Product Updates

It’s here— our latest roadmap update. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been busy working on your ideas and the input that you gave us here on inSpired. We delivered the ability to manage your email notifications and the ability to delete private messages. We delivered a highly voted idea (top 5) around suggesting topics while creating a new topic. We can already see the benefits: 7% of users who want to create a topic looked at one of the suggested topics first. 50% of those users who opened a suggestion first decided to not create a new topic afterward! On average, the number of new questions asked declined by 10%. We’ll keep a close eye on the results as we aim to decrease the amount of duplicated questions and increase the number of people that indicated that a topic was helpful. Over the upcoming weeks we’ll continue working on your ideas by introducing the ability to save topics as a draft, improve our editor to publish rich articles easily and allow users to get search results from a specific category only. Alongside that, we will of course continue working on our mission to make it as easy as possible for your users to find content on our platform. Read on to learn more. Knowledge base categories Following up on the successful delivery of showing knowledge base content on existing (community) category pages, we’re taking things one step further: we will create dedicated Knowledge base parent category and category pages. Knowledge base categories will have an optimized UI/UX, allowing users to quickly find the right articles that will help them to help themselves. Add a knowledge base to your community in which you can easily curate and structure content. Improved formatting capabilities We’re making some under-the-hood changes to our editor so that it can read and store HTML content. Over time we plan to add additional formatting capabilities such as tables, code blocks, syntax highlighting, inline images, multi-level lists, anchors and more. Search in categories We will (re)introduce search in categories. This functionality was stripped when we switched to a new search engine some time ago. Based on your feedback and requests we are going to add this functionality to our platform again. When you perform a search on a parent category or category page you will only get to see topics that belong to that (parent) category. Create draft articles Unfortunately, we’ve had to take away focus from this feature in order to welcome a few more communities onto our branded templates platform, as well as to continue rolling out core platform improvements. We aim to replace the ‘hidden subforum’ workaround for preparing articles with a revamped article publishing flow in Control. With draft articles, you’ll be able to control the publish date of your articles. Salesforce integration (beta) We’re building an integration so you can gain more intelligence on your community and its impact by linking community members and their activity to Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce. We’re currently running a closed beta - if you’re interested, please get in touch with @daniel.boon for more details! Core platform improvements update We’re continuing to roll out core platform improvements to all of your communities, and getting ever closer to finishing the job. Once your community has been upgraded to the new version, you’ll be eligible to start using the beta for API 2.0 (containing all key functionality for Conversations, Questions, and Articles), as well as webhooks. Get in touch with @daniel.boon for more information. Thanks again for your patience and continued collaboration—we’re sorry for the delay in finalizing these improvements. Completed product improvements since the previous update: Manage email notifications Show knowledge base content in category pages Private message deletion for community members

As a follow-up of Visual Guide 2.0, We've made improvements to article featured image and updated its design spec. Read on to learn what is changed and how to prepare a good article featured image. :) Improvements: 1. Article featured image in desktop topic list (Coming up soon) Currently on desktop, article featured images in topic list are displayed in original proportion in a 3:2 container (168*112px). We've noticed some featured images contain a wider visual or long text, which would be cropped quite a lot. What will be changed: To provide a better view, the width of the image container will be changed from 168px to 200px. Action: If you have featured images containing main visual/text, make sure they are visible in the centre. And be aware that featured image will be slightly cropped (10%) on each side in topic list. 2. Instruction of article featured image in control (Done) What is changed: A clearer instruction of the featured image has been added to control on the "new article"-page and on the "moderate topic"-page. Here are some tips for you to prepare wonderful article images for your community: * The following guides will be merged to Visual Guide 2.0 after all changes are done. Article featured image Where and how would article images be displayed on your platform?Topic pageExample: https://community.insided.com/getting-started-customers-only-33/visual-guide-v2-0-1462 Topic list on homepage/search results/category page/etc.Example: https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16 Curated content list on category pageExample: https://community.insided.com/news-platform-updates-16 Topic list What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know your opinion. :)

