Welcome to the BLOX Digital (formerly TownNews) customer community! Connect with other BLOX Digital customers—and with us—to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.

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0

Increase number of assets per page in search results

Brad Boner 6 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated 6 years ago 2

Currently, when using the "Search text" or "Slug" fields in CMS or TCMS, the number of assets returned is only 25. Would like the option to increase that to unlimited, if possible, so we would have a scrolling list of search results on a single page.

+7
Under review

Form submissions into Editorial app as article assets

David Marsters 11 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Jesus Sanchez 6 years ago 7
We use the forms platform for a lot of things, and in many cases, the submissions we get ultimately have to get put into the form of article assets into the Editorial application. It would be great if there were a way for this to happen automatically. An example would be a candidate questionnaire form for elections - ultimately the text is going to get used as an article asset, and right now we have to manually paste it in and format it.

I recognize that not all forms are soliciting information that we would want in our Editorial assets, even if they came over with "Do Not Publish" checked, so perhaps this would be a setting on the form that you could tell it do export to Editorial on a case-by-case basis.

Thanks very much.
Answer
Christine Masters 10 years ago
We do this for some things now - like Letters to the Editor can be submitted through the User Dashboard, and those will automatically become assets.

But, for fielded data that becomes more difficult because we don't always know the format that the resulting asset should have.

For some simple submissions though, this could be done in the User Dashboard.
+7
Under review

Subscriptions - "Upselling" without expiring current service?

Ian McPhee 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Rich Griffin | Product Manager (Product Manager) 6 years ago 2

Hey ya'll,


We recently launched our Subscriptions (we call it Membership) and there are five different price levels, including the free trial. Yesterday we got a call from someone who signed up for the lowest paid tier for one year, about a month ago. They now want to up their membership to the top level - something hopefully everyone will want to do at some point! Unfortunately, they ran into issues, already having an "active" subscription. My temporary solution was to manually expire their service on my end and then have them sign up for the new one, but this is obviously not ideal. 

I almost posted this as a "Feature Request," but figured it has to already exist, I must just be missing something. 

Any ideas?

Answer

Purchasing a different package is indeed possible when you have an active service. A Customer service ticket was resolved on the issue. There was apparently some miscommunication with the subscriber.

+3

Subscription reporting improvements - cancelled subscriptions and new subscribers

Jay Allred 7 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Ian McPhee 6 years ago 1

Try as we might, we cannot find a report / reports that help us keep tabs on subscriptions that do not renew (a.k.a. lost customers). Here's what we suggest be either changed or added.


1. Create a report that let's us track non-renewed subscriptions by customer name. For example, if Amy Jones' monthly or annual subscription is scheduled to renew, but does not - allow a way for us to get a list of those folks. We want to be able to contact them and find out why, win them back.


2. Create a report that allows us to track first-time subscribers by name. Specifically, we are interested in the people that made the initial decision to purchase a membership. Currently, there appears to be no simple way to track this critical data.

0

Show description for video assets when embedded in stories

Brad Boner 6 years ago in BLOX Total CMS 0

For video assets embedded into stories, we would like the video asset's "Description" field to appear under the video (similar to how photo captions appear) when the video is set to the "Video player" presentation mode.

0
Completed

Webinar | Digital advertising 101: Optimizing your local and programmatic ad inventories

Cherry Wolf (Marketing specialist) 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 6 years ago 1

Webinar recording now available.

Digital advertising 101: Optimizing your local and programmatic ad inventories

Navigating the ever-changing landscape of digital advertising can be a challenge. At our February customer webinar, Patty Bristol, Ad Ops program manager at TownNews, shared best practices to help you better optimize your overall digital advertising inventory. Using real-life examples and known challenges, Patty showed how using local and programmatic together can create the optimal digital advertising revenue stream.  

Image 442

Topics included:

  • An overview of digital advertising, including commonly used terms
  • Generating revenue from local and programmatic ad sales
  • Introducing eCPM—the key metric for revenue growth
  • Tips for packaging and pricing digital ad inventory
  • . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

+1

Google Analytics - Collection pageviews

Andrew Link 6 years ago updated by Kevin M. Cox 6 years ago 1

I've noticed over the last four days, our collection pageviews aren't accumulating like they have in the past in Google Analytics. Now in the collections traffic, the pageviews are close to the unique pageviews number. They aren't inflated anymore.

Has anyone else noticed this with their pageviews? Has Google Analytics stopped recognizing the different pages in collection assets?

