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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that not all forms are soliciting information that we would want in our Editorial assets, even if they came over with "Do Not Publish" checked, so perhaps this would be a setting on the form that you could tell it do export to Editorial on a case-by-case basis.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.
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Webinar recording now available.
Digital advertising 101: Optimizing your local and programmatic ad inventories
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Topics included:
- An overview of digital advertising, including commonly used terms
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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
Embed form into story, or onto page
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.
Disable e-Newsletter Confirmation Email
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.
FR: Additional analytics for Email Reach
We'd like to request some additional analytics data be added for the Email Reach service.
• Statistics / Analytics / Email Reach: Add column for open rate. Yes we can do the math when needed but the system can do it much faster and have it available instantly when we need it or provide it in automated reports.
• Statistics / Analytics / Email Reach: We'd like to see columns related to active subscriptions. How many people on the "Sent" list had an active subscription when the email went out? How many of the "Opens" were active subscribers?
• Community / Email Reach: It could be helpful if the "Events" information was also available under Statistics / Analytics / Email Reach so it is all accessible from the same screen.
• Community / Email Reach / Contacts: Add a column for active subscriber status (yes/no).
Thanks.
Feature Request - Comment notification to Article Author
We've recently started using the BLOX commenting system. I would like for Authors to be able to receive a notification when someone posts a comment on one of their articles, as we are encouraging them to join in on the discussions / answer questions posed by readers. Right now the only way to set up notifications is to add their email to the "master list" which notifies them when a comment is posted on ANY article.
If that's not possible, perhaps we could somehow achieve this through the "Per-URL settings"? If I could set an email to be notified by section that would work just as well too.
Thanks!
Comment length restrictions.
Is there any way to restrict the number of words in a post? We have one individual that continually posts at least 10 - 15 lines. We'd like to cut this down to only 180 words.
Can we get an integrated alternative for Google Maps since it's no longer free?
College newspaper here -- we resumed publication after summer break and noticed that all of the maps on articles were not working (grayed out with a "for development use only" message). It looks like Google Maps has gone to a paid usage model: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/
I had to go through a bunch of rigmarole of setting up a Cloud platform app, enabling a tons of APIs and putting in a credit card since usage is no longer completely free. It was annoying because we don't do any cloud computing and don't need any of the datacenter-type features. They do provide $200 of free credits every month, but there is no easy way that I could tell to stop it from charging you $20 or $200 or $2000 or $20000 if the site gets DDOS'd or has a huge traffic spike, or to set a $199.99 max usage and then have it disable itself.
Would you all please start investigating the feasibility of having integrated maps that use a free/open alternative, like maybe OpenStreetMap?
I would like to remove my credit card from Google and not have to think about it.
Hi guys!
As I said previously, we are investigating the ability to provide a new mapping option, and have been investigating different providers.
Right now we are very heavily leaning toward HERE, and have chosen to start development on that. I don't want to say it is a final choice because things may be discovered or could change as we build... but as Aidian said, the free 250k transactions appears to be the most generous.
You'll have to get an API key from HERE, but a credit card is not required.
We will also begin to look at ways to store geo-data since this service allows that, and then for future map renders we don't need to geo-code each time. Our editorial application, for example, allows you to store your geo-data.
Anyway, as I said, we are still doing dev on this - but let me know if anyone has any thoughts or input. Thanks!
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