We’re excited to share our new content curation functionality for category pages with you. This feature allows you to pin knowledge base content (articles, guides, etc.) to the top of your category page. Category page with a curated list (knowledge base) of topics on top followed by a community listSee it in action: https://community.insided.com/gamification-activation-super-users-32 How does this benefit you?First, you want to give your official content the stage that it needs. It will make it easier for your users to differentiate official content from user-generated content and keep them from searching too long for the right information. This is the best spot for e.g. product-specific documentation or your best tutorials. With this category setup, users won't have to dig around, click in multiple places and browse different sources to find the information they need.Second, we often heard the request to highlight your own knowledge base articles. We came up with the unified content stream, but then your KB articles might be swamped with other questions. We see customers like to use the community as their central help center. We see that a lot of great content is created by our companies. Content to inform, to inspire, to help and to train your users. Whatever the reason is, this content deserves to be in the spotlight.Last, with this functionality you have full freedom over how many topics you want to highlight and in which order, because we know how important easy navigation is. How to add a Knowledge base to your category pageCurating a Knowledge base is pretty straightforward. First you have to select the topics in your platform that you want to promote. Then, you assign these topics to the content curation panels in the edit category pages in control.You’ll find a detailed walkthrough how to do this in our How-to article: How To Highlight Knowledge Base Content in Category Pages. We’ve provided a shortened version here. Log into the Control environment. Navigate to Platform>Community and select Edit to the category where you want to add a Knowledge base.  Scroll to the Curate content panel. Select a title for the list. For example, we use “Recommendations”. Select visibility: curated list will display the featured articles at the top of the page. Community list will display all other topics below the curated list.  Drag & drop the topics in your preferred order with the drag & drop handlers in front of the topic titles.Read our detailed walkthrough here: How To Highlight Knowledge Base Content in Category Pages ConclusionThis new functionality will take your category pages to the next level by combining company official and user generated content. Your users will love to see all the right information combined into one page.If you have feedback or suggestions related to this functionality, feel free to let us know in the comments below.

You can now manage all email notifications in your settings page, this way you can (un)subscribe to emails for specific events. You've been waiting for this, but wait no longer. How do I (un)subscribe to an email notificationVisit your profile page and click the 'Edit profile' button or directly click the 'Settings' option in your profile dropdown. Navigate to the 'Settings' tab in which you will find the following email notifications options: Add topic to subscriptions which you reply to Default setting: Yes If you reply on a topic it will be added to your subscriptions. You can find your topic subscriptions in your profile dropdown > 'Settings' Receive email notifications from your topic subscriptions Default setting: Yes You will receive an email when there is a new reply in a topic that you are subscribed to. If you open the email and visit the topic you will continue receiving emails for new replies. If you ignore this email you will no longer receive emails for new replies on this topic. Receive email notifications when a best answer is marked in your subscribed topics Default setting: Yes You will receive an email when a topic that you are subscribed to receives a best answer. Receive email notifications for new topics in your subscribed categories Default setting: Yes You will receive an email every time there is a new topic posted in a category that you are subscribed to. Set this setting to NO works as a kill switch: you won't receive any emails for new topics anymore, even if you are still subscribed to individual categories. Receive email notifications from @mentions Default setting: Yes You will receive an email every time somebody @mentions you in a topic or reply Receive email notifications for new private messages Default setting: Yes You will receive an email every time somebody send you a private message We have plans to organise the settings page so that it's easier to use. We might even create a separate 'Notifications' tab to organise your email notifications.

We successfully moved the position of the search bar as mentioned last week. The search bar moved from the 'navigation bar' to the 'hero panels' on the following pages: Parent category Category Search result

