Product Updates

Ever accidentally lost a bit of content when you were rewriting an article? Or are you collaborating on articles across a large content team, and having to chase each other or add comments externally about who changed what? With our new article version history, all changes to the content in your article are now completely transparent to anyone in Control. You can now have full confidence in the changes you make. With article versioning you can:  Check every content change made to an article, from the first draft to the latest and greatest live version.  See who changed an article, and at what time they made the change.   Recover any particular content from a version via a simple copy/paste. See our new version history feature dramatised in action below: A cautionary taleNote: your existing articles from before we launched this feature will currently only have one version (the latest one). Let us know what you think of the new article versioning feature in the replies - we’re excited to hear whether you like it, and any feedback you have so we can improve it further.

I’m happy to say that we’ve released yet another inSpired idea: article previews. Thanks to @freydrew for submitting the original idea on inSpired! No one likes their formatting to turn out differently than expected. We have a powerful WYSIWYG editor for creating articles, but we heard feedback from you that sometimes things were a little bit off for your community readers after you published the article. For instance, the spacing between lines was different. And the font is different… Or you published the article in a hidden category on the community to share with your boss/colleagues. No need for hidden categories anymore - we’ve introduced a new preview option for article drafts! What’s even cooler is that you can optionally change the sharing settings to share previews with colleagues who don’t even have access to Control.With article previews you can:  See a 100% accurate preview of what your published article content will look like on the community. Give Control colleagues quick access to a preview of your article. Share article previews with colleagues who don’t have access to Control. We hope this helps you publish articles with less stress and higher quality! Some proof that it works: Spot the difference, oh wait, there is none! Well - maybe there are some differences in this particular article...50 bonus points on inSpired for the first customer who calls out any difference between the article content in this screenshot vs what you’re currently reading.Two things to keep in mind: we don’t currently include previews of file attachments, and the sharing functionality ‘Anyone who has the preview link’ is not supported on communities with platform visibility set to private. Let us know what you think of the new article preview feature in the replies - we’re excited to hear whether you like it, and any feedback you have so we can improve it further.

Update Thursday 12 March 17:45: We’ve successfully completed the rollout of the new Control menu  Please leave any feedback in the replies, especially ​if you spot something we can improve, or for example if any navigation within Control has become more (or less!) frustrating :)   We plan to launch a new menu in Control next Thursday 12 March 2020 . In this topic you can find all the information you need to be prepared for the launch, so you and your team can hit the ground running with the new menu. Note: this is a visual/UI update; permission settings will remain the same, although some pages will change location. As we previewed last week in our product research category, we have revamped the login page for Control and we’re working on a brand-new menu. We’re getting ready to deliver this menu to all of your Control environments. Our main goals with this update are to: Maximise the space available in Control to help you focus on your work Make the interface of Control match the inSided brand more closely Make Control a more beautiful place to spend time in Highlights of the changes: No more header in Control - another way we’re giving you more space to focus on your work. An optionally collapsible secondary menu, to give you more room to focus on your current task. Some restructuring of the menu layout, taking into account our switch to icons in the primary side menu. A new button to quickly take you to the homepage of your community. For more information, check out this GIF walking through the new Control navigation in detail. (Updated Wed 11 March: seems our platform doesn’t like my GIF tool, so changed it to a link). Please let us know if you have any questions!

We added a new setting to the Embeddable Widget setup page to improve the content accuracy within the conversational- and in-app widget: Exclude old content Content accuracy settings for the Embeddable WidgetBy default all public content will be indexed and shown within the Embeddable Widgets. With Exclude old content you can decide to exclude old and outdated content.  Content exclusion is based on the recent engagement in the topic: if a topic was started, or received a new comment, within the date range it will be shown in the embeddable widgets. Examples Given that a topic is created 2 years ago and the last comment was 6 months ago: When exclude old content field is empty the topic will be shown When exclude old content field is set to 365 days the topic will be shown When exclude old content field is set to 90 days the topic will not be shown

I’m happy to announce that we’ve released the #2-voted idea on inSpired (with a whopping 46 votes), article scheduling! Thanks to @tomasmouton for submitting the original idea. Your online community never sleeps or takes a holiday. But you should, and we want to help you! No more bringing your laptop to the beach, asking colleagues to publish something for you, or setting reminders to publish an article at a particular time - from now on, that’s all automated by article scheduling.With article scheduling you can:  Schedule a draft article to be published on a particular date/time in the future. Cancel the scheduled publishing, in case your plans change. See who has scheduled an article and when, to help your content team collaborate. We hope this will help you get ahead on your content calendar and schedule in a bunch of great articles for your community. We hope this will also help all of you who are starting brand-new communities, so you can launch your community with a bunch of fresh content. Special thanks to @Koen Sterken @freydrew and @bjoern_schulze for helping with usability and beta testing of this feature  🧪. Let us know what you think of the new article scheduling feature in the replies - we’re excited to hear whether you like it, and any feedback you have so we can improve it further.

