Hi all,

Publisher would like a handful of large, tentpole events to appear at the top of relevant calendar search results, the thought being that more popular events should be displayed above less popular events.

My initial thought on implementing this was to assign those events a higher priority within the calendar, then sort search results by priority.

I tested this by changing the Calendar URL field in the Featured Search block to read "/calendar/?s=priority" (sans quotes) but, running the search, found my high-priority test item third out of four results.

Is the result we're after possible this way? If so, what am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

Brad Bautista

We love the in-line asset styling options. It'd be awesome if there would be a way to set a default style for those within BLOX. For example, every time we pull a sibling asset into body text it'd be great if the styling options were already set to "presentation: summary."

What problem does this solve? Eliminating an extra, sometimes monotonous step, for reporters and editors.

Why do you need this idea? Save some time.

How often would you use this feature? Daily

How many people would this affect in our news org? 100+

Facebook is again offering comment mirroring (where comments made on a story on our Facebook page are supposed to also show up in the FB social plugin at the bottom of the story -- and vice versa).

Turning comment mirroring "on" in the the Facebook plugin is easy. However, our Blox site is not showing the same comments as our Facebook page.

The Facebook app id has not changed, so I'm not sure where to start with this. I entered a ticket, but thought I would check here in case anyone else has had success with it.

Thanks!

TownNews support says it can't help me and referred me to Facebook, but as you all know, that's a black hole. Well, I have mirroring set up correctly as far as I can tell. The comments originating on my FB page and my site page show up in the moderation panel but the site comments from my site don't make it to FB nor vice versa. I think this has something to do with the way TN forms it urls. I notice in my moderation panel a url might be http://www.santafenewmexican.com/tncms/asset/editorial/6f4e907b-a7b2-5f94-acb5-00044cdd1e52/ but a front end user sees http://www.santafenewmexican.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letters-to-the-editor-march/article_6f4e907b-a7b2-5f94-acb5-00044cdd1e52.html for the same asset.

I'm throwing out the Bat signal. Someone, be brilliant, help me out.

—Henry

Starting as early as January 1st, 2018, sites with programmatic advertising inventory that’s less than 70 percent viewable will see a dramatic drop in fill rate and eCPMs. At our December customer webinar, we’ll talk about why viewability matters to digital advertising and what you can do to increase your score and impact your bottom line.

Topics will include:

• How advertiser expectations, the IAB and the Better Ad Standards are affecting the industry.
• How to find out your current viewability score to see where you stand.
• Simple ways to improve and optimize your site’s viewability.
• New BLOX CMS features and enhancements to help boost your viewability score.
• . . . and much more!

Join us on December 14th at 10:30 AM CST to learn more.

Want to take in the webinar on your own time? Register now and we’ll send you a link to the webinar recording once it’s ready.

It makes sense to me is to closely tie adblocker detection with subscription / membership recruitment. 

So - for example - if an adblocker is detected, BLOX should notify the reader and encourage them to whitelist the site AND allow publishers to direct the reader to support our work through a membership / subscription.

Publishers should be able to easily modify the message the reader sees to make it fit within the corporate "voice" of the organization.

Publishers could also be given the option to allow an ad-free experience to readers who become subscribers / members. 

It could work something like this:

Reader: I hate ads and use an ad blocker.

Us: We get it, but if you want to view our content for free, we need you to tolerate the ads. They are the price of admission. But, if you become a member / subscriber, we can offer you and ad-free experience. Sound good?

Reader choice 1: Totally! I want to become a subscriber today!
Us response 1: Great! Here's a link to become a subscriber.

Reader choice 2: No thanks, but I'll white list you so the ads come through.
Us response 2: Thanks! If you ever want to become a subscriber, here's how.

Reader choice 3: No way, you suck. I'm keeping my ad blocker and not paying you a dime. 
Us response 3: We're sorry to hear that. But since we have to pay our bills and the news is not free to report, we'll have to say goodbye for now. 

I would like for the ability to customize the Metering Messages within the Community > Subscription settings, the same location that I can customize the emails to customers that have bought a subscription.  

Otherwise, I am looking to see what file can be edited to changed the Metering Message when a user has 9 out of 10 free stories to view.  Is this CSS or UTL even customizable by the customer?

Hello,

Is there any way to prevent an empty section from creating unwanted space? 