Another major step forward in providing access to all the help and guidance your users need to find the right information, meet our content curation capability for category pages.Very soon company validated content (articles, guides and support material) can be pinned to the top of your category page in a knowledge base stream. What follows is a community stream with user generated content (conversations, questions answers). This way you will be able to combine your company’s support materials with community generated answers and best practices — all in one category page.Here is how it looks: Category page with a curated list (knowledge base) of topics on top followed by a community listYou can see some examples on inSpired in the following categories: News & platform updates, How to's, SEO, traffic and integrations   How does this benefit you?First, you want to give your official content the stage that it needs. It will make it easier for your users to differentiate official content from user-generated content and keep them from searching too long for the right information. This is the best spot for e.g. product-specific documentation or your best tutorials. With this category setup, users won't have to dig around, click in multiple places and browse different sources to find the information they need.Second, we often heard the request to highlight your own knowledge base articles. We came up with the unified content stream, but then your KB articles might be swamped with other questions. We see customers like to use the community as their central help center. We see that a lot of great content is created by your companies. Content to inform, to inspire, to help and to train your users. Whatever the reason is, this content deserves to be in the spotlight.Last, with this functionality you have full freedom over how many topics you want to highlight and in which order, because we know how important having control and an easy navigation is. Configuration in Control vs. How it looks in your category page   What are the capabilities of this feature?These are the key capabilities Add a curated list to any category Highlight content (no max. amount) Highlight topics from any category Show / hide list of community topics Determine in which order topics should be listed Define a title Clean design focussed on read- and scannability Collapse / expand the curated list Optional to use. If you don’t want to make us of this functionality you don’t have to (but we think you will ;))FAQQ: How does this curated list look like?A: As a small stream of topics. This list is on top of the category page followed by the community list.Q: When should I use this?A: When you have company official content in categories with a lot of user activity. Especially when official content is read-only, as it will not move to the first page by itself. Use this to highlight product-specific documentation or your best tutorials. Here in inSpired we use it to set up a category page as a Knowledge base and to enrich community focussed categories with Knowledge base sections.  Curated list examples used as Knowledge baseQ: How many topics can I highlightA: Unlimited, although we recommend not to highlight more than 10 topics at once.Q: Does the topic that I want to put in my curated list need to belong to the same category?No. You can pick any topic from any category and highlight it. This means that Topic A, which is published in Category A, can be highlighted in Category X,Y & Z as well.Q: Can I set up a pure Knowledge base without user-generated contentYes. You can create a pure Knowledge base category in 3 simple steps:   Configure a curated list of topics Hide the community list of topics Configure the permission so that only moderators and community managers are allowed to post (optional) Revoke commenting permissions from all users to use the category as a pure communication channel   

Hi everyone, We've identified an issue with the 'rank rebuild' button; we discovered that in certain scenarios this function can sometimes cause performance issues on your community. As a precaution, we've temporarily disabled the rank rebuild button. We are looking into a permanent fix, and will re-enable the rank rebuild button as soon as we've resolved the problem. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused. In case you haven't used it in a while, here's a quick reminder about what this button does: pressing 'rank rebuild' updates all community member profiles to reflect any changes you've made to ranks (e.g. reordering, adding, editing and deleting ranks).

Update May 13, 11:24: Changes are live On May 13 (Monday) we'll move the position from the search bar from the 'navigation bar' to the 'hero panels' on the following pages: Parent category Category Search result For other pages the search bar will remain in the current place. We're making these changes to have a better alignment with the homepage and to make the search integrate better inside these pages. This is a heads up announcement in case you need to review your hero images for this upcoming change. The changes are already in effect here on inSpired.

We’ve improved the appearance and layout of the create article page in Control (hit the 'New article' button in Control to check it out for yourself!). Now that we've put this new design foundation in place, our next step will be to add the ability to save draft articles (as mentioned in our most recent roadmap update) - in line with our goal to improve the publishing experience/workflow for articles on our platform. Please post your feedback/comments below! 🙂

You asked, we listened. We have recently implemented some platform improvements based on your ideas and feedback here on inSpired. Read on to learn what is now available: Private message deletion for community members Unsubscribe from @mention email notifications Content Helpfulness Facelift Show warning dialog if you navigate away from the create topic process Bulk operation to close multiple topics at once Ability for moderators to post the same message multiple times Private message deletion for community membersWe worked on this feature based on this popular idea. Community members can now delete private messages they have sent to other users or moderators, enabling them to remove content they’ve sent privately that they no longer want to share. Both members of the conversation can see that a message has been deleted, for the sake of transparency. The deletion is available on the front end when viewing your conversation with another user. Unsubscribe from @mention email notificationsOpting out from @mention notifications, a highly voted idea, is now available. Go to your Profile Settings page and set ‘Receive email notifications when you are mentioned’ to No. Once set to No you will no longer receive an email when another user mentions you. Content Helpfulness FaceliftWe changed the emoji, used to up- or downvote a topic, to a more friendly set. Show warning dialog if you navigate away from the create topic processWhen you're in the middle of creating a topic and accidentally refresh, navigate or forget to open in a new tab, there's no warning and your progress is lost. This is no longer the case. We implemented a warning dialog, based on this idea, that shows if you navigate away from the create topic page after providing some input already. Bulk operation to close multiple topics at onceYou can now close multiple topics at once (based on this idea). Simply go to the topic overview in Control, select some topics, press ‘More’ in the toolbar at the bottom, and select ‘Close’. This will prevent community members from submitting new replies to these topics. Ability for moderators to post the same message multiple timesWhen there’s a major incident affecting a large portion of your customer base, sometimes you need to repeat yourself. Sometimes you need to repeat yourself, so we made it possible for moderators to post the same message multiple times, as requested in this idea. --- We hope you're happy with these changes - give us any feedback in the replies below! 🙂

