Though TownNews.com representatives often participate in discussions, this is not a customer service site. For immediate help, call 800-293-9576 or submit a support request via our online ticketing system.
Option for page curl to auto-expand
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?
Is BLOX set up to handle monthly recurring PRINT subscriptions?
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.
Ad-Free Subscriptions
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.
display maps on all asset types
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.
Has anyone switched their entire site over to SSL yet?
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.
Remove/disable the CAPTCHA on a form
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.
FLEX needs more detailed front-end search options - specifically section searching
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."
Slideshow: headlines carousel (Flex only) ... are you using it?
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?
Town News ability to handle major traffic surge
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.
Feature request: Inline notes outside of body copy
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.)
Livestreaming?
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?
Would anyone else like to see an engagement button to show an article's full text?
On some news sites out there, we're seeing an engagement tactic where only a couple of paragraphs of the story are presented, along with a button to reveal the rest of the text. I assume that button then sends an analytics event that can be used to track user engagement, that is, how many people are interested in reading beyond the first couple paragraphs.
I'd personally love to see this as an item added to the upcoming content discovery/engagement URL custom properties.
Bug in the Blox Go mobile admin and bug during batch edit
This creates a problem for ad serving (revenue) that works by section tag.
Need "important update" option to save for assets other than just articles
It would be beneficial to have the "important update" save work on assets other than just articles. This could be useful for table and html assets. For example, we publish data or stats as tables. In some cases we replace the table with updated information and it would be helpful or the reader to know that new information is indeed available in the table.
DFP Unfilled Impressions Flex
Since we launched Flex, we have been seeing high volume of unfilled impressions. I am sure it is because of the class hidden-xs etc, hiding the ad on a small device and not removing it. Anyway to fix this? I am attempting to switch the class names to use visible-sm etc to see if that makes a difference.
Customer support service by UserEcho