We’re happy to announce the release of a points-based leaderboard -  another tool to help you activate your community members. The leaderboard provides a weekly race to the top, with a chance for all of your community members to participate. You can find an example on the inSpired homepage, if you haven’t already spotted it. With the points-based leaderboard you can:  Configure custom points values for 5 activity types on the community (best answers, replies, topics, likes given & received).  Build customised point-based leaderboards for your community homepage (choose # of users to display, time ranges, and exclude user roles). Award points to a user via API (enabling you to reward users for actions outside of the community platform). Find out how the points-based leaderboard works and how to set it up here: https://community.insided.com/super-user-engagement-112/how-to-set-up-a-points-based-leaderboard-1982 ​​​ Thanks to @lila_meyer and @ranjan & @ChrisPantelis for beta testing the points-based leaderboard on the Gainsight & Koodo communities! And extra kudos to @ChrisPantelis for suggesting this idea on inSpired💡. We’d love to hear your feedback on this new feature, so please let us know what you think in the replies!

We are thrilled to announce that our inSpired homepage has been completely re-designed and is available to all of you now! This is connected to our freshly-launched homepage customization tool which is available for you as well!   What’s new Next to an updated banner and other visual improvements, we have added some new widgets & improved existing elements within the homepage. Here the complete change log: Removed border of header, navigation and community statistics bar Updated category thumbnails (and hero banner) Added parent-category navigation cards Updated the quicklinks Added new featured topics widget Updated recommended content widget Changed community category cards order (to start with “recently active”) Added sidebar widget on homepage, (parent-)category page & topic page Added quicklinks at the bottom of the page   Why did we do these changes There are a number of reasons why we did these changes the way we did them. Not just that we regularly review the homepage to reflect latest product improvements and to enhance the navigation experience. We of course also want to show what’s possible with the new homepage customization feature. We hope that you like it and also find something now that you can adapt on your own community homepage! Tip: Learn how to get the most out of your own homepage by checking out our guide on best practices!   Your feedback Of course we are curious to hear from you if you like it, or if you are missing something! Let us know in the comments!

We added a new type of category that you can add to your community, meet News. This category type can best be described as a communication and information sending category as your company has full control over its contents. Characteristics Only moderators, community managers and administrators can create topics in this category The default sorting order of this category is set to ‘Newest first’ - this will sort the list after latest published content and not after latest activity (this excludes sticky topics which will always be on the top) Registered users and super users can not post topics in this category, if you want to add a topic of your user to this category you can do so by moving the topic in the Control environment Example usecases Here are some examples on how and when to use a news category For official updates from your company For product release notes and changes (like we do here in the ‘News & platform updates’ category on inSpired) For your company blogposts that contain roundups, inspiration and interviews Create a news category Creating a news category, or converting a default category to a news category, is a piece of cake: Go to Control > Platform > Community and either add a new category, or edit an existing one. Category type: NewsOver time we will make changes to the UI of this News category (much like ideation and knowledge base categories have a different UI) and to the way topics are being displayed in the topic lists. We hope you like this new category type and we look forward to see it in action in your communities, if you have a great use case please do share it with us in the comments below.

We are working on ‘under the hood’ improvements on our notifications service. This service makes sure that platform emails such as account activation, new replies, new mentions and such are being delivered to your users.  What are we improving Email notifications for new replies (when a user subscribed to a topic)    Speed of notification service, minimizing the possible delay of account activation emails Send a single email when a user is mentioned in a topic that he is subscribed to Rendering of quotes (“) in email subjects (e.g. You’ve received a private message) Overview of available platform emails Preview of platform emails in Control Success notification when the user requests an additional activation email Default content for emails that are sent out when a moderator approves an account (related to Registration Approvals) No changes or actions are needed on your side, these improvements will be delivered to your platform over the coming days. While improving our notifications service some emails might temporarily behave differently than expected (as we’re working on a service that is running 24/7/365). If you are experiencing any unexpected/unwanted behaviour with the improvements listed above (or platform emails in general) please let us know by sending an email to support@insided.com.