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

We made some great improvements to our embeddable widgets. We added search functionality to the conversational widget so that the user can always look up the information they need and we gave our embeddables a facelift to make it look even better. What are the embeddable widgets?Our embeddable widgets are a set of easy-to-install, plug-and-play components that you can embed in pages of your website.. They enable you to extend the reach of your community content and enhance your webpages. The in-page widget enables you to display community content directly on any website where your users are. The conversational widget floats above the page, providing help to your customers, right where they need it. Learn more about the embeddable widgets in the release notes or read the frequently asked questions. Why are we doing this?We believe that the embeddable widgets are a great set of tools that allows your users to access help content wherever they want, whenever they want. To date we provided two ways of ‘pushing’ helpful content in the embeddable: by default there is a list of topic suggestions which are suggested by running a search query on the page title and matching the most relevant content. Next to that we allow you to 'pin' specific topics to specific pages. The list of automated topic suggestions doesn’t always show the most relevant results and pinning topics manually requires some effort. By introducing search functionality we provide another way to get the right content right where you need it. We also improved the look and feel of both the embeddables to make the browsing and reading experience more pleasant. What’s newWe added, updated and improved the following functionalities in this rollout: Conversational widget We added a search bar which searches all available content We added a link to visit the community in the start screen We show the most recent reply directly below the topic. You can load more replies with a single click Conversational widget & in-page widget We improved the design of topic lists We replaced the avatar in the topic list, which was often a default one, with more meaningful metadata What’s nextWe have tons of ideas on the future of the embeddables; adding personalization to provide better contextual help, pushing relevant content in the embeddable based on a set of query rules, adding (parent) categories so users can browse around. The exact next steps will be revealed later, keep an eye on the roadmap updates for more information. As always, if you have feedback, suggestions or great ideas for the embeddable let us know via the comments below.

We’re really happy to share that parent categories have been enabled on your production environments. With parent categories you will be able to offer users a new area which includes all content from all categories in one overview. Parent categories might be a new word for you. To make sure we’re all speaking the same language we have created a visual that explains what we at inSided refer to as parent categories and normal categories. Click the spoiler to reveal Various examples on where (parent) categories are displayed in the platform Why are we doing this?We see that specifically larger, mature communities with many categories would like to offer their (super)users a better experience while navigating the community. A parent category usually includes many related categories which all cover a product or a specific field of interest. Instead of having them change categories just to be up-to-date with the hottest discussions and latest questions, a separate parent category page with all content combined makes more sense. But this does not just provide value for large or established communities, it’s valuable for all shapes and sizes.. You as a community Manager are now able to structure content better, lowering the barrier between different categories in a knowledge base, improving the overall browsing experience. Last but not least: integrations. Why share a link to the entire community on a product page, when a link now can also present all FAQs, discussions and ideas in a single page? We would recommend you to start reviewing your integration plan to maximize the added value for your users. What’s new We added, updated and improved the following functionalities together with this rollout: We made the parent category a new page in the platform which a user can visit We made the parent category names clickable in the navigation (menu dropdown and homepage category stream) We updated the topic stream list and now show the name of the parent category so that you can see to which parent category and category a topic was posted We added the new parent category to the breadcrumbs We added a functionality to hide the parent category description on your homepage We improved the layout and configuration settings for the category structure in control FAQ Q: How can I access parent categories A: Either click on the parent category name in the categories stream on the homepage or click on the parent category name in the menu dropdown. And access parent categories by visiting its direct URL. Q: Which elements are shown on a parent category A: Title Description (optional) Hero image (optional) Categories as navigation cards Topic list displaying topics from all categories sorted by recent activity General sidebar Q: How can I make changes to my parent category A: Visit Control > Forum Settings > Category Structure and click ‘Edit’ on the parent category to make changes. You can change the title, description, determine if you want to show the description on the homepage and change the hero image. Q: Are there no sticky topics on parent categories? A: Yes and No. In parent categories the sticky topics appear in the regular stream based on recent activity and won’t be positioned in a fixed position on top of the stream. Thank you inSpired communityLast but not least a thank you to everyone testing this functionality on their staging environment and providing us feedback. We were able to include some of your suggestions and fix inconsistencies. You helped us shape this feature!

