Hello. We are going to increase our focus on our email newsletters in the coming months. Right now our Daily Digest is based on a URL and also includes a few extra blocks for sponsored content, calendars, featured photo, etc.

We want to take full advantage of the features that are available for newsletters within Blox and would like to see what some other TownNews customers have done to punch up their newsletters.

I know we would have more options if we worked directly in Constant Contact but our goal is keep building the newsletter within Blox to minimize the work needed.

Just wanted to see if anyone has heard if there's a timeline for finding a fix to this issue: Users can circumvent the metered paywall once they hit their limit by using incognito windows, and it's been pretty rampant in the past few months. 

The last meeting we had with TownNews they said they were aware of the issue and working on a fix, curious if there's an update on this. 

Webinar recording now available.

Taking cues from social media, the BLOX Now mobile app eschews conventional news app design in favor of a single, continuously-scrolling stream of community news and events that keeps users engaged. At our June customer webinar, Susan Bell, BLOX Now senior product manager, and Christine Masters, director of product management, introduced the BLOX Now mobile app.

Topics included:

• Increasing user engagement with a hybrid news and information app.

• Feature highlights, including: in-stream video playback, push notifications, and convenient fly-out menus.

• Monetizing your app with Google DFP integration.

• Managing your app, website, and mobile site in one easy workflow.

• . . . and much more.

Are you ready to get started . . . now? Webinar recording now available.

Webinar recording now available.

Editorial masterclass for BLOX CMS

At our November customer webinar, Christine Masters, Director of BLOX CMS for TownNews, gave a masterclass to highlight some advanced, and sometimes overlooked, editorial functionality within BLOX CMS.

Topics included:

• Using BLOX Notifier to keep readers in the loop and drive social media traffic.
• Enriching your stories with multimedia content using the drag-and-drop Article Designer.
• Customizing your site with expert block management tricks—from permissions to scheduling, and beyond.
• Writing headlines to improve SEO.
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

Does anyone know how to export the custom fields that we are adding when our users register. I see the data on the Custom tab of the users' accounts, but when I export the users to a csv file the only fields that are exported are

There's nothing in the TN documentation about this. The documentation tells you how to add a custom field to the registration form, but it's not much good if we can't export that information.

I'm trying to link a banner advertisement to initiate a phone call. Normally that would be done by using tel:xxx-xxx-xxxx in an HREF. I try to put it into the Link URL: section, but it converts it to tel://xxx-xxx-xxxx which does not work.

Is there a way to do that?

We keep getting the runaround from FB/Town News but we have no idea how or where to add additional moderators to the Facebook comment plugin on our news website. Anyone have any ideas on how to do this? The person who set up the integration left and we haven't been able to figure out how to actually delete spam comments from news stories. When we asked Facebook, they gave us script that Town News said it doesn't have in the system. 

Right now it keeps telling me  'BLOX CMS admin is currently unavailable' ... Of course, the person I am adding needs admin privileges ... IS this something related to the recent password update and is there an ETA for when this might be fixed?

Hey all, I'm thinking we could really benefit from a few new options with polls. Some details:

1. It'd be really nice to be able to put an end date on a poll. It just seems like a basic functionality, and I know several people up-voted the idea before: https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/settings/urls/custom_properties/article_5fd6d870-2bdc-11e5-93e5-034d9f275a7e.html

2. Can we have the option to NOT show results (and maybe show a field after someone votes — "Check back Aug. 8 to see the winner."). That'd allow for us to do some really cool stuff that's not currently allowed. You could have votes for an athlete of the week, person of the year, etc. and not risk people not voting because someone is out to a 2-to-1 lead early, etc.

1. What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

Like every subscription-based newspaper across America, the New Hampshire Union Leader must transition our users from paying for print to paying for online content. The online content subscribers will pay for are exclusive news and enterprise stories; the premium information that you dedicate a reporter's day or week to, not just a few minutes to rewrite a press release.

A metered paywall is fine for commoditized news like accidents, fires, crimes, etc. -- the info all media outlets in a region will share. But on premium content -- a story we might have invested hundreds of dollars in and only we have it -- these we want to make access subscriber-only with a hard paywall that can be applied selectively on a story-by-story basis.

Presently, TownNews allows us to assign the level of paywall needed to any defined section in the taxonomy of sections and carve out niches within that hierarchy. For example, unionleader.com has a hard paywall on Business and Politics, and a metered paywall in the Crime and Safety sections. Further, within Politics and Business are sponsored subsections that are excluded from the paywall because an advertiser is footing the bill. All of that works great.

The problem we're seeing arises when a premium story we have invested in naturally falls into a section such as crime, safety, education, etc., that is a metered paywall section. At present we must either allow access to that premium content through the metered paywall or intentionally miscategorize that content to place it into a section that has the hard paywall needed.

A section-based paywall is fine in bulk, but in the particulars is unable to convey Premium status to the content we are most invested in in a manner that is quick and simple.

What we are proposing is that a keyword such as #premium and/or #hardpaywall be established that can be applied by our editors on an article-by-article basis to allow us to lock out non-subscribers regardless of section. Our editors are already accustomed to using keyword #nofollow on Washington Post stories, so such an approach is easy to train against.

We believe such a feature will not only be valuable to the Union Leader, but to newspapers you serve across America who like us will survive only by getting readers to subscribe.

2. How often would you use this feature?  Every day.

3. How many people in your organization would use this feature? About 20 on the news team.

Webinar recording now available.

At this special webinar, the product team at TownNews introduced important changes to BLOX Live e-Editions and Associated Press feeds, and showed how new polling widgets from our Content Exchange partners can enhance your Election 2020 coverage.

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

We've got a payment form set up on our site. The marketing team wants weekly spreadsheet emailed with info from that week's submissions. Is that possible?