As shown in the screenshots below: masthead-full-top is creating a space in the header that I can't seem to get rid of. Using the inspect element tool in Chrome I can't find CSS to remove the issue, and the section isn't editable itself.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Safari and Apple's mobile devices have what's known as "Reader View." It's a nice, clean way to read articles online. We just launched our FLEX site and I see I can use Reader View but when I try it only shows the headline, in-story ads and tagline. I've checked other FLEX sites and they seem to work fine.

What could be preventing it from working on my site?

Idea: Revise how the 'buy now' button logic interacts with AP photos ... either add more commonly used AP byline phrases or find a way to better auto detect AP photos moving from Merlin to BLOX

1. What problem(s) does this idea solve? AP, from best we can tell, doesn't have a standardized way of formatting bylines. Some say "Name/AP Photo," some say, "Associated Press file photo," some say XXX "via AP." The "buy now" rule for BLOX stipulates the byline must be 'associated press' or 'ap photo' for the button to disable.

2. Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible. We're having too many wire photos go on our site that are for sale that we're not licensed to sell.

3. How often would you use this feature? Daily

4.How many people in your organization would use this feature? The entire company, 200+ people

I am usually very optimistic when we get new updates in Blox.  But I have 3 issues with this format.  

• First, as pictured, the navigation buttons cover up content.  Sure, I figured out how to remove the buttons, but my users won't be able to.   The deprecated white navigation buttons in the red bar were the way to go.  I'd like this to be a Per-Site choice to make.
• Second, under the hamburger menu, there are no descriptions as to what each button does.  
• Third, because of the update, I have a random gray bar at the top that I now have to fix.  
• Forth, I do admire the fact that swiping pages left to right now takes a split second.  Finally, the swiping has been improved.  

Here's my quandary: 

We're trying to make our calendar utilization more robust, in part by making calendar categories more easily navigable and by hiding some of the breadth of the calendar categories from users by curating the presentation of certain categories.

To that end, I'd like to use an autonav block to direct users to specific calendar pages, though not necessarily all the subcategories of /calendar/, and possibly even to pages outside the /calendar/ directory.

So, to wit: One of the requested features was a page where users can see text listings of a large number of upcoming events — say for the next month. If I create an associated URL (/upcoming_events/) in the /calendar/ directory, it will show up in the autonav block configured to call /calendar/, but it will also show up in the user submission form for calendar events on the dashboard. I don't want users to be able to submit an event as an upcoming event, but I do want them to be able to utilize the autonav to navigate to /upcoming_events/. If I create /upcoming_events/ outside the /calendar/ directory, it will not appear in the dashboard submission form, but it will also not appear in the autonav.

Similarly, we would like users to be able to make submissions under certain categories that are not necessarily presented to all users in the autonav. This is because we have a number of calendar categories which are not extensively populated (dance, car shows) but could be presented together in a broader category (say, entertainment). If /dance/ and /car_shows/ exist under /calendar/, they'll appear in the dashboard submission form, but also in the autonav. We do not want this because we'd rather direct users to fewer, more populated pages instead of many sparsely populated pages. I can use a card block to pull in /dance/ and /car_shows/ submissions to an /entertainment/ page, but the /entertainment/ page will not show up in the autonav unless it is also under /calendar/ — and thus it will show up in the dashboard submission form, which we do not want because "Entertainment" is a broad enough designation that it becomes meaningless unless curated on the front end.

If I've got it right, this is because the autonav and the dashboard submission form both call /calendar/. After racking my brain, the most efficient solution I can think of for this is a block that looks and functions (for the user) like the autonav, but which can be configured in the CMS to display only selected directories. Is there a block that does this? Is it possible? Am I missing an obvious answer?

Any insights are appreciated.

Brad Bautista

Citrus County Chronicle

Does anybody have a quick/easy solution to get something like JuxtaposeJS working on a Flex site?

https://juxtapose.knightlab.com/

EDIT: Looks like I might be able to just embed the code though... (and I admit I posted before even trying but figured if somebody already has a system like this that is TownNews friendly it will save me some time).

Would like to learn more about why there's a 5-10 minute delay in newsletters from the moment you click 'send' to the moment they're delivered to subscribers' inboxes. In breaking news situations, that delay puts us well behind our competition. Anything we can do differently?

In breaking news situations, eliminating steps is always a nice thing.

It'd be awesome if BLOX allowed, in users' profiles, to set what section tags their new assets would default to.

For example: I'm Kyle Whitfield. I cover the New Orleans Saints. It'd be great if every asset I created automatically populated new_orleans/sports/saints like it populates my byline and author field.

What problems would this solve? See above

Why do you need this idea? See above

How often would you use this feature? Daily

How many people would this affect in our news org? 100+