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More than 10 "similar topics" when you search community.townnews posts
Every time I have a question for this community I want to make sure someone else hasn't asked it before. I even did it for this question. /meta This may be beyond TownNews' ability to customize as I'm not sure about how UserEcho works. But when I search for something like "section tag" I know there have to be more than 10 results and I don't want to take away votes from another established topic by creating a new topic that could be exactly the same as a previous one.
So is this something that can be done?
I had another question/topic but I'll ask it another day. I decided today was the day I'd finally ask about more search results.
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Hi Nick,
After some digging around in UserEcho's settings, I found that it is possible to change the number of "similar topics" displayed below the search box. It defaults to 10, but I've increased it to 20 for the time being. Let us know if this is more useful . . . increasing it beyond 20 started to make the page feel pretty unwieldy.
Aaron Gillette
Marketing director
TownNews.com
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display maps on all asset types
It would be great to display maps (defined by location information in the Other tab) on all asset types not just article assets. For example, here we have an image collection of a new temple opening in the area. It would be helpful to readers to see the location on the map.
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Has anyone switched their entire site over to SSL yet?
We're getting ready to do this. Just looking to see if anyone else has, and what, if any, problems or complications they ran into.
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Remove/disable the CAPTCHA on a form
1. What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.
A. Having the ability to remove or disable the CAPTCHA from internal forms would decrease from submission time and increase productivity.
Ex. https://www.thehawkeye.com/site/forms/news/content_request/
2. How often would you use this feature?
A. Several times per day.
3. How many people in your organization would use this feature?
Approximately 20 -- any editor, reporter, or photographer.
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FLEX needs more detailed front-end search options - specifically section searching
Currently I don't see any way to allow users to specify which sections to search. For instance, if someone wants to search for an obituary they can't go to our main site search and say "John Smith" and click something to limit the search results to obituaries.
I can send them to a different page like "/search/?c=obituaries" but usage of the internet trains us to look for a "Narrow my results down" area. I shouldn't have to redirect them to another search page.
It'd be nice to have at least the option to search news, sports and obits. Or you could get fancy and allow BLOX managers to map certain sections tags to custom search options. Like "Map local-news, state-news, national-news to News" and "Map obits to "Obituaries."
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Slideshow: headlines carousel (Flex only) ... are you using it?
We're having trouble getting this template to work: http://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/design/blocks/block_library/flex/article_8a16afb8-744b-11e5-8de2-3f674904dbe1.html.
Any one using it?
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Town News ability to handle major traffic surge
I feel for the web staff at The Dallas Morning News. During the shootings last night their primary site just couldn’t take the load. (Their beta site remained online for those who knew about it and had the URL.)
It got me wondering, if one of our sites were exposed to the huge traffic surge from a major national event such as this, would it be able to handle the load?
I’m hoping y’all can share what sort of technology and procedures you have in place for a major spike in traffic. Can things scale automatically or does it require some manual intervention by Town News staff? To what level and how quickly can additional resources be thrown at a problem like this if needed?
Looking forward to any insight that can be shared.
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Feature request: Inline notes outside of body copy
You can add inline notes to body copy. This works; text marked as a note does not appear in the body. But when text with an inline note is copied into any other field, the inline note shows up. Underlined. And it's not always visible outside unless you're looking at the HTML.
Feature request: No matter what field it's in, hide text that's marked as a note. (In HTML, <ins class="note">historic</ins> would hide the word historic.)
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Livestreaming?
Hello I was wondering if their was any kind of livestreaming support for townnews websites? something like how news station livestream their news broadcasts? Maybe its already able to do that. If so could you tell me how?
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Feature Request: Add geo location target for serving Banner Ads
Our advertisers would like to target Countries or States or even Cities for their banner ads. Some examples would be to target Canadians (Winter Visitors) at certain times of year, Military communities as they look to relocate, or Mexico site users on the weekends. In some cases, the advertiser can only sell to people in our state or are trying to target visitors from a neighboring state.
Our request is to be able to target Countries, States or even Cities for banner ads.
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Hi Lisa!
I was able to figure out your site based on your email address, so it looks like you are indeed using Ad Manager.
If so, yes, we can target banner ads by geo-location in Ad Manager. Here are the docs:
http://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/marketplace/banner_ads/workspace/article_c78ca706-2beb-11e5-b97e-8b48b6ba52c6.html
Look for the part titled "Geo Targeting."
I will say that we are using IP address lookup to figure out the geo location, and on desktops this is a bit wonky since your ISP may report that you're in, for example, Virginia, because that's where your ISP is. (But you're in New York.)
On mobile, which is a majority of traffic on most sites, the geo-location information is much better and we use this information for ad targeting.
One more thing, I should take a moment to mention our ad targeting program for DFP, TownNews.com iQ. This program, in combination with the Google DFP software, can provide a much finer-grained targeting of users based on a variety of data (such as subscription information). If you have any questions, please ask your sales representative! :)
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Would anyone else like to see an engagement button to show an article's full text?
On some news sites out there, we're seeing an engagement tactic where only a couple of paragraphs of the story are presented, along with a button to reveal the rest of the text. I assume that button then sends an analytics event that can be used to track user engagement, that is, how many people are interested in reading beyond the first couple paragraphs.
I'd personally love to see this as an item added to the upcoming content discovery/engagement URL custom properties.
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Bug in the Blox Go mobile admin and bug during batch edit
This creates a problem for ad serving (revenue) that works by section tag.
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Join us | Optimizing your BLOX CMS site for speed
At our July customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management, will highlight insider tips and techniques to help make your BLOX CMS site faster than ever.
We'll cover:
- Understanding the need for speed and how TownNews.com's Flex Templates can help reduce load times.
- Evaluating ads, third-party add-ons and other factors that can slow down your site.
- Creating page size & load time budgets to help you stay on track when designing pages and adding new content.
- Future upgrades to rendering, CSS and much more!
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Need "important update" option to save for assets other than just articles
It would be beneficial to have the "important update" save work on assets other than just articles. This could be useful for table and html assets. For example, we publish data or stats as tables. In some cases we replace the table with updated information and it would be helpful or the reader to know that new information is indeed available in the table.
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DFP Unfilled Impressions Flex
Since we launched Flex, we have been seeing high volume of unfilled impressions. I am sure it is because of the class hidden-xs etc, hiding the ad on a small device and not removing it. Anyway to fix this? I am attempting to switch the class names to use visible-sm etc to see if that makes a difference.
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