Product Updates

We've released a small update to the Moderator primary role. Read on for more details! What's changed? Moderators can no longer (by default) grant/revoke roles for any users. This includes both primary and custom roles. Moderators no longer have access to the 'Custom User Roles' section in Control. Why has this changed? Moderators were able to escalate their own role to Administrator. We believe moderators should not be able to autonomously gain access to Administrator privileges 🙂. I don't like this change. How can I make things go back to the way they were for my moderators? We understand not everyone is keen on this change, and that's fine; our challenge is to provide a system that's flexible enough for everyone's needs. If you want to give your moderators the ability to grant/revoke primary/custom roles again, all you have to do is set up a custom user role with the 'Users' permission enabled. Apply this custom user role to your moderators and you're good to go. What other changes are in the pipeline? We're also looking into removing further permissions from the moderator role. Just like this change, you'll be able to reenable the vast majority of them through custom user roles. Here's the draft list of permissions that we plan to remove from the moderator role by default (all of these can be reenabled through custom user roles, should you want your moderators to keep on having access to them): Analytics General settings Forum settings System configuration Appearance Embeddable widgets settings Let us know your feedback in the comments below!

Another heads up for you and your moderation team: we plan to release an update to the editor for the topic moderation page in Control at the beginning of next year. Read on for more details!! What has changed? We have replaced the old BBcode editor in Control for replying to a topic with the WYSIWYG editor. What exactly is included in this release? All the same formatting options currently available in the WYSIWYG editor on the frontend/create topic in Control. @mentions for replies in Control. What are the next steps for the editor in Control? Editing in Control using the WYSIWYG editor. We're making good progress here but still need to wrap a few things up. There will be an option for you (or if needed, our support team) to quickly fix any broken BBcode (@Ronald Posthumus @tom.shaddock hope this helps you to sleep easily at night :D).

As of today Content Helpfulness* is available for your communities. This allows your visitors to vote on the helpfulness of topics in your community, you can decide on which topics they should vote. Read on to learn more. What is Content helpfulness?A feature added to topic pages where users can indicate if they found the topic helpful or not. Users can reply by picking an Emoji to indicate whether or not it has helped them. After they voted for a topic they will see a thank you message and will no longer be asked to vote. You have the possibility to show the helpfulness score (= helpful votes/all votes*100) to your users, this will only show the score after at least 5 votes have been submitted. Where is it shown?By default it will be shown below the opening post on all articles and topics that have a marked best answer. When the users starts scrolling to read the comments a small bottom bar will appear allowing the user to vote at any given moment. Where can I see the results?Votes are directly sent to the topic moderation page in the Control Environment. Topic that have topic helpfulness enabled will have an additional 'Content Helpfulness Performance' panel showing the distribution of votes and the helpfulness score Next to that Data will be logged to your Google Analytics under Behavior > Events > Top Events. If you click on the event action 'Topic Helpfulness' it will show an overall distribution on the positive, neutral and negative votes. To see which topics are voted for you can set the Primary Dimension to 'Event Action' and the Secondary Dimension to 'Page title' this will show a list of topics and their votes. Which configuration options are available?In the Control environment you'll be able to view and change the following options: Change the messaging Toggle on/off to display the Helpfulness Score to your users Change on which content types this feature should appear Read the How To guid to learn more: How To Configure Content Helpfulness What's nextWe have more improvements planned: Add data to Content Dashboard Ability to toggle on/off this feature on individual topics Improve our search algorithm with the helpfulness score, helpful content will rank better in the search engine We'll keep you posted on updates here on inSpired Thank youA shout out to all pilot customers who helped us shape this feature from the start by giving feedback & spotting bugs @Stéphan Lam@Kat@ErikT@Florian@Hiewwaiy *We renamed this feature from topic helpfulness to content helpfulness since this functionality may cover all the content types in your platform. Update I January 16thWe deployed the ability to toggle on/off content helpfulness on individual topics. In the topic moderation page we added a configuration setting where you can determine the visibility: Use default (inherits default setting for this topic type) Enable (will show content helpfulness regardless the default setting) Disable (will hide content helpfulness regardless the default setting) Update II January 30We shipped an improvement on the usability of the content helpfulness panel: The panel will no longer appear when the user is scrolling down (and reading). The panel will only appear when the users stops scrolling down and starts scrolling back to the top.

GIFs are once more available on the inSided platform! Sorry it took longer than expected to resolve this - hopefully you still have enough time to post some Christmas GIF(ts) on your communities! 🎅🤶!

