styles (colors, cards, fonts, buttons, lists) in your platform. Stay tuned for more!

We shipped some improvements to the Robots.txt file based on your feedback. The Robots.txt file helps you to tell Search Engines what content you would like to have be made available in their search results, and what content you would like to remain hidden. Note: This update will not be applied if you have already configured your Robots.txt file When we first delivered the possibility to set up a Robots.txt file it was empty. It was your responsibility to update and maintain this file (often a one-time setup). Now, in case your Robots.txt is empty, we’ve pre filled this file with some generic rules to exclude some community pages from being crawled.   What did we change to your Robots.txt We added the following generic rules (only if your Robots.txt file was not configured before). We advise everybody to add these rules to their Robots.txt file if they haven’t done so: Disallow: /members/Disallow: ?userid=Disallow: ?sort=Disallow: search_type=tagDisallow: search?q=   Why did we do this? By disallowing the pages above we tell search engines to not crawl them, eventually leading to them not being indexed anymore. The other pages of your platform, that hold importent content and information, will get more value and rank better in search engines. In the end it will be easier for the user to get to right information they are looking for from their favourite search engine.   How can I change my Robots.txt If you want to make changes to your Robots.txt or revert the update we pushed you can follow this guide to configure your own Robots.txt file: Setting up a Robots.txt file

If you’re working with colleagues who aren’t in Control on a daily basis, this one’s for you - it’s now possible to configure email notifications to be sent to moderators when they are assigned a topic in Control. With moderator assignment notifications, you can:  Alert moderators when they’ve been assigned to a new topic, including direct links to the topic in the frontend and Control, as well as the topic title/author, category, and a snippet of the content. Turn on/off assignment notifications for your moderation team. To turn on these email notifications for your moderation team, go to Control > Settings > Moderation > Moderation Notifications and flip the on switch 🔔. An example email generated by assigning a moderator to a topic. ​​​​​​The subject line contains both the user who assigned the topic to you and the topic title (e.g.  “daniel․boon assigned a topic to you: API: badges and date filter”)This option is located in Control > Settings > Moderation > Moderation NotificationsThanks @lila_meyer for submitting this as an idea on inSpired! We hope you like this new feature - please share any feedback or questions you’ve got in the replies!

Got a popular idea where you want to highlight an official company response or your latest update without end users having to scroll through pages and pages of replies? We’ve introduced pinned replies to help you help your customers find the latest information without having to dig for it (thanks @Rudi for submitting this idea on inSpired). With pinned replies, you can: Highlight any reply in a conversation/idea in the first post of the topic. Easily pin/unpin/repin any reply in Control. You can check this idea on inSpired for a real-world example. How a pinned reply looks on the frontendAnd here’s what the interface looks like in Control: An example of a pinned reply in Control, with the option to unpin the reply and pin another reply. Currently, you can pin a reply in any topic with the conversation topic type. We hope you like this new feature - please share any feedback or questions you’ve got in the replies.

Challenging times at the moment, guys, and I hope you’re all staying well. How is the situation affecting your business and daily work?  We’re seeing that some companies are struggling because their support teams are understaffed, and their support requests are increasing.  We wanted to put together a few quick ideas for you that might help make community management life a little easier in the coming weeks…   Direct support enquiries to your community If you’re sending out communications to your customer base detailing any temporary changes to your operations or service provisions, consider recommending that customers visit your community to get any further questions answered, and reduce the pressure your support team is no doubt feeling right now.    Here’s GiffGaff doing a great job of it:    Community under pressure too? Consider recruiting some extra super users  If you’re in an affected industry (I’m looking at you, telco!) then your community is no doubt also under some additional pressure and experiencing elevated activity with users discussing and asking questions relating to the current situation. Consider recruiting a few additional super users to help you through this period—if you already had your eye on new potential super users, now is the time to cut the red tape and get them on board and offering you some much-needed moderation support.   Highlight relevant knowledge base content Make use of the features available on your community to highlight news or update content  related to how the Coronavirus outbreak may impact your customers. If you’re taking special measures, implementing temporary changes to plans or accounts to assist users, or simply have your operations affected in any way, this is a great way to make sure worried customers get the info they need in a couple of easy clicks. You could consider temporarily adding new Quick Links or re-arranging them to make sure pandemic-related content is easy to find.    Good job O2!    Coursera have used the Featured Topic feature to draw attention to their COVID-19 related content How else are you guys making the most of the platform’s functionality to help you through right now? Please do share it with us as I’m sure all fellow community managers will be happy to receive any tips!   Stay well. ​

