I’m looking for some examples of nicely done Paywall screens. You know, the one that comes up below the two preview paragraphs when a non-subscriber hits the wall.

We’ve realized that our standard one is pretty boring and we’d like to spice it up.

One example that we like is at the Lufkin Daily News, nice use of colors and logos.

The page you get taken to after clicking “View Offers” is nice as well.

So what about y’all, has anybody else spiced up their Paywall? I’d love to see some examples.

Thanks!

It would be helpful if a tab could be added to the "View Subscription" window that opens when an individual subcriber's name is double-clicked.

Purpose would be to allow text entry of customer service notes when actions were taken that are connected to the subscriber that are not necessarily "recorded" in BLOX.

Could act as a very simple integrated CRM that ties right to subscriber account. Could literally begin with just a window where notes could be added.

Example: CSR takes a phone call with a question from customer, solves problem. Notes date, problem, time.

Example: New subscriber. CSR sends thank you card and gift to subscriber.

Example: Subscriber calls multiple times with one problem or another, Diff people answering phone. Allows for info on previous interactions to be universally avail. "I see you called last week..."

Submitted this as a ticket but wondering if this is just me being dense?

Are y'all have luck w/ social embeds showing in FB Instant articles? Facebook has some documentation on how to do it. But I **think** it's something TownNews would have to implement. But maybe I'm wrong?

Hi there - I would REALLY love to be able to set as "default" some boxes to be automatically checked under Flags and Sections. Being able to have these as defaults would save us SO much time and help with consistency. Would love some help!

It would be great to see a "folder" structure for Blocks in the Design section where we can place our content/html blocks into so we can orginize better. Either through a drag/drop feature, or in the block itself ("Place in folder"). If no folder, then it would be on the root of the list, with preference of folders showing up first. Folders could be opened and closed.

Often there are lots of different blocks made, even if we try and keep standard and mulit-page blocks. We try and keep keywords and a standard naming conventions, but often miss or don't see blocks even when using the search function.

e.g.

News Folder

• Breaking News Block
• World Events Block
• Local News
• etc...

Advertising Folder

• Rates info block
• Ad sizing and location block
• Random HTML blocks
• etc...

Here's a quick mockup to show further what I mean.

We just transitioned to Flex yesterday and one of the problems we've run into is with HTML ads.

When clicked, they are opening the resulting link right there inside the small 300x250 pixel ad box, instead of opening the link in a new tab/window (which is what happens with all other ad types and for HTML ads on Zen).

I'm being told this is intended behavior and nothing can be done on Town News' side of things.

How are y'all getting around this? We've got a major advertiser pretty upset with us right now. I suggested the workaround of them adding the target="_blank" on their side but of course they balked since they've got the same HTML ad tags running across numerous sites and this isn't a problem anywhere else.

Help!

Join us on February 2nd @ 10:30 AM CST

What's new in BLOX CMS!

At our February customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management at TownNews.com, will highlight the exciting new features in this latest major release of BLOX CMS.

We'll cover:

• An exciting new Twitter search panel which helps reporters and editors easily find and incorporate tweets into articles.
• Enabling HTTPs to enhance your site's security, search engine optimization and speed.
• A sneak peak into new Google Tag Manager tools and integrations.
• . . . and more!

So, Blox CMS is awesome. Our site gets visited and content is easy to add. Our city loves the site. Our sales people have no problem selling the site. But THEN...

...its time for billing. When we do our billing for our OTHER products, we press a button and the invoices, affidavits and proof of performance pop out of the computer. Brilliant!

When we do billing for Blox CMS, it's a long and tired slog through the mud finding each individual ad, printing the report, looking for the next, printing a report... etc, then we capture a picture of each ad on screen and print it out individually as well. Then match them up.

Its tedious, its time consuming, it makes my bookkeeper grumpy!

I don't like having a grumpy bookkeeper.

If anyone has a suggestion, I'm listening. I'm willing to pay money for this.

If such a product does not exist, I would ask and implore for one to be invented. Again, I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to solve the problem. Make it easy for us!

Thanks all!

Bruce McKirdy

Hi all,

We have a unique situation at the Columbia Missourian which is that we have students cycle in and out of our newsroom three times a year (gotta love a teaching newspaper). We're trying to get better with story metadata, specifically to help out our archives (in Merlin) to be more searchable.

I'm wondering if anyone has implemented any sort of metadata/tag list suggestion function in their systems (note, I'm talking about something different than the suggestions from Open Calais or the Content Exchange) -- along the lines of suggested metadata that would be internal to a newsroom. e.g. "Columbia police department" or, say, the mayor's or a public official's name. The idea would be to provide a list of frequently used local tags to help newbies know what to add to stories.

It's contest season, and we had several "breaking" news articles that we want to present. We want to show how we covered the story incrementally. A story about a police shooting has 132 revisions, but only the last 20 show up. Is there a way to capture and view those earlier revisions?

We have entered a feature request to improve the printout of images in e-editions, so the images can be scaled to fit on one page.

Better printing of graphics (such as crossword puzzles) for our customers.

We have several customers who like to print the crossword puzzle from the e-edition each day and solve the puzzle. Right now, the image prints out across 3 or 4 pages -- even when you try to scale it. Also, when a user prints a story from the e-edition, he has no control over the size of the printout.

3) How often would you use this feature?

Readers would use it daily.

4) How many people in your organization would use this feature?

I intend to send this as a ticket too, but we've discovered that when adding a keyword to an asset that there is a bug that creates a new blank keyword field below the keyword that you've added. Blox automatically saves all keywords typed into these fields, so I discovered even the blank ones are automatically saved. Yesterday, I cleaned out HUNDREDS of blank keywords out of our keyword list in the admin. I wanted to mention it for anyone else noticing that the keyword auto-dropdown isn't working quite right.

When a story is updated and you choose to declare it an "important update" so the story says "updated" with the date and time the story was updated, the original publication date no longer shows in Flex. In Zen we were used to the original publication date remaining on the page and the updated date/time showing up next to it.

For example: Published: March 26 Updated: March 27

Now it just says: Updated: March 27

You have no idea when it was published!

Please bring back this feature! Without the original publication date showing, it is not clear to readers when the story was published.

Hello!

We currently host our own online store for things we sell such as books and page reprints.

I just noticed Blox has that ability through forms using PayPal and others. I would love to see some examples of how other newspapers have used forms to sell products.

Please share some links. :)

Thanks!