Say hello to Typeform! Last week Daniel mentioned the retirement of the survey module, which is now in effect. Today we're happy to announce that you now have the ability to embed Typeform surveys in your post. Here's an example of a Typeform survey. FAQ How to add a Typeform survey to your topic? Press the 'Embed media' icon, paste your Typeform URL and press 'Insert'. Your Typeform survey will now be embedded in your post. Can I still use the inSided Survey functionality? No, this feature has reached the end of life status, and has been disabled. Can I still use the inSided Poll functionality? Yes, the poll feature is still available for customers. Do I have to pay to be able to use TypeForm? inSided treats TypeForm just like any other 3rd party content you can embed in our WYSIWYG editor (Youtube, Vimeo, ….) We are not responsible for the management of the content, but just allow you to visualise it in your community. This means that you will need to have a subscription with TypeForm that will allow you to create and manage surveys. Typeform has both free and paying subscriptions, you can find more info here. How does TypeForm handle data security and privacy? You can find all the necessary information in the links below. What happens to my data? What is GDPR? Data portability GDPR rights for respondents What other companies do we share data with? Security at Typeform If you don't want to store the data on TypeForm servers, you can use the Responses API to send the data somewhere else AND delete the data from their platform (and servers). The data will be erased immediately from their main servers and will be deleted from their backup servers after 30 days. Please let us know if you have any questions!

We're excited to announce that the quick links feature that we recently posted about are now available in your community. Quick links can be added to your homepage and are there to guide your users to virtually wherever you want your users to be: a FAQ article, an important category, a list of topics with a specific tag and more. You can point to everything that has an URL. Setting up quick links is easy as pie and gives you direct visual feedback on how the quick links will appear on your community. You can find more information on setting up quick links in the guide below: How To Set Up Quick Links On Your Homepage A list of specifications Quick links will be shown on the Homepage Quick links can point to both an internal and external URL Quick links are responsive and will evolve into a horizontal scroll list on small devices You can set up as many quick links as you like You can choose between 3 different types of quick links: plain text, icon or image We hope you like this new feature. If you have any feedback drop us a comment below 👇

This roadmap update highlights the features & improvements planned for the inSided platform. Priorities can change as we face new challenges. At inSided we are committed to executing iterative and rapid improvements based on our vision and feedback from our users and customers. Got an idea on how we can improve our platform? Don't hesitate to post your idea on our Ideation board. Product updates coming soon: Improvements to the core of our platform We've begun the process of rolling out core platform improvements across all communities, which we aim to keep as quiet/unnoticeable as possible (please read the announcement article to learn the details changes to functionality for moderators that you need to be aware of). API 2.0 Beta - Conversations and Questions (including Webhooks) Once the core improvements to our platform are rolled out, we'll be able to launch the beta for API 2.0, which will provide a more consistent REST experience for developers. The first release of the new API will provide you with all key functionality for Conversations and Questions, including moderator actions. Apologies for the delay on this release. WYSIWYG editor in Control We're integrating the WYSIWYG editor used on the frontend into the Control environment. Our first focus is on integrating the editor into the create topic workflow in Control, making it easier to create articles. At last, you'll be able to to see directly how your article will look before publishing it. We're also working on integrating the WYSIWYG editor for replying to topics in Control, helping you moderate and respond faster. This will include support for @mentions in Control, as well as a couple of extra keyboard shortcuts e.g. for adding links and strikethrough text). Thanks to our beta testers for their helpful feedback so far! Quick links Quick links guide your users to virtually wherever you want them to be. Everything that has an URL can be linked to: categories, articles, documentation etc. You can preview this feature on the inSpired community. Topic Helpfulness Allow visitors to indicate whether a topic was helpful or not. After a successful beta release, we're working on making this feature publicly available. Some nifty improvements are included such as a new design, emoji voting system, configuration options in Control. We'll also make sure that data and insights are sent to your Control environment. More information can be found in this topic. Want early access? Leave a comment below. Open text widget Create your own sidebar widget from scratch with the use of HTML/CSS. We'll enrich the widget library with an 'open text' widget that allows you to create your own widgets from scratch. Typeform support We will retire the survey feature. From Friday 14 December onwards it's no longer possible to create surveys in Control. As soon as we retire the ability to create a survey, we will simultaneously release the option to embed a Typeform survey in posts. Typeform allows you to create versatile rich surveys with numerous different question types. GIFs We're in progress with re-enabling support for GIFs right now. We appreciate your patience here! Notification when a user's reply is marked as the best answer We plan to work on this idea from @Arakou - which aims to give your superusers a motivation boost by alerting them every time one of their replies is marked as the best answer. Community members will be able to disable these email notifications from their profile. We'll provide ample warning before enabling the notifications for this new email notification, to give you the chance to customize the notification to fit your brand. Add close topic to bulk operations This idea from @Ditte was on the last roadmap update, but unfortunately is currently impeded by our core platform improvements. We’ve left it here just so you’re aware we still plan to pick this up! Completed product improvements: November 2018 Assign to me functionality for moderators (Idea) Configure fonts Topic Helpfulness Emoji rate system and Content Performance panel in Control Exclude non-verified accounts from the members dashboard October 2018 Read all button on the homepage (Idea) Live Search September 2018 Enable only the in-page widget & add embeddable widgets to more than one domain View topics in the embeddable widgets, without leaving the page Gather topic helpfulness feedback in the embeddable widgets Remove the option to do an empty search (Idea) Make timestamp stand out more on a profile’s activity feed (Idea) August 2018 Upload & Attach Files to posts Allowing super-users to mark answers Embeddable Widgets - Configure The Content Shown On Specific Pages Of Your Site July 2018 Community Success Dashboard Spam Prevention - Self Service Configure header colors and settings Configure community- and category title colors June 2018 Configure navigation bar colours Spam self-service May 2018 GDPR - User Erasure 3rd party scripts Self-Service for Branded Templates Community statistics widget April 2018 Community Widget Management Improved Member Dashboard Unanswered Topics tab March 2018 Improved Content Dashboard Embeddable Widgets Members Dashboard (First version) Configure introduction widget colors Read/unread topics indicator Super User as a primary role February 2018 Breadcrumbs for Branded Templates Improved Phrases tool Self-Service moderation labels for Branded Templates Default avatars Self-Service styling for Branded Templates January 2018 Pending-post approval for Spam prevention Self-Service category permissions Self-Service badges