Get ready to (re)design your community homepage. We have rebuilt the homepage design experience from scratch. Adjust the look and feel of your homepage with just a few clicks. No coding required!     What can I do with this feature? Add, edit and delete homepage widgets while directly previewing your homepage Place homepage widgets in whatever order you like! Preview (design) changes before publishing Use brand new widgets like: featured topic cards, community navigation cards, leaderboard, container, HTML widget(s) What is new?   Customization modeA whole new mode to allow you to easily change your homepage layout. Guess what? You won’t need the Control environment to make changes to your homepage anymore!  Live previewPreview changes that you make directly. No more jumping back- and forth between Control and your Community layout. Reorder widgetsTake full control over the position of your homepage widgets. Place important topics on the top of your homepage, above the fold, or place a list of recommended topics right above your footer. Widget libraryPick homepage widgets that suit your business. Choose from a wide range of widget types like: navigation, topic, promotion, sidebar, custom code Go full-widthNot a fan of the sidebar? Remove it and apply a full-width design on your homepage Featured topics (widget)We improved the featured topics design and added some extras. Add a title and button to the featured topics panel. Point base leaderboard (widget)Display a point based list of valuable community members based on their engagement levels. Community cards (widget)Promote community parent categories as navigation cards, there are 2 different templates that you can pick.   How to get started   Simply sign in to a community account with user role Community Manager or Administrator. Go to the homepage and click the nice purple ‘Customize’ button. Of course, we also added some guides and how-to’s to help you get started:  Getting started with the homepage design A closer look at homepage widgets Set up quick links on your Homepage Feature topics on your Homepage Set up community and knowledge base navigation Add custom widgets to your homepage with HTML&CSS Enjoy!

Instant search and search filters are now available on your communities! As of now you will be able to narrow down search results and perform more specific search queries with the help of filters. We replaced the old search result page with a new page that includes a bunch of new and improved functionality. Can’t wait to see how it looks like and works? View the new search page: https://community.insided.com/search In some edge cases the total topic counter may not reflect the counter in the filters, we are aware and are looking into these inconsistencies What’s new Category search - searching in a category page will only show results from that specific category Instant search - the list of search results will automatically refresh after some time as you type in a search result page Endless scroll - when you reach the bottom of the list of result we’ll automatically load a new set of results Search filters - we added search filters to the search result pages that will allow you to filter on: Source Community (shows all topics posted to community categories) inSided Knowledge base (shows all topics posted to inSided knowledge base categories) External Knowledge base* (shows all topics from an external Knowledge base like Zendesk or Salesforce) Knowledge base categories Filter topics by knowledge base parent- and child categories Community categories Filter topics by community parent- and child categories Topic type Filter topics by article, idea, conversation, question Public tag Filter topics by one or more public tags *Only visible when you have set up a Federated search integration with an external knowledge base Thank you; We’d like to thank everybody who helped us testing and providing feedback. We were able to include some of your feedback and fix inconsistencies. Thanks! 

In the course of improving the dashboard experience, we have added a new feature which allows you to save the filters you have activated as a bookmark. We hope this will save you time and effort when pulling your weekly/monthly reports from the dashboards. This improvement is based on feedback from this idea, following up on our recent ideation review. What’s new Once you have selected all the filters that you are interested in you can save them for later. Simply click on the small icon at the top and choose a name for it.     Some tips for working with this feature Remove the date filter before saving, unless you only want to check for a certain date range All saved filters are available across all Dashboards - no matter where you add them Be as specific as possible in the description to find back a saved filter more easily They are ordered by the way they have been saved - your last saved filter will be at the bottom of the list Deleting or editing filters is not possible at the moment. We believe this feature in its current state will already make your reporting job easier with the dashboards, and wanted to deliver it to you as fast as possible, so we haven't included a full array of options just yet. Your feedback We are curious to hear your feedback on this feature. Do you find this helpful? Is there something you are missing? Or is there something not working as expected? Let us know in the comments! What’s next? In the meantime, we are already working on implementing more ideas from our community. Make sure to upvote or create ideas so we know that you’d like us to work on it.  

We’re pleased to share that we are currently working on improving the user- interface and experience of search. Jump to the instructions to preview the advanced search on your community Example of new search result pageWhat to expect Searching in a category page will only show results from that specific category* Instant search - the list of search result will automatically refresh as you type in a search result page Endless scroll - when you reach the bottom of the list of result we’ll automatically load a new set of results UI changes - the list of search results will be changed to improve read- and scanabilty Search filters - you will be able to filter search result pages on: Community (parent) categories Knowledge base (parent) categories Topic type Public tag Source (e.g. community, knowledge base) *category specific search results are already available in the live-search dropdown We have more ideas for search filters but would like to hear your input on this as well: Let us know what you think of this update, share your most desired filter and stay tuned for more!

