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.
Though BLOX Digital representatives often participate in discussions, this is not a customer service site. For immediate help, call 800-293-9576 or submit a support request via our online ticketing system.
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Topic Pages Examples
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Feature Request: Username associated with video clips created in Blackbird and Field59
It would be great to have a username associated with video clips that are created in Blackbird and Field59. As an admin, it would be extremely helpful to be able to quickly identify the person that created a specific video clip.
This feature would come in handy if a video clip were erroneously published or efforts were duplicated by 2 users. Currently we have no way of identifying the clip's creator.
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White eEdition screen of non-enlightenment
Does anyone else have subscribers that are experiencing issues with the eEdition where they go into it and they just get a white screen? We've got about 15 now. Tried different browsers tried resetting passwords. Development is looking at it but I didn't know if it was just us.
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Skye, your ticket had to do with a customization you had for a page title text macro that was bleeding thru to some javascript functions. We've made the change to fix this for your site.
Thanks,
Joe Hansen
TownNews Senior Solutions Team Lead
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"Disconnect" a story from host syndication channel
Is there a way to have a story that has been syndicated to stop being automatically revised once it is brought into our system? I.e. is there a way to "disconnect" from a syndication channel?
Other methods we used in the past are not reliable since the new update. This is important since sometimes a story in another market will focus on one municipality, while we want to move up content about our local market.
But in the new system, simply creating a copy of the original asset can result in assets appearing as duplicates on the site. And we cannot reliably remove the original asset without breaking an original link that's already been shared OR reliably "hide" it from our homepage because if it gets revised again then our edits will be undone.
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Tyler, yes this is still available (though probably a bit out of date considering it was 2015) on our TownNews.com site.
TownNews Senior Solutions Team Lead
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Content Exchange
I would like to create a suggestion mechanism for the Content Exchange. If we produce something that has broad appeal, that we can highlight it for other news organizations. For example, we are starting a op-ed-column on national issues and it can be helpful to organizations outside my area (CT). With so much of the Content Exchange being sports and celebrity stuff, this can be something that would be lost in that group.
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Instagram in Broadcast channel
I would love to have Instagram added to the Broadcast channel with the ability to scrape a child asset photo from an article asset. We've found that there's never enough time to take the extra steps to post into Instagram independently.
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Feature request: Allow subscribers to share articles
This has come up before, but was a good suggestion from one of our subscribers via twitter.
Is there a way that would allow subscribers to share articles that would not be subject to paywall? This could turn our subscribers into real ambassadors for our sites. NYT and WaPo allow subscribers 10 shares a month and remind them of that benefit each time they share.
https://twitter.com/FlappyMcB/status/1516470200157224964
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Ability to remove user-facing asset timestamp after a period of time
We'd like to see the ability to optionally set a time for each block that would prevent the asset timestamp from being shown to the public. In other words, we may wish to suppress the timestamp on home page articles once they are older than 4 hours. It may look better to have *no* timestamp than a timestamp that clearly states to the public that we've not made any material changes to the article in x number of hours.
Ideally, this would be an option that could be set individually on each display block.
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Instagram spash page
Many publications now have a splash page from Instagram and I feel like this could be an easy addition in BLOX. We have interns run our Instagram and sometimes a post may be a story from a day or two before. If a reader uses the link in the Istagram bio, it takes them to our front page, however, the story may now be buried and readers may not take the time to find the related article.
What I would like is a splash page. When a reader uses the link it would take them to a BLOX page that just has the images from Instagram. These images would then act as a link to the corresponding story. This would be useful for all aging content and help to get more eyes on stories and less frustration.
I talked to TownNews and there's nothing available like this yet. Have any users built something like this or have any suggestions?
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Online Merchandise Store
Hello everyone,
We are wanting to set up an online store, selling merchandise such as t-shirts etc for a host of promotional items we run. Currently, we have a https://PRINTful.com account set up this, but it looks like there is no easy way to integrate the API with Blox CMS?
Does anyone have any other platform they may be using or work around without building out another site with a Shopify account or WordPress? Screen Shot 2019-01-16 at 3.22.29 PM.png
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sending an xml feed newsbank
Hey everyone!
We cut ties with Merlin at the end of last year and have been manually sending PDFs to NewsBank to archive every night, but when we stopped using Merlin apparently the XML feed of stories stopped sending.
I was curious if any other TownNews entities have anything automated through TownNews to send this feed to NewsBank? Or any best practices to get it from CMS to NewsBank?
Thanks!
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Jenna,
Yes! We have a built in NITF feed for newsbank and work with them for a lot of our customers. Just submit a Customer Service ticket and we can get that set up for you.
TownNews Senior Solutions Team Lead
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Is there a plan to allow users to cancel a digital subscription in the user dashboard?
Our staff has decreased dramatically in the past few years and managing manual transactions for digital subscriptions can eat up time.
is there a plan to add an option to cancel a digital subscription in the user’s dashboard?
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Lost preference to uncheck Do Not Publish by default
What happened to the preference setting that allowed you to upload a batch of photos and have them automatically go live? The pref for newly created items vanished about a week ago. Now, if you upload a half-dozen photos, you have to go through a multiple-click process for each of them to uncheck Do Not Publish. The only alternative is, if they have a common name, to search and do a batch edit, also involving many steps.
you may not want a story to go live, but you can quickly check Do Not Publish before you start populating the story form fields or assigning it sections. Photos are more harmless to have live before the story. And often you're not uploading pix until just before the story goes live, anyway.
Separately, there also have been far more incidents lately where you can upload one or more images from within a story file but they don't link to that story. You have to search for assets individually to find and link -- another, frustrating step on deadline.
Customer support service by UserEcho