Updated Thu 13 Dec 2018 @ 16:25 Just a heads up for you and your moderation team: we plan to release an update to the editor for the create topic page in Control this week. Read on for more details! We have released an update to the editor on the create topic page in Control for all (branded) customers. Read on for more details! What has changed? We have replaced the old BBcode editor in Control for creating a topic with a WYSIWYG editor (the same component your community members use on the frontend). What exactly is included in the release of the WYSIWYG editor for creating topics in Control? All the same formatting options currently available in the WYSIWYG editor on the frontend. A bigger post editing area, which matches the width of the desktop view in the frontend, and which scales as you type, so you can easily see/preview your whole article before publishing. Copy/pasting text with formatting from another editor will also become easier. New shortcut: Add hyperlinks using CTRL/CMD-K New shortcut: Add strikethrough formatting using CTRL/CMD-SHIFT-X. @mentions (for create topic only right now...although we're working on this for replies...read below for more info!) We hope this will make the creation of Articles a little bit easier for you! What is not included in this release? No new capabilities have been added to the editor in general (e.g. still no tables). This falls under our longer-term vision to provide all the rich formatting capabilities you need to best serve your community. You won't be able to preview the exact font you use on the frontend (although we have made at least a few cosmetic improvements so it's easier to see line breaks/space under headings etc). What are the next steps for the editor in Control? Replying in Control using the WYSIWYG editor. We're in beta with this and expect to release this as a next step (we'll give fair warning about this since it'll have a more significant impact on your moderation team). This will include @mentions for replies in Control. Editing in Control using the WYSIWYG editor. We're investigating this, and keeping in mind that posts can often 'break' and can only be resolved by viewing/editing the BBcode itself. Additional info 'Unofficially supported' BBcode options like 'color' will continue to work if you manually add in the BBcode (just like they currently do in the WYSIWYG editor on the frontend). Hope you like this update! Please let us know if you have any questions/feedback 🙂

Why are surveys being retired?Since we launched 'Surveys', we haven't seen the usage/adoption we'd hoped for. We also haven't invested the time needed to improve Surveys, since it no longer fits with our vision for the inSided platform. For these reasons, we plan to retire the Survey feature from our platform. What's changing?The first step we'll take will be to disable the creation of new surveys on our platform. We will disable the creation of new surveys from Friday 14 December onwards. However, we'll provide you with an alternative (one which we believe you'll find superior to our current feature). You'll gain the ability to embed Typeform surveys in your post. As soon as we retire the ability to create a survey, we will simultaneously release the option to embed a Typeform survey in posts. We'll announce this change on inSpired once it's available. What will happen to my existing surveys?For the time being, your existing surveys will be preserved as they are. Our next step in retiring the Survey feature will be to remove existing surveys from the platform - however, we'll provide with a clear timeframe for this step (in a later update) so that you'll be able to save any data that you'd still like to keep from your surveys. Sidenote: the 'Poll' feature isn't going anywhere and will still be available for you to use. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Some time ago we announced Topic Helpfulness here on inSpired. After this beta release we've been looking into ways how to improve this functionality. Thanks to you and our pilot customers (who tested this feature, shared data and gave their feedback on improvements) we were able to deploy some nice improvements; A fresh new look & feel Replaced the binary vote system (yes/no) by a universally known emoji vote system Fixed vote bar that appears when the user starts scrolling in a topic Make topic helpfulness available on all Answers and Articles What is Topic helpfulness?A little area below the opening post where users can indicate if they found the topic helpful or not. Users can reply by picking an Emoji to indicate whether or not it has helped them. This data/event will then be directly logged into your Google analytics, giving you clear view on which topics/content are helping people the most. For the moment data is not visible in the Control Environment yet. What's nextWe're working on configuration options in the Control environment, this allows you to determine the phrases of the topic helpfulness and where it should appear. Next to that we're making data on the votes available in Control: topic moderation pages will be enriched with a 'Content performance panel' and the data will be sent to the Content dashboard. When will this feature be available on my Community?When configuration options, data and insights for this functionality are available in the Control Environment. We want to ensure you have complete freedom over the visibility and have access to the data from day 1. Pilot customers already have the latest improvements mentioned above. Early accessCan't wait until the public release and want to have it now? We can enable the latest version of topic helpfulness on your community. This means visitors can already vote on the helpfulness of Answers and Articles, data will be sent to your Google Analytics account where you can analyse results yourself. Sent me a private message if you want early access. We will keep you posted here on inSpired on improvements and new milestones, if you have any questions or feedback let us know.

