1) What problem(s) does this idea solve?

When you already have the URL of a live story, looking up the asset in CMS to edit it by its title is slow and cumbersome. The UUID is already part of the URL but it currently isn't possible to find assets by UUID to edit them on the CMS side of things.

2) Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

To streamline asset lookups in CMS.

If the external ID were available in View Source in Flex, that feature could also be handy for asset lookups in Total CMS.

3) How often would you use this feature?

All the time.

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

The 10-12 folks who are comfortable with URL manipulation.

I’m looking for some clarification on End Dates for banner ads based on some inconsistencies in this example.

So how is it supposed to work:

1. Does the ad server through the entire date of the End Date? Meaning all the way until 11:59 PM on the End Date.

2. Or does it stop serving as soon as the date is reached? Meaning 12:00 AM as soon as the date flips to the End Date?

In the example screenshot, this ad still shows as Enabled (as opposed to Expired) in the main window. However the Performance area under the Other tab lists the ad as expired.

It appears that #1 is the correct behavior since this ad is still racking up impressions, but I just wanted to confirm. If so it looks like there is a simple bug in the Performance area that is reporting the ad as expired a day early.

Thanks.

We’ve got a customer who would like to have an online advertisement rotate between multiple images randomly. It doesn’t look like there is a way to do this currently in the Marketplace / Banner Ads module. Am I missing something simple?

To be clear, we're not looking for an animated ad that rotates in place. We're looking for logic that will pick between two static image ads and randomly display one or the other at page load.

If not we’d like to make a feature request for this functionality. This way we can keep everything as one ad with the same pool of impressions, ad positions and other options.

We’re getting more and more requests for this type of thing now that we’ve stopped allowing Flash ads on the site.

What do y’all think?

I just wanted to make sure everyone on the community site saw this news:

http://venturebeat.com/2016/08/23/google-search-removes-mobile-friendly-label-will-start-negatively-ranking-mobile-interstitials-in-2017/

It looks like ads that do not overlap content (such as a push-down expandable ad) would not be affected, so could be an alternative. Those of you doing popups may want to consider switching to another ad type.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas on how TownNews.com can help with this. Thanks!

The expandable(pencil) ad has several options for auto-expanding. Page curl doesn't have anything like that. Could we get an auto-expand option for page curl?

Our current circulation software can't do monthly recurring transactions. No clue why not. I don't deal with that software. So they've come to me to see if BLOX can handle recurring transactions.

Is it as simple as creating an online subscription service with no URL access? I've looked at our forms manager where people can purchase print subscriptions initially but I didn't see anything to have it auto-renew.

Does Town News have an option that allows certain subscribers to have advertisements automatically removed from the site? I’d be interested in seeing this technology pursued.

This sort of arraignment could could give more of a “member” type feel for the customer relationship instead of simply that of “subscriber.”

For example from a recent E&P article:

The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah has developed a digital membership model that’s tiered: $4.99 a month provides subscribers with full digital access to the site, plus invitations the special events the publisher now hosts regularly. The other option is to pay $9.99 each month for an ad-free reading experience. More than 700 readers have signed on, the vast majority who have opted for digital reading unencumbered by advertising interruption.

Let me know what y’all think.

It would be great to display maps (defined by location information in the Other tab) on all asset types not just article assets. For example, here we have an image collection of a new temple opening in the area. It would be helpful to readers to see the location on the map.

http://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/news/local/photos-hindu-temple-opens-in-lower-makefield/collection_168812f2-50c4-11e6-813b-d38b9c063610.html

We're getting ready to do this. Just looking to see if anyone else has, and what, if any, problems or complications they ran into.

1. What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

A. Having the ability to remove or disable the CAPTCHA from internal forms would decrease from submission time and increase productivity.
Ex. https://www.thehawkeye.com/site/forms/news/content_request/

2. How often would you use this feature?
A. Several times per day.

3. How many people in your organization would use this feature?
Approximately 20 -- any editor, reporter, or photographer.

Currently I don't see any way to allow users to specify which sections to search. For instance, if someone wants to search for an obituary they can't go to our main site search and say "John Smith" and click something to limit the search results to obituaries.

I can send them to a different page like "/search/?c=obituaries" but usage of the internet trains us to look for a "Narrow my results down" area. I shouldn't have to redirect them to another search page.

It'd be nice to have at least the option to search news, sports and obits. Or you could get fancy and allow BLOX managers to map certain sections tags to custom search options. Like "Map local-news, state-news, national-news to News" and "Map obits to "Obituaries."

We're having trouble getting this template to work: http://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/design/blocks/block_library/flex/article_8a16afb8-744b-11e5-8de2-3f674904dbe1.html.

Any one using it?

I feel for the web staff at The Dallas Morning News. During the shootings last night their primary site just couldn’t take the load. (Their beta site remained online for those who knew about it and had the URL.)

It got me wondering, if one of our sites were exposed to the huge traffic surge from a major national event such as this, would it be able to handle the load?

I’m hoping y’all can share what sort of technology and procedures you have in place for a major spike in traffic. Can things scale automatically or does it require some manual intervention by Town News staff? To what level and how quickly can additional resources be thrown at a problem like this if needed?

Looking forward to any insight that can be shared.

You can add inline notes to body copy. This works; text marked as a note does not appear in the body. But when text with an inline note is copied into any other field, the inline note shows up. Underlined. And it's not always visible outside unless you're looking at the HTML.

Feature request: No matter what field it's in, hide text that's marked as a note. (In HTML, <ins class="note">historic</ins> would hide the word historic.)

Hello I was wondering if their was any kind of livestreaming support for townnews websites? something like how news station livestream their news broadcasts? Maybe its already able to do that. If so could you tell me how?