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Alignment for Related Assets needs to be fixed
When I add a Child Asset to an article, but do not actually drop the Child Asset into the body of the article, I don't like what it does to the alignment of my page: it actually ADDS a "left rail" and shifts the entire text of the article to the right. But the only thing in the "left rail" is an image of that asset I added... so it looks really odd.
This is only an issue on desktop, not on mobile.
It creates an additional problem when I add an Article as a Child Asset to another Article. Now, since I'm in the Parent Article, it's not too much trouble to simply place each Child Article into the body of the Parent Article. But it has now affected the alignment in all of those Child Articles -- because it added the Parent Asset to the "left rail" for each of those Child Articles! So now I have to go back into each of the Child Articles and drop the new Parent into the body of those articles, to fix that alignment.
This is terribly cumbersome and awfully time-consuming, but it's necessary if I don't want most of my articles to be misaligned on desktop view.
The easy fix is to create a default that adds all Related Assets into a horizontal "block" at the end of each article.

New BLOX UI: We like it -- with one caveat :)
Refreshed blox UI really taking off here. One thing bugging us a bit.
-- Searchable assets aren't color-coded anymore
It's just tough to scan thru and easily distinguish, esp pdf vs. img
See attached screenshot. Any suggestions or consideration to reverting back or adjusting?

Infinity Scroll Limintation
After a lot of back and forth with support we finally figured out why Infinity Scroll was not working on our main section pages:
"Blocks with infinity scroll enabled won't work with a dynamic setting (section tags set to 'Matches current URL or descendant'). There will need to be a hook set (setting a section, keyword, flag, etc.)."
This limitation does not appear to be documented anywhere at the present time.
This means Infinity Scroll will not work at all on the default Town News blocks that get assigned to every top level URL and all sub-sections (through inheritance) in the system. I assume most customers are using these across most areas of their sites.
Having to work around this will greatly increase the number of blocks needed for a site if they want to use Infinity Scroll on every section front. It could easily scale into the hundreds of blocks needed for a site. Then every time a style change is desired, such as showing the comment count in the summary block, it'll require editing each of those hundreds of blocks instead of the standard dynamic one.
Every single sub-section URL will need it's own block created instead of being able to inherit the blocks from the parent URL.
With this limitation Infinity Scroll is basically dead in the water for large scale deployment.
I really hope Town News is working to fix this but I wanted to post it here for wider awareness because before the answer came back the template developers I was told that there were other sites having the same trouble I was.

Feature request - infinite story scroll
I would like to request an infinite scroll feature. When you get to the bottom of one story the next story published in chronological order shows up on the same webpage. This goes on for ever.

Apple News Format
Apple is finally opening up ANF to everyone. We've been pushing an RSS feed to Apple News for a while now, but publishing in ANF will over a more robust experience to readers.
Information on integrating the format here: Use a CMS with News Publisher
Any thoughts on getting BLOX to push out in ANF? There are already WordPress and Drupal plugins available.

Users bypassing paywall with timing trick
It seems an enterprising non-subscriber has found a little glitch to access articles behind the paywall and his instructions are now making the rounds on social media.
Here are the instructions:
"I'm not too sure if I should be posting this. However, as someone who does PC/IT work and repair, I figure I could let some of y'all in on a way to read most of, if not all the article's without paying. (On Android using Chrome) Basically, I go to the article I want to read that is not free. Then I select "Request Desktop Site" in the browser settings. (the three dots on the top right) Once that loads, (it puts a minor delay on the article loading) all of the article is displayed in its entirety for just a moment or two. A few seconds later the pop up to sign up for a subscription block's it all out. Now it's that small delay, prior to the subscription pop up, that we are after. In that delay, I do a screen shot of the article. (You might have to refresh the page and try again if you weren't quick enough the first time) After I successfully capture it, I then just read it via my picture gallery. If it's longer than my initial screen grab,
I try a second time and scroll really quick to encompass the remainder of the article with another screen shot. If it's too long for those methods, I do a complete screen record. (video recording of your entire screen) then I go back through the recording and look frame by frame. Hope this helps some of y'all. You're welcome."
We've tested it out and have been able to confirm it works. While it isn't easy enough that I think we'll start losing subscribers over it, it also isn't that complicated to pull off.
I'm actually seeing it pretty consistently even on desktop browsers right now. It seems that the delay before the paywall message appears is much longer than it used to be. It looks like Town News might need to adjust the timing of how things are rendered so the full article isn't displayed until after the user has been evaluated as having an active subscription.
Have any of y'all come across readers doing this or something like it to bypass the paywall?

Form submissions into Editorial app as article assets
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.

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.

Subscriptions - "Upselling" without expiring current service?
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?

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.

Subscription reporting improvements - cancelled subscriptions and new subscribers
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.

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

Ban commenting not user

Batch upload
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.

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

Report comment for "guest" users?
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.

The ability to unlock assets within the Blox Go mobile interface
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.

FR: Disable username display in e-Edition "River of News"
(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)
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
Customer support service by UserEcho