Surprise! 🎉 Our new favorite feature, Quicklinks, is now previewing on the inSpired community! This feature is our first, bigger step towards our vision of a true self-service platform which will enable you to give your customers an experience that reaches beyond your community. What are Quicklinks? Quicklinks are there to guide your users to... virtually wherever you want them to be! Just a few examples: That one article that you want everybody to see when they visit A category which you want to highlight to everyone Most viewed / searched topics, articles, FAQs A PDF file (e.g. a manual) Any website / url outside of the community Basically everything that has an url! You can decide yourself how many of these links should be presented and how they are being presented. Fully self-service. A quicklink is set up in three steps: Add your own title & description Add your url choose between image/icon/nothing to be displayed at the top Unhappy with the order? Simply drag & drop the tiles to give it a new twist, it's that simple. Quicklinks on the Homepage In this example you can see a mix of different use cases for quicklinks (all are using icons btw). Two more tiles can be expanded here, should the user wish to: If you should choose 4 quicklinks instead of six, the layout changes accordingly. Setup in Control Below a sneak-peak at the settings in your Control environment (final experience may vary). Next to the order of tiles, you can enable/disable the general visibility and the border options. They will be located in the new "Homepage"-settings page in your Control environment. From here you will also select and edit individual quicklinks: FAQs Do we have to pay to turn this feature on? Of course not! It is standard for all branded template communities. What happens to featured topics? They will stay as it is. Not exactly however, we want to improve the way you use them. Stay tuned for updates on that. When will it be released / available? We are still brushing it off to give you the best experience. We don't want to put a deadline on this, as we want to ensure quality. But expect it very soon! Will it be turned on automatically once you release it? No. You have all the time you need to set it up in your Control environment, you can activate it whenever you feel ready. Feedback We are not just testing here, we also need your feedback. :) What do you like? What would you like to see different? What are you missing? We are very curious how you experience this feature. So take your chance and help shaping it!

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be rolling out an update with some core improvements to our platform. Since we’re migrating one-by-one to ensure a smooth transition, your community might receive this update earlier or later than other communities, sometime in the next few weeks. Most of the changes will be silent/unnoticeable and mainly concern improving the stability, consistency, and quality of the inSided platform. However, there are a few changes to topic moderation which will take effect once your community has been updated: Converting the topic type of questions/conversations To convert a question to a conversation (and vice versa), we will no longer show the 'contains question' switch. Instead, to convert between these content types on the topic moderation page, you'll need to go to More options > Convert to conversation (or Convert to question). Moving multiple replies to a brand-new topic It will no longer be possible to move multiple replies in one go to a brand-new topic. To achieve this, you first need to ‘promote’ a reply to a new topic, and then move the replies in a second transaction. We’d like to improve the user experience of this part of the moderation workflow (related ideas like this are on our radar). This didn’t fall under the scope of our core improvements, which are more focused on platform stability/consistency/quality. To help us assess the priority of improving this, it would be great to hear real-world examples of how you use this feature and how often. Moving the opening post of a question/conversation/article It is no longer possible to create a brand-new topic from the opening post of an existing topic (we hope you’ll agree with us that this makes very little sense) 🦆. You’ll only be able to move the opening post of a topic to another topic if the topic has no visible replies. Moving replies to an existing question/conversation It’s now possible to move opening posts/replies from one topic to another topic without replacing the opening post of the topic you’re moving to, even if the opening post/reply that you're moving is older than the opening post. This change was based on the feedback in this idea and based on the fact that moving an opening post to a topic is essentially ‘convert to reply’. At first, this will only be possible for conversations/questions (not articles). We have the same behaviour changes planned for articles, which will be available at the same time moving replies to/from articles becomes available again. We'll update the idea that inspired this change once it's available for all content types. Changes to moderator approval of posts by new users (aka ‘Pending Posts’) If you enable the pending posts feature, then until you turn it off all posts submitted to the community will become ‘pending’ (not visible, awaiting explicit approval by a moderator). Beforehand, if a user had been active on the community (created a new topic or replied to an existing topic), they were exempt from the pending posts system. Now, it affects posts by everyone except moderators, community managers, and administrators. Since launching Akismet, we haven’t seen any demand for this feature due to the lowered incidence of spam on our platform. If you foresee these changes to pending posts as a problem, please give your opinion below. Character limit per post - enforcing a 30k limit This will become standardised at 30k characters. This limit is liable to change (increase) in the future - it is currently limited to 30k due to a need on our side to optimise performance. We’d love to hear from you below if you find 30k characters too limiting! We’ve heard specific feedback about the need to increase the length due to the need to include code samples/logs in posts. ⚠ Just to be clear: this update is not live on any of your Control environments yet. We expect this update (and the changes detailed above) to be rolled out on your community anytime from the beginning from the middle of this week until towards the middle of December. Please share your opinions on these changes. If there’s any change here that will negatively impact your experience as a daily or weekly Control moderator then we want to hear from you, so that we can improve it in the future.