We are going to add a new Integrations section in the Control environment. In this article you will learn what is going to change:   Update (Jan 21): The new integrations section is now available The changes mentioned in this topic will be rolled out to your Control environment on January 21 (Tuesday)  This update only involves a new section and reordering pages. User permissions will remain the same. New ‘Integrations’ section in ControlIntegrations A section dedicated to platform integrations with third-party applications (Apps), setting up an API, and connecting to single-sign-on (SSO) providers. Changes ‘Integrations’ will moved from ‘Settings’ to its own section ‘Integrations’ ‘Integrations’ page will be renamed to ‘Apps’ ‘API’ will be moved from ‘Settings’ to ‘Integrations’ ‘SSO’ will be added in the near future Why are we making these changes We are actively looking into providing more integrations options to our platform. To promote visibility, and making it easier to explain where to work on integrations, we added the Integrations section to Control. If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the replies!

We’re happy to announce that our integration with Salesforce is now available in the inSided Control environment with self-service set up. Our Salesforce integration enables you to push community member and activity data to Salesforce to gain a 360° degree view of your customers—providing you with richer data that helps prove the worth of the community to the rest of your business. What can you do with this integration?    Get a 360° view of every customer’s community activity, making sure you’ve always got the full context easily to hand when communicating with customers.    Understand the reach of your community and see how it’s been adopted by your customer base, as well as which customer segments you can target to improve community membership and results.    Get insights about the engagement levels across your customer base, and easily spot any accounts that have dropped in activity—so you can take proactive action.    Provide better context for your product team on customer ideation, by identifying which ideas are most popular amongst different customer segments (you can even link ideas to account ARR!). For more inspiration on how to get the most out of this integration, check out our eBook: Unlock your Community Data — Integrate inSided with Salesforce. ​​​ The Salesforce CRM integration is included in our Enterprise package. If you’re not on our Enterprise package, you’ll see a card in Control directing you to contact your CSM or Support to learn more. Installing the Salesforce CRM integration Follow our setup guide with your Salesforce Admin to get the integration set up (time to set up is just under 30 minutes!). This guide also provides more details about how exactly the integration works, and exactly what community data you can pull into Salesforce. We’re really excited to bring you this integration and are confident that it will help deliver a lot of community value for the Salesforce users out there! As always, please let us know in the replies if you have any questions or feedback.

Hey,  a quick heads up to let you know that we will re-enable text color and background colors in the community editor (this is currently only available in the editor in control). We made this decision based on; your votes on this poll (12v5)  your feedback in this topic the fact that it will allow you to edit a topic with text colors in the community without breaking it (reported bug). This functionality is not limited to a user role or a set of permissions. All users will be able to make use of this functionality. Text- and background colors are now available in the community editor