Here we are, nearing the end of Q1 2020 and what a strange and difficult situation we all find ourselves in. The whole team here at inSided hopes that you, your family, friends and colleagues are coping as well as possible with the current situation! How about a welcome break with our latest Roadmap Update? ☕ We’ve got some great new releases we’re excited to share with you all, including:  The all-new Homepage configuration: this is a huge step to help you optimize for your various different use cases and custom styles We’re extremely proud to have delivered so many ideas from you—our beloved community!  We’re looking forward to helping you all bring your offline communities online, with user groups and events (more below) — especially now.  Here’s a quick look at our releases since the previous update: Bring your community together online with our new Events module Never lose a change with article versioning Publish perfectly-formatted articles with (shareable!) article previews Brand-new menu in Control Hide ‘old’ content in the Embeddable Widget Publish content even whilst you’re on holiday, with Article Scheduling Target the competitive spirit of your members with a points-based leaderboard Change your community homepage layout design with the all new customization mode New category type 'News' now available A whole new search experience: Instant search and search filters Dashboard improvement: save filters as bookmarks Get a 360° view of your customers with our Salesforce CRM integration Use text- and background color in the editor Embed Miro boards into topics Platform email improvements  Coming up: What we’re working on:   Groups Engage with like-minded community users who are passionate about the same interest, industry or role Create and manage public or private groups from Control View and manage group members, see who is part of your group, accept or deny new members and remove members who misbehave Your community members can browse public- and private groups. Join a group, see its members and post new topics and replies to it Customization improvements Following up the Customization mode we’ll continue working on improving and expanding the capabilities of the customization mode. As part of these improvements you can expect new homepage widgets, a new topic list view and more general design improvements. Personalization We will start investigating how we can serve more relevant (personalized) content to a segment of users. If you have any ideas or thoughts on this subject, send a private message to @Yoeri as we would love to hear your feedback on this subject. Salesforce Federated search We’re building an integration with Salesforce to search for Knowledge base content through your inSided community platform View Salesforce knowledge base articles in your community live-search and search result pages Salesforce Support Case Escalation We’ll provide you with the ability to create Salesforce cases from community posts directly in Control. This makes it really easy to notify your support team, and give them quick context on issues customers raise on the community that can’t be handled by other customers, or the community team. Tag management We’re going to give you a better way to manage the tags users can create on the community, with the outcome of making tags more useful for your users to find relevant content around a subject on the community. This includes a way to manage tags in Control (create, edit, delete), and a way to prevent users from adding tags on the fly (as well as a way to suggest tags from the ‘official’ list). Ideation workflow We’re looking into ways of making it easier for you to manage your ideation processes on the community, whether it’s highlighting the latest official response to an idea, or closing the loop in a more effective way with all customers interested in the idea. So with all that said, we’re looking forward to continuing our momentum into next quarter and bringing you even more rich features and functionality. Let us know here on inSpired what your focus is right now and how you’re utilizing your community to help you through this challenging period. Until the next update, stay well! 

Events are all about community, whether you’re hosting an online webinar, running your yearly conference, or arranging a local meet-up for your community members. As we see more and more in-person events being cancelled in the wake of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), getting your community together online and keeping them engaged has never been more important. That's why we want to make it as easy as possible for you to publish and promote events on your community. Not only is this a great way to keep your users engaged, it allows you to measurably prove the value of your community platform within your organization. By putting your online community at the center of the event experience you facilitate knowledge sharing between community and ensure the conversation around your event goes on long after it’s finished.   Thanks to @bjoern_schulze for suggesting Content Type: “Event” as an idea on inSpired! With events you can: Help community users discover events via the community with brand-new events widgets for the homepage and an overview page with upcoming and past events.  Boost interest and signups with event RSVPs (you can even use our platform as an end-to-end event management tool for more informal events).  Increase community engagement by promoting featured topics to encourage meaningful conversations before and after your event takes place. We’ve prepared a whole new suite of documentation to help you navigate the new events feature - learn more in our events knowledge base. Events functionality is also available via our API - see our API documentation for more details. Let us know what you think of the new events module in the replies - we’re excited to hear whether you like it, and any feedback you have so we can improve it further.