Update #4 (Mar 2019): it's now possible to move replies to/from articles again - thanks for your patience! Update #3 (Feb 2019): rolling out the core improvements to our platform is taking longer than expected - apologies for the delay. It's our top priority to finalise rolling out these improvements, which will restore this functionality to your Control environment. Update #2: this will only affected branded customers. Update #1: moving replies both from and to articles will be unavailable. What exactly will be unavailable? For all customers running on branded: Moderators won’t be able to move a reply/replies from an article to existing conversations/questions/articles and vice versa. Moderators won’t be able to move a reply/replies from an article to a new topic. Why will moving replies from articles be unavailable? We're making some big core improvements to our platform - these big improvements are being rolled out in smaller batches to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the quality of your communities. As a result, moving replies from articles to a new topic & existing questions/conversations will be unavailable whilst we roll out the first batch of improvements. From when will moving replies to/from articles be unavailable? We expect to make the feature unavailable across all communities from this week forwards (it will not happen simultaneously for all communities, so we can't provide a specific date/time). When will moving replies to/from articles be available again? We aim to make the feature available again within the next 2-4 weeks. As of February 2019, we expect this feature to become available again by no later than the end of March. We're really sorry for any inconvenience to your moderation workflow! We're working to make this feature available to you again as soon as possible.

This roadmap update highlights the features & improvements planned for the inSided platform. Priorities can change as we face new challenges. At inSided we are committed to executing iterative and rapid improvements based on our vision and feedback from our users and customers. Got an idea on how we can improve our platform? Don't hesitate to post your idea on our Ideation board. We are very excited that Live Search is now available for all branded communities, yey! Topic helpfulness is still under construction, after deploying it for a number of pilot customers we are now working on some smaller improvements to turn this into a killer feature. We are sorry to announce that we have to push the release of the new API once again forward. With the new API, we also needed to rebuild a few core components of our platform. Since this is a quite big release, we need to make sure we fix all the bugs and can guarantee a stable and performant platform. With half of our development team now focussing on this, we should see it coming available soon. Product updates coming soon: First beta for API 2.0 - Conversations and Questions (including Webhooks) We have been working on a new API which will provide a more consistent REST experience. We are expecting to start a beta for all of our Branded Templates customers soon. The first release of the new API is providing you with all the functionality for the conversations and questions domains, also including moderator actions. Topic Helpfulness This element will be added to Q&A topics and allows user to indicate if they found a topic helpful or not. This data will be directly logged into your Google analytics, giving you a clear view on which topics/content are helping people the most. You can preview this feature on the inSpired community. A new and better way of asking a question Asking questions should be easy and fun. Adding more information to your question such as descriptions, images, videos and tags should be optional, not required. We're working on a simpler way to ask questions in order to generate high-quality Q&A's Read all button on homepage This idea added by Lorna, will allow users to mark all the new posts as read. Add close topic to bulk operations This idea added by Ditte, will allow moderators to close a number of topics in one bulk operation. This should be a time-saver for moderators. Completed Projects & ImprovementsSeptember 2018 Enable only the in-page widget & add embeddable widgets to more than one domain View topics in the embeddable widgets, without leaving the page Gather topic helpfulness feedback in the embeddable widgets Remove the option to do an empty search (Idea) Make timestamp stand out more on a profile’s activity feed (Idea) August 2018 Upload & Attach Files to posts Allowing super-users to mark answers Embeddable Widgets - Configure The Content Shown On Specific Pages Of Your Site July 2018 Community Success Dashboard Spam Prevention - Self Service Configure header colors and settings Configure community- and category title colors June 2018 Configure navigation bar colours Spam self-service May 2018 GDPR - User Erasure 3rd party scripts Self-Service for Branded Templates Community statistics widget April 2018 Community Widget Management Improved Member Dashboard Unanswered Topics tab March 2018 Improved Content Dashboard Embeddable Widgets Members Dashboard (First version) Configure introduction widget colors Read/unread topics indicator Super User as a primary role February 2018 Breadcrumbs for Branded Templates Improved Phrases tool Self-Service moderation labels for Branded Templates Default avatars Self-Service styling for Branded Templates January 2018 Pending-post approval for Spam prevention Self-Service category permissions Self-Service badges December 2017 Status-Page WYSIWYG editor for Branded Templates

Goodmorning! We're extremely excited to announce that live-search has been enabled for your communities as of today. From now on when your users start searching they will get a list of relevant results directly below their search query. Live-search comes with an improved algorithm on the relevancy of search results. We enabled this new algorithm last week already to monitor the performance. (we want to make sure live-search brings the best results to your users). We see a slight increase of +/- 4% of users who click on a search results after they performed a search. We believe that adding live-search will increase the click rate on search results even more. By clicking the 'Search' the user will directly go to the search results page showing the most relevant results. Clicking on a topic in the dropdown will bring the user to the topic (pretty obvious ;)) If a user can't find the information he's looking for he can ask a question to the community, this will bring him to the create new topic page 🙂 For this interaction we made some small tweaks as well. If a user is not logged in and wants to ask a question we will still bring him to the create topic page and then show the login/registration modal. This way the user know what he can expect the moment he has an account. We hope you're as excited as we are on this new feature. Let us know what you think, or if you have any feedback, in the comments below.