+10
Started

Set Broadcast time separate from Start Date/Time

Brad Boner 8 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 6 years ago 8

First, thanks so much for adding the Broadcast feature to the TCMS. It's a very useful feature that will certainly get a lot of use.


It would be awesome if we could set a custom time to Broadcast assets separate from the asset's start time. This would enable us to send content to our social media channels for optimum visibility. For example, much of our content goes live on our website at 4:30 a.m. but it would be better to delay the Broadcast to Facebook until about 7:30 or 8 a.m. when there are more people on Facebook.

It would also be nice to have the ability to schedule multiple Broadcast times for different channels inside a single asset. For example, we would like to broadcast to Facebook once but may like to broadcast to Twitter three separate times, so it would be cool to have the ability to schedule a single FB broadcast and three Twitter broadcasts.


Finally — and I don't know if it's possible — but it would also be nice if media such as photos that are attached to assets could be broadcast to Twitter along with the asset's link.

Thanks,

Brad

+1

Ban commenting not user

Nic Stevens 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Kevin M. Cox 6 years ago 7
I would love to be able to ban someone from commenting without locking them out of their web site account. We have a column called It's Your Call and routinely we have people that push the limits and we have to determine if they are a subscriber BEFORE we can ban them because if they are a subscriber and we ban them, they can no longer get onto the web site. It's quite horrid to handle because you have to remember who you warned and once you banned them, you have to decide if you give them part of their subscription price back. We are on Facebook commenting for most things but this piece because we like the engagement it brings to the web site. Just sometimes don't like the comments. It's becoming weekly we have to make this call anymore. I also feel this would go along way to keep more and more pages with TownNews commenting instead of moving to Facebook commenting.

+13
Completed

Batch upload

Jason Schaefer 11 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Maunette Loeks 6 years ago 24
It could be quite useful for the batch upload feature to be included in the story asset (child assets).

This would enable the copy desk to upload/attach photos to a story at one time instead of batch uploading separately then searching for files.
Answer

This feature was released with our Tuesday update to the CMS.

0

Report comment for "guest" users?

Robert Armstrong 6 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

It seems that right now, the only way to report comments is if the user is logged in. Is there a way to activate the report button for all non-logged in users? I understand that this may lend itself to abuse, so having an option to have a higher threshold for "guest reports" or even the ability to remove the report button on a specific comment could help curb that.

0

The ability to unlock assets within the Blox Go mobile interface

Lonnie de Lambert 6 years ago in BLOX CMS 0


Having the ability to unlock assets within the Blox Go mobile interface will solve the problem of having to switch to desktop view on a mobile device and log into the CMS in order to unlock an article. This will save precious time, especially in a situation when multiple staff members are working on breaking or developing stories.

+1

FR: Disable username display in e-Edition "River of News"

Kevin M. Cox 6 years ago in BLOX CMS 0

(Apologies if I've simply been unable to find this setting and thanks in advance if anyone can show me where it exists already.)

We'd like the ability to disable the display of usernames in the e-Edition's "river of news." (See attached screenshots)

Image 435

Image 436


Showing them here doesn't add anything to the reader experience. They aren't clickable and just clutter up the display with un-useful information.

I'd be fine with them being simply removed completely but an option to enable or disable their display would allow other sites to make that decision themselves.

1. Create a cleaner reader experience by decluttering the display and removing information that is not useful.

2. Every day.

3. Every reader.

Thanks,

Kevin

+9
Under review

Embed form into story, or onto page

Meagen Finnerty 7 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Ian McPhee 6 years ago 3

I'm not sure if this has already been cracked, but it would be so nice if forms generated embed codes so we could put them at the bottom of stories, or embed them onto a landing page. Right now, we either link to them or use a third-party form that we can embed. 

+1

Disable e-Newsletter Confirmation Email

Sally Reynolds 6 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Ian McPhee 6 years ago 1

When a reader signs up to receive our e-newsletters (https://lancasteronline.com/newsletters/), they get an automated confirmation email from Constant Contact that must be clicked before they are actually subscribed to the e-newsletter. While I understand that the purpose is to maintain list quality, the unintended consequence is that the confirmation email is a barrier to the reader. As such, it reduces e-newsletter sign ups. The confirmation email is an optional feature in the Constant Contact platform. However, it is not optional for our e-newsletters due to (I assume) a decision made between Town News and Constant Contact. This affects all Town News clients who use the Constant Contact e-newsletter integration. I would like to ask for a reconsideration of this requirement, such that it be turned off globally for all of us.