Starting from tonight (March, 21st, 10 PM CET) we're testing some big core improvements to our platform - these improvements are tested in smaller batches on the staging environment to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the quality of your communities. As a result this could cause your staging environment to be responding slower than usual or will be unavailable for short periods of time. We're planning to run the tests across several days and expect to be finished by the 27th of March. Needless to say we are aiming to minimize the impact. Note: The tests are executed on the staging environment and will NOT have any effect on your production environments.

In 2019 we continue our focus on making it easy to find content on our platform. In the last couple of months, we introduced quick links and homepage recommendations to better guide users to the right content. We improved the technology so that we can offer more relevant content. We introduced schema.org to encourage Google to create rich snippets for answered questions, and we made it easier to create rich content by introducing our new WYSIWYG editor in control. We are proud to show the latest and greatest on our own Help Center which we opened up publicly. In the upcoming weeks, we will work on further optimizing the way how users can find content, by introducing a parent category page and upgrading our embeddable widgets. Read about the most important upcoming releases below. Make it easier to browse through content with ‘Parent Categories’ We are working on a parent category page which allows users to have an overview of all content from multiple categories in a single page. This allows you to present your users a single destination that only includes content which is relevant to them. This feature has recently been announced and is available for testing on your staging environment already. Read Coming soon: Parent categories to learn more. Upgrades to Embeddable Widgets We will upgrade the look & feel of the embeddable to improve the reading and browsing experience. The trigger used to open the conversational widget already got a small facelift. Search will be added to the conversational widget, allowing users to search all the content from your platform. We’ll optimize the search relevancy to serve the best content possible. Streamline your support workflow by escalating community posts to Zendesk from Control Sometimes community members post issues that can’t be solved by the community, like a bug with one of your products, or an issue that’s unique to their account. In this case, the only route to a solution is to pass the information on to your support team. For customers using Zendesk, we’re building an integration that will allow you to quickly escalate any question, conversation, or reply to a ticket on Zendesk Support, via Control. By embedding this escalation button directly within Control, we aim to save you time and eliminate the frustration of switching between different platforms. Core platform improvements We’re still in progress with rolling out core platform improvements to all of your communities. Once your community has been upgraded to the new version (you can tell by the appearance of a blue ‘create topic’ button in Control), you’ll be eligible to start using API 2.0 (containing all key functionality for Conversations, Questions, and Articles), as well as webhooks. Thank you all so much for your patience and continued support whilst we patch the issues with the improvements. Completed product improvements since the previous update: Robots.txt Content Recommendations Open Text Widget WYSIWYG Editor Fully Implemented in Control Typeform support Quick Links

Ugh, Robots…! They can do anything, are taking over the most mundane tasks and worst of all: they are scanning my platform! We have received a lot of feedback via inSpired, support and the CSM team that you want to be able to control the search-engine crawlers. We listened: As of today we’re happy to introduce the Robot Exclusion Protocol (historic name), or as it’s more commonly known: a robots.txt file for your platform! What is a Robots.txt file?First introduced as far back as 1994, the Robots.txt file was created as a solution to keep badly-written crawlers or search engines away from your content. Moving on to present times, it’s a pretty standard way 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. What can I do with a Robots.txt file?With this file you can tell search engines how to crawl and index the content of your platform, you can configure the following settings in Control: Write crawl and index guidelines for (specific) user-agents Tell user-agents (Search Engines) which content they are allowed to crawl and index (allow) and which they can not crawl and index (disallow) Link to a hosted XML sitemap. FAQQ: How do I setup a Robots.txt file for my platform A: Read this guide to get started: How To Setup a Robots.txt file Q: Where can I see the Robots.txt file in Control A: This feature is available to Administrators and can be found in Control > System Configuration > Robots.txt Q: I don’t have a Robots.txt file. Will search engines still crawl my platform A: Yes. If search engines can’t find a Robots.txt file they assume there will be no guidelines and they will crawl your entire platform. Q: Which search engines support a Robots.txt file A: Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu Q: What can I do with a sitemap A: Sitemaps tell search engines which content is available and where to find it. Although it’s a different functionality it is sometimes pointed to in the Robots.txt file. We don’t offer the functionality to create an XML sitemap inside our platform, but if you created an XML sitemap yourself you can use the Robots.txt file to link to it. Q: Can I link to sitemaps A: Yes. Make sure you point to an absolute URL and your sitemap is an .xml format. e.g. https://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml

In the past months we have released a number of improvements which help you guide your users to the most relevant content. We believe that our next improvement will also be a major step forward in making access to the most relevant content much easier and more efficient. By introducing parent categories as a clickable page, you will soon be able to offer users a new area which includes all content from all categories in one overview. Difficult to explain, so maybe it’s better to define what we mean with (parent) categories and give some examples to avoid any confusion. Category, Forum, BoardWhen a user creates a topic he needs to select a place where it will be posted. You might have different names for this place (category, forum, subforum, board, section, etc), but for clarity we are calling it a category. To make sure we’re all speaking the same language we have created a visual that explains what we at inSided refer to as parent categories and normal categories. Various examples on where (parent) categories are displayed in the platform Why are we doing this?We see that specifically larger, mature communities with many categories would like to offer their (super)users a better experience while navigating the community. A parent category usually includes many related categories which all cover a product or a specific field of interest. Instead of having them change categories just to be up-to-date with the hottest discussions and latest questions, a separate parent category page with all content combined makes more sense. But this does not just provide value for large or established communities, it’s valuable for all shapes and sizes.. You as a community Manager are now able to structure content better, lowering the barrier between different categories in a knowledge base, improving the overall browsing experience. Last but not least: integrations. Why share a link to the entire community on a product page, when a link now can also present all FAQs, discussions and ideas in a single page? We would recommend you to start reviewing your integration plan to maximize the added value for your users. What will change?Throughout the platform changes will be made to facilitate and show this new parent category: Parent categories become a destination page that users can visit Parent categories will become clickable in the navigation (menu dropdown and homepage category stream) Parent categories will be listed in the topic streams Parent categories will be listed in the breadcrumbs Naming in Control FAQ Q: What will this new parent category page look like? A: Example of a parent category page "Community Management" with multiple categories “Getting started, Moderation tips & tricks etc.” Q: Which elements are shown? A: Hero banner with title and description Categories as navigation cards Topic list displaying topics from all categories sorted by recent activity General sidebar Q: Do I need to enable this new page for my users? A: No, the moment we enable this parent category page it’s always accessible for your users through the homepage, menu, breadcrumbs or direct URL. Q: Do I need to prepare anything? If you want to display a banner/image on top of the parent category page you have to provide one in the Control environment. Q: When will this be enabled on my production environment? April 2, 2019 Test on stagingAlthough we're still working on this functionality we enabled the parent category page on your staging environment already. There you can see and test all the changes mentioned above yourself, right now. We're looking forward to see the new categories in your platform. If you have any feedback or spot something unusual please let us know.

Not one, but two new functionalities are here. 🎉 Homepage recommendations and configurable homepage streams which were announced last week are now available! Homepage recommendationsHighlight the most important content for your users on your homepage in basic recommendations lists. You know best which content is the most viewed and/or helps your users the best. Give that content extra attention by highlighting it on your homepage. What can I do with this feature? Enable/disable visibility Manually add and remove topics that you want to highlight on your homepage Reorder the position of topics that are displayed Get started: How To Create Recommended Topics Lists on Your Homepage Configurable homepage streamsRename, reorder and toggle the visibility of the tabs displayed on your homepage. We'll add configuration options in Control that allow you to change the setup of the Categories, Recently active and Help others tab. What can I do with this feature? Rename tabs Reorder tabs Enable/disable the tab (toggle visibility) Get started: How To Configure Homepage Tabs (Categories, Recently active, Help others)

We will add the description of category pages to the homepage. This will be added Wednesday February 13. Why are we doing thisWe are working on making the category page more valuable. We will make the category page clickable so that your users can visit it and see the nested subcategories as well as a collection of the topics that belong to those subcategories. Adding the description of a category page can give more context about what a category is about, at the moment this field is available in the Control environment but not visible anywhere on the platform. FAQQ: How will descriptions look like? A: Example of category "Welcome" with description "Category description will be displayed here". Descriptions are plain text displayed in the meta color. Q: How do I add descriptions? A: You can review and adjust category descriptions in Control > Forum Settings > Forum structure. Edit a top category level, define a description and click save. Q: When will I see the descriptions on my homepage? Wednesday February 13 Q: Is it required to provide and show a description? No it isn't. If you leave the description field empty it won't display anything Update I – 13 FebruaryCategory descriptions are now available on your production environment