We're really happy to share that live-search will be enabled on your communities in the next week. Not sure what live-search is? Head over to my previous post to learn more on this new feature. In the past weeks, we've been working hard on the search engines and made a couple of improvements to the live-search dropdown: Improvements- Topic context has been added next to the topic title, you can now easily see what kind of topic, question or article was created - Exact search hits will be highlighted in bold when you start typing - Search results list now interacts with your keyboard, use your arrow-up and the arrow-down key to navigate through the list of results. Press enter to visit the topic. - Press escape to cancel your search query and close the dropdown with results In order to release live-search and make it work together with the search results pages we needed to make some under the hood changes. These changes caused a collision with the sorting filters on the search results pages, therefore the sorting options are currently disabled. We are aware of this issue and investigating it. We believe that the new search algorithm in combination with live-search will bring better results to you and your users, therefore this is our top priority to bring this your communities first. Let us know what you think of the latest improvements and stay tuned for more!

This roadmap update highlights the features & improvements planned for the inSided platform. Priorities can change as we face new challenges. At inSided we are committed to executing iterative and rapid improvements based on our vision and feedback from our users and customers. Got an idea on how we can improve our platform? Don't hesitate to post your idea on our Ideation board. August was an exciting month for the embeddable widgets where it’s possible now to configure the content that is shown in the widget. Also the preview of live search reveals the upcoming improvements we are making on our search capabilities. API 2.0 beta is ready to go, but we have been encountering infrastructure issues that have hindered the release, so it’s still showing on this list. Product updates coming soon: First beta for API 2.0 - Conversations and Questions (including Webhooks) We have been working on a new API which will provide a more consistent REST experience. We are expecting to start a beta for all of our Branded Templates customers soon. The first release of the new API is providing you all the functionality for the conversations and questions domains, also including all moderator actions. Live Search When a user is searching he will get up to 5 results in a dropdown the moment he starts typing in the search box. At every keystroke our search engine does its magic to push the most relevance topics to the user so he can find the information he needs. You can preview this feature on the inSpired community. Topic Helpfulness We’ll add a little area below the opening post in Q&A topics where users can indicate if they found a topic helpful or not. This data will be directly logged into your Google analytics, giving you a clear view on which topics/content are helping people the most. You can preview this feature on the inSpired community. Embeddable widgets - Show answers/conversations/articles directly within your website The next big update for the embeddable widgets is almost ready - your website visitors will soon be able to view answers to questions and read help articles/conversations seamlessly within the conversational widget, without ever having to leave the page. Embeddable widgets - Gather anonymous topic helpfulness feedback from your website visitors Along with showing the details of topics in the conversational widget, we’ll also add a way for visitors of your website to anonymously provide feedback on the helpfulness of the content they read. In the future, we plan to make this data available to you through a dashboard in Control. Completed Projects & Improvements August 2018 Upload & Attach Files to posts Allowing super-users to mark answers Embeddable Widgets - Configure The Content Shown On Specific Pages Of Your Site July 2018 Community Success Dashboard Spam Prevention - Self Service Configure header colors and settings Configure community- and category title colors June 2018 Configure navigation bar colours Spam self-service May 2018 GDPR - User Erasure 3rd party scripts Self-Service for Branded Templates Community statistics widget April 2018 Community Widget Management Improved Member Dashboard Unanswered Topics tab March 2018 Improved Content Dashboard Embeddable Widgets Members Dashboard (First version) Configure introduction widget colors Read/unread topics indicator Super User as a primary role February 2018 Breadcrumbs for Branded Templates Improved Phrases tool Self-Service moderation labels for Branded Templates Default avatars Self-Service styling for Branded Templates January 2018 Pending-post approval for Spam prevention Self-Service category permissions Self-Service badges December 2017 Status-Page WYSIWYG editor for Branded Templates

At inSided we want to help you understand the value of your community. We are developing a feature that gives more insight into which Q&A topics in your community are considered helpful and which are not. Next to that we were inspired by the post: Demonstrate and drive community value by enabling public likes in our community. Today we rolled this beta feature as a preview out inSpired, we call it Topic Helpfulness. What is Topic helpfulness?A little area below the opening post where users can indicate if they found the topic helpful or not. How does Topic helpfulness work?Every Q&A topic (questions and questions that have a best answer marked) of your community will get a new little area below the opening post asking one simple question: “Did this topic help you find an answer to your question?”. Users can reply via a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to indicate whether or not it has helped them. This data/event will then be directly logged into your Google analytics, giving you clear view on which topics/content are helping people the most. Because it is a beta version the data is not visible in the Control environment yet. We have plans to make the data available in the content dashboard at a later stage. A few points: This is available to ALL users, both logged in and anonymous users It’s available in every Q&A topic and is logged separately per topic The response (Yes or No) is only visible to the user, e.g. only he/she will see what response they have given to the topic Pilot customers neededBefore we're making this feature publicly available to all branded communities we want to run a short pilot program with 1 or 2 of our customers. The pilot program is simple: we'll activate topic helpfulness on your community and start measuring data. Data will be sent to your Google Analytics and is visible from day one. After a while we'll discuss results, thoughts and feedback. Interested in becoming a pilot customer for topic helpfulness? Please contact me via a Private Message. We will keep you posted here on inSpired on improvements and new milestones, if you have any questions or feedback let us know.