Before the decade is coming to an end, we really wanted to share our first review of ideation on our community in order to touch back on all the great ideas that have been shared on inSpired - and of course also what we have done with them! We have learned and improved many things around ideation in the past twelve months, but we recognize that there are still some things we could do better going forward. This review is not meant to pat us on our back, but much more to feed back to you so that you learn what we have changed and how this has impacted the ideas that you have submitted, voted for or commented on. Of course we also want to talk about the most prominent ideas and give you a lookout on what to expect for 2020! First, let’s have a look at ideation in 2019 in numbers     And here’s how we improved the process   Just like some of you who are working with ideation on your communities, we also are going through a process of optimization in the hope to improve the product as well as customer sentiment. In a nutshell, these are the things we have done in this year to make sure that your suggestions are being followed up on in a more efficient and thorough manner: Recurring meeting to discuss new & popular ideas Better explanation of how we review ideas New, clearer idea labels More space within the product roadmap to implement ideas This review For the next year, we plan to have more (quarterly) reviews in order to link back to ideas quicker. We are also are looking into some product improvements to make our & your work with ideas more efficient! Most popular ideas   Now let’s have a look at the most popular ideas of 2019 and their status: 1. Manually grant Badges to users (47 votes / Delivered) Well, this idea has been sitting on our community and in our product backlog for a while, longer than we or you would have liked - but it’s finally there! We actually delivered a number of further improvements, so that you can make better use of Badges on your community! 2. Schedule an article to be published on a specific day (44 votes / Open) We would have loved to deliver this as well this year, but unfortunately it had to be deprioritized in favor of other improvements. Surely one of the items for us at the top of the wishlist for the next year, we really see the value of this in making your life easier and also want to be able to use this! 3. Ability to delete private messages (37 votes / Delivered partially) Since a while now users are able to delete their private messages. We have labeled this as partially delivered as we do not offer yet functionality to delete complete conversations / messages in batches, however by now you can finally clean up some things or revert mistakes in case you send a message to the wrong recipient! 4. Front-end moderation by users (31 votes / Open) This is a nice one as well, however we have been struggling a bit to figure out as to which extend this should go. The likelihood of us working on something in this direction is quite high for the next year, but the evaluation is not completely done yet -  we cannot fully commit without knowing the full scope of what we think we want to deliver on this. 5. We should be able to include images/pictures in pms (28 votes / Open) We recognize that there is more demand around features for private messages (general attachments, hyperlinking, etc.). As we have rolled out the new text editor on all other pages of our community, we are investigating the time needed to implement the new editor to private messages too - which would enable you to do most (if not all) of these beatiful things in private messages as well! We will come back to this soon as we have news. 6. Opt-out of @mention email notifications (27 votes / Delivered) Many of you wanted better settings for your users to unsubscribe from notifications. Until 2019, users were not able to turn off @-mention notifications. We have implemented this feature, as well as more clear settings around notifications in general. 7. Suggest existing topics while making a new topic (25 votes / Delivered) By implementing this idea we were able to deflect a lot of double-content on your community, reducing the customer effort to find an answer and literally forcing community search on users (as most of them do not seem to be motivated to search first themselves ). While this caused a small dent to the general activity to the community, we feel that it really added to the customer experience!   What else did we deliver? Of course there have been more ideas which we have implemented, here a full list of all the ideas which we have delivered on in the past 12 months: Add partner and superuser to primary role No warning when you navigate away from your active page Show the content of a topic/reply in the email notifcation Private message show username in the browser tab Enable robot.txt file with branded template Tables in wysiwyg editor Allow @ mentions to work from within control Ability to convert answer to article Save as draft option for articles FTP links Crate the option to open in new tab in the case of insert link / hyperlink Knowledge base improve responsiveness Add a clearer way to unsubscribe from category subscriptions Filter by article labels Editor jump to insert field when adding a link Ability to adjust visibility and position of recently online ribbon Custom height for homepage hero image Give option to manage the introduction widget Paste image in text fields Editor stay put when copy-pasting in a long message Add banner to community for advertising Add links to recommended widget Disable “show as attachment” for images by default   Next steps As some of you might have noticed, we are currently updating many ideas that we have covered during our review. This also means that we have to close some ideas - another learning for us was to say “no” if we don’t see much demand it is not a fit with our vision we want to improve something in a different way So expect more engagement by our team in the upcoming days and weeks. Of course we are curious about your thoughts on this review, our ideation workflow as a whole as well as on specific ideas - so please keep that coming as it helps us to improve the process. We are also actively looking into the next number of ideas which we will implement in the new year, so keep your fingers crossed and wait for our next update soon to come! :)

