Hey PeerBoard Community! 💞
And Happy Valentine's day! What's your love language? Ours is to help your awesome communities get bigger and more engaged. Here's a large product update to express our love for what we're doing together.
In this update:
- Feed: massive load time optimization, unread comments counter, more feed widget customization
- Administration: "Hide" for posts, Roles and Groups in invites, updated Groups selector
- New "growth" pricing plan
- UX Improvements: insert image via url, 'Help' shortcut for admins, disabling PeerBoard attribution
- Plugins & Apps: Thinkific app launch, upgrading plans on Shopify
- For Developers: New APIs
- Bug Fixes
1. Feed
I. 10X feed load optimization for large communities
We've streamlined the feed load time, and now it takes 10X less time to load large communities with lots of posts and comments! Our largest partners, you should definitely notice the change! And cheers to future growth unlocked!
II. New comments number visible in the feed
Community members receive email notifications on new comments to the posts they've created or personally commented on. What if you're interested in seeing a discussion evolve without contributing to it? Well, check this out!
Now you can preview the number of new comments right from the feed. If you see a plus sign (+4), that's the number of new comments to the post you've read. If there are no new contributions, the preview shows the total number of comments.
III. Feed widget customization
You can embed a feed widget on any website page to give a preview of what's happening in your community. With the new customization options, you can choose the spaces and the number of posts to display. Additionally, you can choose to show or hide the community header, pinned posts, the search bar, the greeting unit, the new post button and navigation.
2. Administration
I. Hide posts without notifying the author
Communities have different sanctions against members who don't fully comply with the guidelines or can ocassionaly translate controversial messages. If you're not ready to block the member, as an admin, you can hide their post/-s without notifying them. Hidden posts are visible only to their authors and all the admins.
To hide a post, click on the three dots from the feed or in the post and choose Hide.
II. Assign member roles and groups upon invitation
Previously, you would need to go back to members list to assign roles and groups to the freshly recruited members. Now you can preassign their place in the community hierarchy when sending them invitations to join you.
To invite new members, go to Members -> Invite.
III. Assign groups to spaces with ease
Our group selector got a revamp. It shows more data, doesn't crop the badges anymore and you can also find member groups using the search bar instead of scrolling down.
3. New Growth Plan
We've introduced a new Growth plan to make sure you've got everything you need to continue growing. The Growth plan includes:
- All the Free, Starter, and Professional plan features
- Unlimited private spaces
- Webhooks (in private beta)
- Mobile SDKs (in private beta)
Have a look at the pricing plans overview post to compare it with other options.
To upgrade, choose Settings -> Billing, add a card details and select Change plan.
4. UX Improvements
I. Support Shortcuts for Admins
Getting in touch with our team is even easier now. To contact PeerBoard, select Help on the admin panel and choose between the options.
Members don't see this option, instead we added a "Report a problem" button at the very bottom of the right menu. You can remove it in Customization -> Branding
II. Insert & upload images with a new pop-up
Previously we had only image upload option for post images, not having an easy option to insert a url. This oversight is resolved and now you can beautify your posts both by uploading and linking images from the web.
III. Remove Powered by PeerBoard from the footer
To make your community fully white-label, you can now remove the Powered by PeerBoard attrubution in the Branding settings - only if you're on a Pro plan. Uncheck the box and select Save.
5. Plugins & Apps
I. PeerBoard's Thinkific app is OUT IN THE STORE!
The first and only native community app for Thinkific is live in the App Store! Our integration with Thinkific is unique, as now their course creators can have all the robust features PeerBoard offers in other solutions (notifications for posts and comments, rich editor, search, private spaces among some) while also enjoying the perks of:
- SSO
- automatic student & enrollments import
- easy discussion space creation based on course titles
- two integration places — on a page and in the course player
Read more about our integration and install the app here.
II. Upgrade on Shopify with native app payments
Now you can freely upgrade to paid plans from our Shopify plugin as we enabled their native app payments. Go to your community page on the Shopify website, select Billing → Upgrade. You will be redirected to your Shopify admin dashboard to approve the subscription.
6. For Developers: New APIs
For General API overview, dive into this post.
I. Spaces API!
With the new Spaces API, you can retrieve the spaces list, create new spaces, as well as retrieve, update and delete existing spaces using our API endpoints. You can also change their privacy (and we already have Groups API to manage member groups) and hierarchy.
II. Update subscriptions settings for a member
With updated Members API, you can unsubscribe a member from a specific digest or from all notifications. This is handy when you have your own member profile and may want to sync the subscription preferences with PeerBoard.
III. Control email activation for members registered via API
We’ve added activate_emails flag in the Members API for creating new members so you can now decide yourself whether you want to subscribe newly created members to emails right away (sending them a welcome email and subscribing to digests) or wait till they will go through our member onboarding screen.
Generally, we recommend to sync all member data to PeerBoard so you can be tagging them with member groups as you go. And in this case not subscribing them is often a preferred option so you now have a way to do that by passing false in this new flag.
IV. New post API
This was often requested and long awaited by our developer community! With the New Post API, you can automatically create new community posts. For any posts created this way, we add a new label in the end of the post "Automatically created ", e.g., "Automatically created a day ago". That way you'll distinguish API created posts from manually produced ones. Make also sure to check that the restrictions of the usual posting flow apply (title length, posting permissions, category access). We allow posting from admins only, so you'll need to specify an admin who will become an author.
7. Notable bug fixes
- Editor: pasted text doesn't start a new paragraph anymore.
- Broken image upload on focus change
- Wrong comment counter for deleted comments
Have something in mind? Comment & share your thoughts!
We are also starting to alpha-test our notification panel and mentions this week, among other things, so stay tuned for more great things to come!