We have some exciting news to share! We just added a beta version of the live-search functionality to the inSpired community. We're previewing and testing this feature here on inSpired before we're making it available on the latest community templates. Please give the new search a try and tell us what you think: Did you find what you were looking for more easily? Do the search-results (in the dropdown) meet your expectations? Which information do you expect to see when searching? Do you think searching on your mobile/tablet is accessible enough? Are some items appearing too often, not enough, too far down in the results, or not at all? How does the search algorithm work? Search algorithms are very complex and a are affected by a lot of rules and attributes. When searching for something these are the attributes that we index (ordered by importance): Title First post Answer Reply Tags Category Parent Category Then a ranking formula is applied to configure how hits are sorted. This formula compares each criteria one after another. Amongst these criteria are: number of words from the query that match, typos, the position of the matching words, is the topic type an article (y/n) was the topic solved (y/n), when was the topic last updated, the number of likes, views and replies on a topic.   When will live-search be available in my community? When live-search and the search results are returning the expected results. When is that? That's hard to tell. We're still tweaking the searchable attributes, ranking formula (getting you the best results), UI and UX, so If you have any questions, ideas or other feedback about this feature (positive or negative) let us know. We will keep you posted here on inSpired on improvements and new milestones.

Hi all, It's time for inSpired Innovation Lab again! We are happy to invite you to our office on November 15 (or follow the event via live stream). The program will start around 3 PM CEST (9 AM EST) and we will organize drinks and dinner afterwards so you will have lots of networking opportunities. More on the program and content will follow in the upcoming months, but make sure you Save the Date! And let each other know in the comments that you're going. We are looking forward to seeing you there. 🙋

Widely requested on our ideation board, and we finally got around to doing it! Thanks for submitting the idea - these help us make decisions about new developments for our products. So there you are, at your desk after creating/acquiring a magical file/document that will help your community members overcome certain challenges. You look at this information-saturated masterpiece and then suddenly realise it’s 24-pages long. Oh no! No one wants to read all of that in a single huge post on your community! And you certainly don't want to have to reformat it all over again... Don’t worry! We've got your back! Proudly introducing File Uploads! Available right now in the community frontend and control! Upload files, like you have never uploaded files before: it’s seamless, secure and fast. You can also enable file uploads for some or all members of your community, if you believe that your community members would benefit from sharing files with each other. How does it work? Step 1: Upload file. Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit! (well-informed users). Jokes aside, we hope you appreciate and use this new feature. Let us know what you think! What exactly is available right now? Attach files to individual posts and topics. Available in both the community frontend and control. Self-service ability to configure whether users with the ‘Registered User’/’Super User’ primary roles are also able to upload files on the community (by default, only moderators, community managers, and admins can upload files) Note: this feature is only available on Branded communities. Check the FAQ for more detailed information. FAQ & How Tos Got any questions about this feature (e.g. what's the file size limit?, what file types are supported?), or interested in enabling file uploads for Registered Users/Super Users? Check out the following FAQ and How To: FAQ: Uploading & Attaching Files To Posts How To Enable Members Of Your Community To Upload And Attach Files To Posts Share your feedback with us! We’d love to hear what you think of this new feature. Start a conversation with us below! 🙂

“It’s not about the size of your data, it’s about what you choose to do with it!” Sounds good right? Wink-wink! We however think it’s only partly true. We like data, and believe you can never have enough of it. Have an argument with your colleague? use data to settle it! Need that quick report to satisfy your management? BAM, data! Data is ONLY valuable however, when you use it in the right way or for the right use-cases. Therefore we are now introducing the Community Success Dashboard (or CSD, short) to make your data-collection life a little easier! By releasing this first version of the CSD we aim to already give you more insight into the inner workings of your community. E.g. KPI’s about questions asked, or average response time are now easily available at first glance. For now we have selected a first set of data points that are quick to adopt and quick to act upon. Don’t worry, we will add more in the future. We believe the current release already has enough power to help you succeed in making your community an even bigger success! More details below. What is available?Customers running on the latest community templates will have a brand new dashboard, the third of its kind. This time it’s all about the community metrics that will help you define the success of your community. Check it out in Control > Analytics > Success dashboard to see it in action. Here’s a brief overview of what you’ll find. KPI’s for questions asked and answers given in a specific time range KPI’s for average response time, average users per topic and average replies per topic KPI for topics where only one user was involved Distribution of questions that have been answered Distribution of answers given by your company vs. answers given by peers Detailed breakdown of number of replies per topic Funnel on user activation How-To’sWant to learn more about this new dashboard and our dashboards in general? Check out our How-To’s: How To Use the Success Dashboard How To get Started with Analytics Dashboards How To Use The Analytics Selection Tool (Advanced) Share your feedback!We’d love to hear from you. Should you have any concerns, questions or just a general thumbs up: start a conversation with us below! :) UpdateThe community success dashboard is now available for non-branded templates.