It’s nearing the end of the year but we are still working hard to deliver on three themes that come from your feedback. Think of these as early gifts from inSided for the new year :) 1. Gamification: We are improving our capabilities here to give you the ability to manually reward badges (think a ‘Superman’ badge going to your most active responder or a ‘Geek’ badge for the most ideation requests on the community)! And soon we’ll release a new powerful capability to allow you to use points and leaderboards to better motivate and reward users for community engagement. 2. Reporting Dashboards: We got feedback that the current dashboards can be confusing and some data is not accurate. We want to get your confidence back. So, we are rolling out updates to make the dashboards more robust, logical and trustworthy.3. Enhanced Customization: And last but not least, many of you asked for possibilities to make your homepage more unique and optimized for specific use cases. We are really excited about our (upcoming) releases that allow you to do just that.    Quick look at our releases since the previous update: Federated Search: Search for Zendesk Guide content through your inSided community platform Manually award badges (+ win a 100€ voucher) Show content in community emails Editor placeholders are re-enabled in the editor Use Custom CSS to change the look and feel of your community File upload limit raised to 50MB Improved design for live search suggestions Improvements to Header, Footer and Third-party scripts pages in Control New homepage widget: HTML code Previewing the point-based leaderboard Coming up:   Customization—easily change the look & feel of your community We’ll continue on our quest to make it as easy as possible to change the layout of your community homepage Configure and preview your community homepage directly in the front-end Add, edit and remove homepage widgets with a simple click, no coding required Featured topics - a brand new and improved way to feature topics on your homepage A new widget to easily feature topics via search or by pasting the topic URL Improved design of featured topic cards and responsive state Feature as many topics as you like and drag & drop them in the right position Determine where on the page you want to feature topics. Maybe you want them directly below the hero image or all the way at the bottom—you’ll have free control Add a title and call-to-action button to your featured topics (optional) News category - a new category type suited for updates and announcements A brand new community category type (next to default and ideation) Don’t worry, only moderators, community managers and administrators can publish to this category.  Posts will be sorted by ‘Newest first’ not by latest activity to make sure community members never miss your latest updates. UI/UX improvements to the way topics are being displayed Editor We’ll continue iterating on the editor to provide the best create and editing experience as possible. Powered, of course, by your feedback, ideas and suggestions here. Points-based leaderboard The points-based leaderboard will help you drive community members to contribute via a holistic measure of their contributions and a weekly race to the top. We recently started to preview the points-based leaderboard on inSpired. Read our how to to learn more about the specifics of how the leaderboard currently works. Our next step is to make it possible for any of you to add this powerful gamification element to your own community. Watch this space!  Dashboard improvements Based on your feedback to make the dashboard data more intuitive to understand, we recently rolled out a major change to the dashboards, so that the data accurately  reflects the current state of your community.  As part of these improvements, we’ve rolled out new documentation and added some tooltips to the dashboards in Control. Still up ahead, we’ll make it easier for you to save filters that you apply on a weekly or monthly basis—saving you time and effort. Gainsight integration We’re building an integration with Gainsight so you can gain a 360 customer view and enable your Customer Success team to proactively improve community engagement, self service, and ideation. You’ll be able to see community member and activity data right within Gainsight allowing you to configure views, health scores and CTAs. Mixpanel integration We’re also building a Mixpanel integration, enabling you to combine product usage data with community activity data. This will allow you to optimise the performance of your community using Mixpanel’s advanced reporting capabilities—including flows, funnels & retention. You’ll also be able to analyse the impact of community content and behaviour on product usage. We hope you like what we have on the horizon for the rest of the year and we really appreciate all the great ideas and feedback we get from you. In the meantime, from all of the team at inSided, we hope you have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 🎄🥂

You can now embed Miro boards into your topics. Miro is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform that brings your teams together, anytime, anywhere. Combine your community & Miro’s boards to for example work on Product development, UX research or just to make sure everyone stays aligned. There are two ways to embed a board into your topic: Simply paste a Miro url (must include /app/) in a topic or reply and it will generate a board Click the 3 dots (...) in the editor, select “Embed Media”, paste the URL in the field and click the Add button Here is an example of a Miro board: We will continue to work on other integrations like this one, as we believe integrating your community with other software helps you create more value for your customers!  

Dashboard data is now more intuitiveWe’re happy to confirm that we’ve successfully released the previously-announced change to the way the dashboards process data to all of your community dashboards. Broadly speaking, this means the dashboards now reflect the current state of the community data (e.g. by taking into account moderator actions).  Our dashboard documentation has levelled up too!We’ve also upgraded our analytics dashboard documentation to be a lot more detailed and precise - this new documentation is now the go-to documentation if you have any questions about how certain metrics work on the analytics dashboards. We also added some tooltips directly in the dashboards themselves, giving you a quick reference when you just need a reminder about how a particular metric is calculated. ️ If you need more time to adjust to the changes, you can opt-out until January 3rd 2020We understand that you might need more time to adapt to the changes - we can still offer you the option to revert the change to the dashboards (for a period lasting up until Friday 3rd January 2020) via an opt-out (just contact support@insided.com!). This is only in case you’ve decided you need more time to review the changes that we’ve deployed. After Friday 3rd January 2020, all customers will be moved to the new way of processing data in the dashboards.  The ability to save your filters is coming, so you can complete your weekly/monthly reporting quicker!Several of you have mentioned that you find it tedious to have to set the same old filters every week/month when you want to get data from the dashboards. To save you time, we’re going to add the ability to save (and reapply) your favourite filters in the dashboards. We aim to release this in the upcoming weeks.  We’re still making some final tweaks & fixesWe’ve identified the following last improvements to make in the dashboards, and we’re currently taking action to resolve them: [Done] % Members with at least 1 post: this metric is not behaving as expected. [Done] Total members: we will ensure that this only shows current members of the community in all cases (excluding banned/deleted/not activated/not approved members). Note: these changes will impact all customers (the ‘opt-out’ mentioned above is only for the change related to metrics showing the current state of the community).If you have any feedback or questions, please let us know in the replies !