Hi all, as every year, we do a review of our inSpired Community to make sure it is the best place to talk about everything around inSided. Also this year we put our heads together to see what we want to change. In this article we want to share with you what we are up to: inSpired goes publicThe biggest change will be that, as of next week, our community will be publicly available for all to see & participate. We do that for various reasons, but one is to showcase our inSpired Community as a good example of a community-powered help center. Other vendors are already doing this, and we think that we have no good reason to keep inSpired closed any longer. Customer-only categories We do not want to lock people out just because they are not a customer (yet). Nevertheless, we also do not want non-customers to have access to potentially sensitive information, nor let them influence the way we work with your feedback in our ideation section. Therefore we have checked all content and decided to restrict some areas for customer-eyes-only. New featuresWe have some very cool improvements in the pipeline which have a great potential, and we will showcase them here on inSpired before we unleash them to your communities. But do not panic: every feature will be optional to use, even though we doubt that you would not like to activate them on your community. New categorizationWe are making some changes to our category structure. These changes will be made available in the upcoming weeks. Next to some general information around the platform, we will create a new space dedicated to our Community Managers, where we can discuss questions around KPIs and other items of relevance to the success of your community. New look and feelNew Banners, icons, etc. We will give our community a brand new look and feel, 100% aligned with our new company style. Very pleasing to the eye, and we hope you will like it as much as we do! "So when will this all happen?" you might ask... Monday the 4th of february will be the day where all this will come to life. Stay tuned and make sure to check out the new inSpired experience, and please share your thoughts about it with us!!!

Update Thu 11 July: I've updated this article to reflect the fact that all moderator permissions we intended to remove have now been removed. Update Wed 24 April: we're going to start removing permissions from the moderator primary role this week (sorry for the delay - I think my advance notice was a bit too in advance). Read on for more details, and to see what actions you can take if you don't want this change to affect your moderation team! What has changed? We've removed the following permissions from the moderator primary role. Here's a visual showing how permissions have changed for moderators in Control - everything in green is still available for moderators; everything in red has been removed for moderators. Click each spoiler below to see the details of the permissions that moderators have lost access to: Analytics Content dashboard Members dashboard Success dashboard Post fields analysis Export Forum settings Homepage Forum structure Email alert Ideation Moderation Labels Content Helpfulness General settings User management User profile fields Custom User Roles Ranks Badges Phrases Platform visibility Post field overview File Uploads Spam prevention Integrations System configuration SSI configuration Third-party Scripts Appearance Basic Colors Buttons Fonts Header Navigation Widgets Embeddable widgets settings Installation Customization Setup Content configuration Read on to see how you can adapt to this change if you want your moderators to maintain their access to these permissions. Why did this change? The Moderator primary role was not clearly distinguishable from the Community Manager/Administrator role. By stripping away these default permissions from the Moderator primary role, the role has become much more flexible. It means you can choose to add moderators with access to the bare minimum features needed for moderation. However, if you want your moderators to have more access, you can simply grant them the extra permissions in a custom user role. I'd rather keep my moderator's permissions the way they are right now. How can I achieve this?This is really easy to do - just follow the steps below. Create a custom user role as follows Find the moderators you want to grant permissions to via Control > General Settings > User Overview and switch on the custom user role you created for them. Voila! Please note that the following options still won't be available, even with the custom user role described above. Let us know if you think this'll be a problem for you in the replies.Forum settings Content Helpfulness General settings File Uploads Spam prevention Integrations System configuration Third-party Scripts Embeddable widgets settings Installation Customization Content configuration Any other questions/feedback? Let us know in the replies! 😁