You might notice a new button/functionality has just appeared in the editor on inSpired - file attachments! We're previewing this feature on inSpired ahead of its rollout for all customers on Branded templates. We hope to make file attachments available to you soon! What exactly will be available for the first release of file attachments? Attach files to individual posts (and delete them, if needed!). This'll be available in both the community frontend and Control. Configure whether users with the registered/superuser primary roles are able to upload files on the community. FAQ What file types will be supported? .pdf .zip, .xml, .txt, .csv, .doc/docx, .xls/xlsx, .ppt/pptx What's the individual file size limit? 25 MB Will I be able to make it so that only moderators/community managers/admins can upload files? Yes. By default, standard community members will not be allowed to upload files. This will be configurable in Control (ability to turn file attachments on for registered users and/or superusers). We trust the inSpired community, so that's why you're also able to upload files here :) Feedback/questions Please reply below if you have more questions about this file attachments. Or, please comment if you've got any other feedback about this feature (positive or negative 😁), after trying it out yourself on inSpired.

This roadmap update highlights the features & improvements planned for the inSided platform. Priorities can change as we face new challenges. At inSided we are committed to executing iterative and rapid improvements based on our vision and feedback from our users and customers. Got an idea on how we can improve our platform? Don't hesitate to post your idea on our Ideation board. Product updates coming soon:. First beta for API 2.0 - Conversations and Questions We have been working on a new API which will provide a more consistent REST experience. We are expecting to start a beta for all of our Branded Templates customers soon. The first release of the new API is providing you all the functionality for conversations and domains, also including all moderator actions. Spam Self-Service We will allow customers to enable and configure the Spam service in Control. We will also add a few measurements to control non completed user registrations. File Upload Community staff will be able to upload and attach a variety of file types to posts for other community members/visitors to download (for instance, pdf files). You'll also have the option to allow file uploads from any registered member, if it would be beneficial for your community. inSided Analytics - Community Success Dashboard The Community Success Dashboard will show global metrics that allow you to track community health and success. Webhooks for Conversations and Questions Next to the new API for Conversations and Questions, we will also provide a system where we can push data whenever a specific events occur. This will enable integrations with other systems like CRM. For example, we will be able to send the details of a new topic to the CRM system whenever the create topic even has occurred. Completed Projects & ImprovementsMay 2018 GDPR - User Erasure 3rd party scripts Self-Service for Branded Templates Community statistics widget April 2018 Community Widget Management Improved Member Dashboard Unanswered Topics tab March 2018 Improved Content Dashboard Embeddable Widgets Members Dashboard (First version) Configure introduction widget colors Read/unread topics indicator Super User as a primary role February 2018 Breadcrumbs for Branded Templates Improved Phrases tool Self-Service moderation labels for Branded Templates Default avatars Self-Service styling for Branded Templates January 2018 Pending-post approval for Spam prevention Self-Service category permissions Self-Service badges December 2017 Status-Page WYSIWYG editor for Branded Templates

This roadmap update highlights the features & improvements planned for the inSided platform. Priorities can change as we face new challenges. At inSided we are committed to executing iterative and rapid improvements based on our vision and feedback from our users and customers. Got an idea on how we can improve our platform? Don't hesitate to post your idea on our Ideation board. Despite of our efforts, we didn't manage to deliver most of the items we announced early June. Due to some unexpected interruptions we experienced delays. This months update will repeat most of the items already announced last month. Good news is that we are close to delivery with most of the items below, they all can be expected in the upcoming weeks. Product updates coming soon:. First beta for API 2.0 - Conversations and Questions We have been working on a new API which will provide a more consistent REST experience. We are expecting to start a beta for all of our Branded Templates customers soon. The first release of the new API is providing you all the functionality for conversations and domains, also including all moderator actions. File Upload Community staff will be able to upload and attach a variety of file types to posts for other community members/visitors to download (for instance, pdf files). You'll also have the option to allow file uploads from any registered member, if it would be beneficial for your community. inSided Analytics - Community Success Dashboard The Community Success Dashboard will show global metrics that allow you to track community health and success. Webhooks for Conversations and Questions Next to the new API for Conversations and Questions, we will also provide a system where we can push data whenever a specific events occur. This will enable integrations with other systems like CRM. For example, we will be able to send the details of a new topic to the CRM system whenever the create topic even has occurred. Completed Projects & Improvements June 2018 Configure navigation bar colours Spam self-service May 2018 GDPR - User Erasure 3rd party scripts Self-Service for Branded Templates Community statistics widget April 2018 Community Widget Management Improved Member Dashboard Unanswered Topics tab March 2018 Improved Content Dashboard Embeddable Widgets Members Dashboard (First version) Configure introduction widget colors Read/unread topics indicator Super User as a primary role February 2018 Breadcrumbs for Branded Templates Improved Phrases tool Self-Service moderation labels for Branded Templates Default avatars Self-Service styling for Branded Templates January 2018 Pending-post approval for Spam prevention Self-Service category permissions Self-Service badges December 2017 Status-Page WYSIWYG editor for Branded Templates