On Tuesday 10th December 2019, we’re going to start rolling out a significant change that will impact current and historical data for all three dashboards.  You don’t need to take any action. The change will take up to 24 hours to roll out across all customers. You can continue to use the dashboards in the meantime. ​​​ Background As we mentioned last week, we’re working on improvements to the dashboards to make them more transparent, reliable and a better fit with your expectations about how the data should be processed. Why we’re making this change One major point of feedback we heard from you is that it’s more important for the dashboard metrics/filters to reflect the current state of the community, rather than ‘what happened at the time’. As a result, we’re changing the dashboards to process content data according to the current state of the community. This will align the dashboards better with the data you see in the topic/post/user exports, and make the data easier to verify.  Why this date? We know that the majority of our customers generate reports at the start or end of each month (and some at the very start of the week). We've picked Tuesday 10th December to minimize any disruption to your reporting workflows, as the majority of work involving Dashboards happens at the end and/or beginning of each month. What is the impact? All metrics & filters related to content will be affected (e.g. category, content type, count of # topics). Metrics & filters related to users will not be affected, as they are already based on the current state (e.g. user role, user rank, # community members). If your community was migrated from another vendor, then your all-time numbers related to content are likely to significantly increase. This is because we’ll be pulling in all content stored on the community (including content from your previous vendor), rather than just the content that we recorded the events for since you started with inSided. Example scenarios to explain the change Here are some example scenarios to explain the concept behind the change: Scenario: trashed topic/reply. After the change, if a topic or reply is trashed, the principle is that it will no longer be reflected in the dashboard data. If you trash a topic, then the topic counter will go down. It won’t be reflected in metrics such as the average response time. The same applies to replies. Scenario: question converted to conversation After the change, if a topic is converted to a different content type, this will be reflected when using the ‘Content Type’ filter and in widgets like ‘Created topic types’ on the content dashboard. E.g. converting a question to a conversation will decrease the question counter, and increase the conversation counter. Scenario: topic moved to a different category After the change, if a topic’s category is changed, this will now be reflected in the dashboards. This will be most noticeable when using the ‘Popular categories’ widget and when using category as a filter. Scenario: conversation converted to a reply of another topic (and vice versa - if a reply is promoted to a new topic) After the change, if you convert e.g. a question to become the reply of an article, the question counter will go down, and reply counters will go up. Scenario: you migrated from another vendor. After the change, some metrics will increase if you filter over a certain time period. E.g. the total # topics for all time will increase, since it’ll also include migrated content. Some data will not be accessible (e.g. checking how many likes a topic got over a certain period on the popular topics details page), since we don’t have the events data from your previous vendor. We believe this change will make the dashboards much more intuitive and give you more reliable and verifiable insights.  Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions!  

We’re excited to announce a preview of a brand-new points-based leaderboard on inSpired that we believe will help you activate community members - a weekly race to the top, with a chance for all users to participate. Check it out on our homepage. Why is this only available on inSpired? This feature is currently in private beta whilst we tweak & tune it in order to ensure it’s reliable and impactful before we make it publicly available to all of you on your own communities.  Why a points-based leaderboard? The main reason we believe a points-based leaderboard will help with activation is that it enables you to configure a holistic measure of a member’s activity on the community. This gives you a simple number that you can use to identify, highlight, and reward active users. This simple number can also help stimulate weekly competition on the community. Several of you directly requested a points-based leaderboard on inSpired :)! When will this be available for me to use on my own community? You should expect to be able to make use of this feature on your own community in Q1 2020.  Until then, we’ll be running the private beta on inSpired and a few customers to ensure all the essential pieces are in place to make the points-based leaderboard effective. How exactly does it work / how can I participate on inSpired? We’ve made a separate article to explain how the leaderboard works in more detail, and in particular how it works on inSpired. We’re excited to hear what you think and get your input, so that together we can shape the future of this feature ! Let us know in the replies below!

We have good news for those who are running a Zendesk Guide knowledge base, as of today it is possible to search for Zendesk guide content directly in your community with our latest federated search feature! Sometimes community members are looking for an answer to a question that has never been asked on your community, but are available on your Zendesk Guide knowledge base.  We built a “federated search” integration that allows your community members to simultaneously search through your community content AND Zendesk Guide knowledge base. Saving them valuable time and increasing your self-service resolution rate. You need to have a public Zendesk Guide knowledge base set up in order to make use of this feature. With federated search you can:  Show Zendesk Guide content in your community live-search dropdown and search result pages Directly navigate to Zendesk Guide articles from the community Filter the search result pages between community results and Zendesk guide result Configure which language and Zendesk categories to show in federated search You can enable federated search in Control > Settings > Integrations. You need to have an integration with Zendesk Support installed to use federated search. Read this guide how to setup the installation and how to activate federated search: Search for Zendesk Guide content through your community - a brief tutorial Please add a reply below if you you have any questions, or feedback on this feature! 👇