We’ve made improvements to our platform functionality. We worked on quick links, content helpfulness, related topics and solved topics. If you’ve missed what’s new, here’s a roundup of everything we did: Quick links can now open in a new tabWe added a configuration option for quick links to open in a new tab based on your feedback in this topic. Now you can decide per quick link if it should open in the same tab or in a new tab, this may be especially useful if you are linking to destinations outside of your community. Content helpfulness visibility can be configured per topicWe deployed the ability to toggle on/off content helpfulness on individual topics. It is now possible to enable or disable content helpfulness on individual topics despite the generic setting. Use default (inherits default visibility setting for this topic type) Enable (will show content helpfulness regardless the default setting) Disable (will hide content helpfulness regardless the default setting) Related topics are more relevantWe connected the Related topics widget to the same datapoint as we use for our live-search engine as we announced in this topic. Both live-search and the related topics now provide the same relevancy and results when searching for or reading information. Solved topics will appear as a “Rich result” in GoogleWe enriched topics that have a marked best answer with Q&A structured data. Google search results for eligible Q&A pages display a preview of the top answer when users search on a mobile device. This new presentation helps site owners reach the right users for their content and helps users get the relevant information about their questions faster. More info on Google rich results can be found here: Rich Results expands for Question & Answer pages Curious how your solved topics appear in Google? Use Google test engine for rich data to analyze your topics and see a preview That’s everything for this update, we hope you like the new improvements we made. Be sure to get in touch if you have any questions.

Update: changes mentioned in this topic are live We're working on improvements for the related topics widget (finally). As you've pointed out earlier here, here and to a certain extend here the related topics widget can use some improvements. We'll change the datapoint that is currently providing recommended topics to the same datapoint that we use for our live-search engine. The goal is to make the related topics suggestions more accurate and relevant to the topic. Another benefit is that these improvements will decrease load time (and therefore increase performance) on your platform. One of the consequences for switching data points is that we can no longer show a relative timestamp below the topic title. Instead we will show the category to which the topic was posted to provide more context about the topic. Other suggestions for improvements such as manually recommending topics or only listing topics between a specific time range are not included. Our priority is to make Related topics results more accurate. These improvements will be automatically rolled out to your platform in the upcoming weeks. We'll let you know when it's there.

We've made the WYSIWYG editor available for editing all posts in Control; now you don't need to go to the frontend to edit and see a preview of the content that you're editing! Read on for more details. What's included in this release? We have made the WYSIWYG editor the default editor for editing in Control. We have added an option to 'Edit with BBcode' (this button is right next to the standard 'Edit post' button). Clicking this button loads the old BBcode editor, allowing you to correct any BBcode formatting issues that may occur and that can't be fixed using the WYSIWYG editor. Hopefully you don't have to use it too often! With this release, it's now possible to carry out your content creation/editing workflow entirely from Control. This means, for example, that there's no need to switch to the frontend to edit your articles that you're still preparing. What else is coming up (related to the editor & articles)? Coming up this quarter we're going to continue delivering updates related to the articles creation workflow. Specifically, we aim to make it easier for you to create and manage articles. In the pipeline, we have ideas ranging from a dedicated drafts feature, to showing the 'last updated' date on articles, all the way to upgraded formatting capabilities. We hope to share more information with you soon! Please let us know your opinion/feedback on this release in the replies below 😊. Note: we’re also tackling some bugs related to the editor, including: Replying in Internet Explorer 11 appears to be broken - we're investigating this right now. BBcode is shown after saving an edit in Control (refresh the page to see the proper formatting again).

Ever since we released the widget management module in Control we received feedback and requests for a so called 'Open text widget'. This widget would allow you to create anything you like from scratch with code support. We're super happy to announce that as of today this widget is available for you.   What is available? We added two new widget types to our widget library (Control > Appearance > Widgets).HTML Block: Allows you to create/code your own widget from scratch. Code support is available so you can insert HTML/CSS, Javascript, Embed codes, iFrames and more.Text Block: Allows you to put plain text in a sidebar widget   What can I do with this? The possibilities are endless, if you have some coding knowledge you can basically create whatever you want, here are some possibilities: Create an image banner to your webshop / promotion Create a call to action to your latest ebook Display a list of your community moderators Insert a poll from a Third Party Embed a twitter timeline Display a promotion video Display a list of other contacts options such as email, phone and twitter You can add widgets to your sidebars and determine the position where it should show.   How do I get started? You can start right away by navigating to your Widget Library in Control (Control > Configuration > Sidebar). We created a small 'how to' to help you get started:How To Create a Custom Sidebar Widget (with HTML/CSS)Beware: a little bit of coding knowledge is required to get the most out of this feature. We highly recommend you to invite a web developer who can help you out on writing valid code and to test on your staging environment first.   Feedback, ideas, suggestions? We hope you enjoy this new feature and we're happy to hear your thoughts. If you have any feedback, ideas or suggestions leave them in the comments below