What better way to send you our heartfelt holiday wishes than by releasing a bunch of great updates? We were busy at work finishing up some large items, so this update covers past two months of changes. Buckle up!
1. Articles 📰
We just released Articles, our second dedicated post type and its associated workflows. The post type is designed to help you showcase long form content, feature UGC posts, and encourage members to share more with a new member badge and make it incredibly easy to measure everything!
We really recommend that you read more about the Articles Workflow in this guide explaining all the details.
2. New Insights 📈
Space and Group Filters
We've added more filters to the Activity and Content pages in your Insights panel. Now you can filter for top posts and comments by space and also filter contributors by associated member groups. If you have multiple cohorts/member segments in your community, this is a great way now to compare engagement between them! Look out for these dropdowns on the right from section headers.
Community Visitors
For communities with public content it's quite important to be aware of the non-member (anonymous) visits. We cleaned up our tracking logic and now have more confidence in the numbers not being inflated because of multiple sessions, etc. You can find this in your Insights -> Activity panel on Active Members chart.
Post Views
This was one of the top requests from our backlog and we're happy to share that now you can track post views across multiple Insights areas!
Let's start with post view counter in the post itself. We've added not just the counter, but also a pretty cool chart (!) with post specific views, so you can track spikes of activity and see correlations between your campaigns and post opens. You can also change the reference period from daily to weekly to monthly to see a longer trend.
💡 Note that we started to collect this data just recently, so you won't have data for posts older than a couple months.
💸 This chart is a part of our Content Insights functionality, available starting from our Pro plan.
Posts and Articles sorted by views
Lastly for this Insights update, we added a way to sort posts in Insights -> Content and Insights -> Articles by views. Previously you could see only a change in upvotes, now you can switch to Most Viewed and see the number of new views for a selected period.
Posting this also made me wonder, why there's been so much interest in our Terms of Service recently, hmmm.
3. Global and Space Level Pins 📌
This also was one of a few older feature requests that we kept pushing back and that kept haunting us, even though we really wanted to get it done. Well, no more! Now you can pin a post to the homepage and to a space page! This is a great way to keep important content organized while decluttering your homepage pins. Admins can now find the pin controls it in the three-dot menu next to every post.
If you have moderators, you also have now two explicit controls in Settings -> General to also allow them to pin posts to Home or Space pages.
💡 Note that pinning a post to a space pins it both in a parent space and in a nested space, if any. Still not sure, maybe we should do three pin types? If any of you actually need that, let me know!
Notable Improvements
From the other important news, we:
📱 Improved our editor on Android! We updated our editor core to the last version of the open source editor we use and they fixed some of the problems on this platform. Let us know if you or your members still experience any.
📺 Added support for YouTube stories and other formats to feed preview! We've got this request from a customer and now you have playback for such videos right in the feed.
🥷 For developers: an explicit optional skip\_onboarding parameter in our JWT format and API. Previously we relied on other parameters, piggybacking this as a side-effect. We plan to stop doing this, so we recommend to pass this flag as true if you want to skip onboarding when running us in a tight integration.
❓We've also added more useful tips for question posters so that they are more aware that they mark the best answers they receive and in this way we hope to improve both post and solve engagement in questions.
And of course we fixed a bunch of bugs and regressions, thanks to your feedback. Keep it coming!
Direct Messaging Preview
Finally, we didn't manage to finish direct messaging this side of the new year. Sorry. We really wanted to make sure that it has all the restrictions, reporting and notification functionality you deserve before it gets rolled out.
Our current plan is to get it live around the end of January. But! We wanted you to get a taste of what's coming and also collect your feedback. So, we've already enabled direct messaging in this community and you can (and I invite you!) to message me to give it a try.
The only entry point for now is in member profiles and is visible for now on admin profiles only, but much more is to come.
So to start a chat with us, all you need to do is head to our Profiles and click "Start a Chat":
We also are testing group messaging already and it will follow direct messaging some time in February. If you want more (chatrooms anybody?), let us know!
So send something to me or Tarek! And as always, upvote, share, comment here with any questions or suggestions!
That's all from us this month, as we approach the end of December, I hope everyone in the community enjoys a happy holiday season. We're proud to be serving such an awesome group of customers and partners!
Best wishes from the entire PeerBoard team! Here's to an awesome 2023🎆