Yes, it finally happened! As of now, you are able to manually award badges to your users! Now we realise that many of you were waiting for this feature to become available - and that the wait was long ​​​ .As the top voted idea of this year with 47 votes, we are happy to tell you that we have added several improvements to make it easy to use with lots of flexibility . We hope you find this feature helpful for activating members to share their expert knowledge, encourage positive behaviour by rewarding users who go the extra mile, and generally just adding a sense of fun to your community!Check out our challenge further down below for your chance to win a 100€ voucher! ​​​​​​  Show off your creativity with the new manually award badges feature and win!With manually award badges you can: Award badges to individual users, or up to 50 in one go. Revoke badges from individual users. See a list of badges a user has earned on their profile page in Control. Filter the user overview to show users who have received a certain badge. Integrate other systems with our API endpoints for awarding & revoking badges.TutorialWe have created a complete tutorial which can be found here. ​​​​​The challenge - share your most inSpiring use case and win an Amazon voucher!We would love if you could share your own favourite idea for awarding badges manually - this way we all benefit. This is why we created a challenge to see what the best use case for this feature could be! The challenge itself is quite simple:Share your favourite use case of manually awarding a badge in the comments. The top 3 users who shared the ideas with the most amount of likes will win a voucher. As we have customers who work in large teams as well as “one-man-shows”, we have to limit the way we count likes to keep it fair. Per company a max amount of two likes (including your own ) will be counted, even if e.g. your 5 colleagues have voted. The competition will end on the 18th of December 15:00 CET. Winners will be announced afterwards.And here an overview of what you can win:1st place: 100 Euro voucher (or in $/£ for US/CAN/UK) + an exclusive inSided badge2nd place: 50 Euro voucher (or in $/£ for US/CAN) + an exclusive inSided badge3rd place: 30 Euro voucher (or in $/£ for US/CAN) + an exclusive inSided badge So - what is the use case you’ve been dreaming of for your own community? Some tips: Describe your use case as clear as possible, so that everyone gets how your vision looks like Include visuals, links or anything that makes your submission entertainingBest submit your idea before the next newsletter goes out (always last Thursday of the month - next one is Thursday 28 November)Be nice and vote if you read a cool idea here to support our competitionOf course this is not only about winning, but mostly about sharing genuine, valuable ideas with each other. Happy posting and good luck to all of you!

Hi all,we’re very happy to share the news that as of now, you can choose to include a preview of new content on your community within your notification mails! This improvement was induced by an idea which was submitted on our community (by@lila_meyer), needless to say we are very happy that you guys remain so active in sharing, voting and discussing these here!Why has this been added?We believe that richer notifications will have a bigger, positive impact on the user experience. Users can directly read valuable information within their mail inbox without having to go to the community (where they might even have to log in first to see the content). This makes users happy and can also result in more community activity (e.g. while reading the preview of a new topic that has been created).As we investigated this idea after our latest ideation review, we have found that the development work we need to invest to give you this option is relatively small compared to the big positive impact such an improvement has.What has been added exactly? We have added a placeholder option to many notification emails.Without this placeholder in a notification email, everything will stay as it is. This way you can decide for yourself if you want to include the content in a notification or not! This variable has been added for the following notification emails:New topic New reply New answer New mentionSome details of how it worksWe have set up this placeholder to include the first 600 characters If a reply, new topic, etc. includes more than 600 characters, the system will stop after the last word and add “...” to itHow to add the content to your notification mailsYou actually only need to add a small piece of text to your notification email:{content}Retrieve the notification email which you would like to improve via the “Phrases”-page in your Control Envrionment and add the code in the location where you would like the content preview to be displayed.Not an expert in HTML, or not sure how to locate the right notification? This tutorial can be used as a step-by-step guide for changing notifications.Some more tipsAdjust / create information around subscriptions: You probably know that notifications on our platform work in a specific way - you only receive a single notification until you visit the topic again. You can imagine that users might not visit a topic when they already can read the content of a reply within the notification. Hence we recommend you to be very clear in your messaging - inform the users that they will not receive any new notifications unless they visit the topic.We also advise you to improve your notifications in a way that the preview can be easily identified as such, e.g. by adding horizontal lines & making the content display in italic (see example below).An exampleHere an example of how a new notification email could look like: Feedback? Questions?Share it with us in the comments!​