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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Under review

Trouble with bots and crawlers

Mike Stickler 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Patrick O'Lone (Director of Software Development) 10 years ago 6
Is anyone having bandwith overages and when they try to track them back discover msnbot is accounting for 24%-33% of total page views. I am loathe to block them completely but changing the crawl delay had no effect? 

By way of comparison googlebot, yahoo(slurp), and bingbot all seem to account for about 6% of our pageviews. 

How are you dealing with the issue?
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Weather rss

Craig V 10 years ago in BLOX CMS 0
Is there somewhere I can get a rss feed for the weather that Town News pulls?
0
Completed

Broadcast Idea

Jason Schaefer 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 1
One of the big issues with Facebook is that when you broadcast and the asset has no image attached that FB will pull a random image. Unfortunately this includes ads or business logos.

Can a prompt be added to broadcast that notifies the person broadcasting that there is no image attached and makes them choose to continue.
Answer
Christine Masters 10 years ago
Hi Jason!

We have a feature that, when you do not have a related image on the page, will send FB a "default" og_image to use. Most newspapers will use a logo or something similar.

Here is the documentation:

http://docs.townnews.com/kbpublisher/OpenGraph-Tag...

Also, note that these can be set on the URL, so you could theoretically have a different og_image per section.
+4
Under review

General request for expanded sorting functionality

Dylan McKinley 10 years ago updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 7
Blox's power is obvious and awesome, but just imagine how we could enhance and improve efficiency in our various workflows if we had more control over the metadata we can see in the asset search results viewer. Perhaps it's already in the works, or perhaps there are technical limitations I am not aware of – but it would be fantastic to see all columns sortable, many more columns available to show more metadata fields, more and customizable functionality of what kind of preview hover text shows (for instance, right now the only thing you see is the image when you hover over it - it'd be great to tweak that to show the caption as well or be able to switch between them somehow). Generally, I'm hoping we can see the search results grow into something more like an Explorer or Finder window. I know I could shave a ton of time off the projects I work on with more options. Thanks for all your hard work, TownNews!
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Apple iOS 8 breaks browser-based file uploads

Aaron Gillette (Marketing Director, TownNews) 10 years ago updated 10 years ago 1
Apple’s iOS 8 was released September 17, but if you’re a BLOX Go user, you may not want to upgrade just yet. Read more »
Answer
Update: This issue has been fixed by Apple's iOS 8.0.2 release.
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Webinar: What's new in October

Aaron Gillette (Marketing Director, TownNews) 10 years ago updated 10 years ago 0
On the first Thursday of each month, Christine Masters (director of product management) and Aaron Gillette (director of marketing) will review the most exciting new and upcoming changes to TownNews.com's products and services.

At October's live webinar, topics will include:

  • Managing paywall and subscription rulesets with our new rule profiles feature.
  • Importing and sharing YouTube videos with our built-in syndication tools.
  • Helping your advertisers celebrate the season with fun new Bulletins themes.
Join us for a FREE, live webinar on Thursday, October 2nd, at 10:30 AM CDT.

 « SIGN UP TODAY! » 
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New tool consolidates paywall rules for easy maintenance

Aaron Gillette (Marketing Director, TownNews) 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated 10 years ago 0
Our new rule profiles feature makes managing your subscription rules a breeze, even if you offer tons of packages. Read more »
+1
Started

Business Directory

Jason Schaefer 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 1
Can Google+ be added to the social media (second tab) for the business directory listings.
Answer
Christine Masters 10 years ago
This is in an upcoming Business Directory release.
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Completed

Ability to test forms with payment information before going live

Sam Williams 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 1
We'd like to be able to test forms that include payment information before pushing them live to the public. If that's already possible, we haven't found it in the documentation, but it would be a great feature. We've had several cases where forms went live, but there were errors in the form that we were unaware of because we could not process them without it charging a card.
Answer
Christine Masters 10 years ago
Hi Sam!

Pretty much any of our products (Forms, Ad Owl, Upsell Manager, etc.) will utilize the test Visa number:

Any name
Any address
acct: 4111111111111111 (a 4 and 15 ones)
expiration: Any future date
CSC code: 123 (I think it can be any three-digit number)

For this to work, you have to be viewing the form in PREVIEW mode (not live).

Try this out and let me know how it works for you.

Christine
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Completed

User can register for an account with Facebook

Deirdre Long 10 years ago in BLOX Total CMS updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 1
Users should be able to register for an account by linking their Facebook account. "Log in with Facebook" like other websites do. 
Answer
Christine Masters 10 years ago
Hi Deirdre!

I'm happy to tell you that we do have this! It is enabled via Settings -> Users -> Authentication -> Federated Authentication.



If you need help, you can contact our Customer Support team and they can help set this up for you.
+2
Under review

Universal Analytics Upgrade (GA)

Mike DellaVecchia 11 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Mike Stickler 10 years ago 3
Apparently Google is now offering improved analytics via a "Universal Analytics Upgrade" however the upgrade will require some tracking code changes.  Here is a link to some detailed info on what is to gain and what changes are involved.  https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/?hl=en_US Since Town News pretty much controls the GA tracking snippet for us, was wondering what, if any, changes are on the horizon to accommodate the new analtyics.js snippet over the current ga.js.  Might you have an ETA as well?

Google says you can go thru the upgrade process in GA and continue to get your stats as normal, however, the benefits of the Universal upgrade won't be seen until the tracking code is updated.  I'd be willing to beta if you need a volunteer.
Thanks

0
Under review

Pin assets

Maunette Loeks 10 years ago updated 10 years ago 4
It would be very awesome if we could pin assets FROM the asset. It would be very convenient for those assets that have moved out of the top story or other block because of time, but we want to "resurface" the asset in the block.
+1
Under review

Remove breadcrumbs from page

Matt Connolly - WCI 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Jason Schaefer 10 years ago 2
Is there an easy way to remove breadcrumbs from a specific page. I still want them for the majority of them, but would like to remove them on pages I scrape to get the "site template" (i.e. for things like e-mail templates and uPickEm contests). I know I can hide this in CSS, but would like to do it in BLOX
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Under review

Has anyone experienced content going live BEFORE their publish date?

Lindy Bazner 10 years ago in BLOX CMS updated by Christine Masters 10 years ago 6
Has anyone experienced content going live BEFORE their set publish date? We experienced a mess of content going live well before their intended publish date, and set off a bit of a firestorm in our newsroom. I have heard of this happening once at yet one other property, but I thought I'd ask around as I'm submitting a help ticket. It's a somewhat sketchy idea of a bug, especially considering embargoed content. We're going to attempt to test it again to recreate it.