Hi community people!

Earlier today we had our big BLOX Core update! If you missed the release notes, they are here.

I've noticed a few media sites start using the User Reactions feature. Are any of you thinking of enabling it? Maybe on just a specific section? I'm interested in hearing your reactions or ways to improve it.

Hey folks, I submitted an idea to Town News, and they said I should post it here to see if this development idea would help others, too. Anything else think this would be helpful?

The idea is basically to add a few new controls — either on the section level or on specific photo types — to allow editors to turn off the "buy now" button on all mugs, all crime stories, or other examples like that.

Town News asked me to answer these questions:

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

A: There are dozens of photos used daily on our website that we do not want to sell. Many of these get automated tags that remove the "buy now" button (AP photos, for instance), and that's great. But still a large number of photos get manually tagged with #nosale to keep that button hidden. It would be very helpful to have more specific, targeted and automated ways to blacklist some photos from being sold. For instance, we NEVER want to sell a photo of a criminal who just committed some heinous crime. And a huge number of the mugs we run on our website are handouts that we can't sell, and even the ones that are ours are not any real source of revenue. My proposal would be that we have some ability to turn on/off the "Buy now" button for specific photo types (like all mugs) or sections (so you could turn off sales for all photos attached to stories categorized as crime, for example).

How often would you use this feature?

A: This would be used daily. The automated button removal would impact dozens of stories and several dozen photos each day.

How many people in your organization would use this feature?

A: All online editors would gain from this function, and reporters would no longer have to alert online staff to photos that got missed during the tedious and error-prone manual #nosale application process. Dozens of employees would be impacted.

I know the system is set up to restrict photo purchasing through MyCapture to anything with the keyword #nosale. But I'd say about half the time, maybe a little less, the reporters/editors forget to add the keyword. What they almost always add is "Provided" or "Provided photo" in the byline field because typically they're more concerned with making it look good for print.

So if there's a way to do this please let me know. But if not, this would be a really handy feature.

Please add an autosave feature. I'm having to redo tons of work when something stupid/unexpected happens and my Blox window closes before I saved. Working in another text editor that has autosave isn't a great solution because it usually means I have to fix every paragraph break in the story once I've cut and pasted it into blox, on top of just adding even more complication to my workflow.

So now you cannot enter the email address and password at the same time.  The creates an issue with the web browser auto-populating the credentials, actually hindering workflow.  And of course, creating an headache for I.T...again.  

We'd like to submit a request for magazine style "flip book" e-Editions, similar to Issuu with double-truck views:

https://issuu.com/galvnews/docs/coast_monthly_april_2017

Right now we are having to host these off-site to have this magazine view that readers like.

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

It allows for magazines and other special sections that aren't newspapers to be hosted in the native BLOX e-Edition.

2) How often would you use this feature?

At least monthly.

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

Everyone, including all readers.

Promo Designer works well if you're using an image, or if you have a written offer of some sort. Taking it one step further, how hard would it be to include the use of video assets in Promo Designer?  I would imagine we could increase our video traffic if we were able to create a pop-up that displays a chosen set of video assets either on load or when exit intent is exhibited. Video assets would be chosen from a Block, a Search or an RSS feed.   how hard would that be to build out?

Is TN familiar w/ the ability, through Google Chrome, to send a reader notifications if they opt-in? Been seeing this a little more frequently among news sites. Just curious.

As we get more and more readers moved from print subscriptions to digital-only subscriptions, we've had several older readers ask how they can easily print the crosswords, jumbles and Sudoku puzzles from the e-edition.

My request is for a simply clipping tool to make it easier to print a portion of the e-edition, similar to the print/save tool used by Newspapers.com. It works quite effortlessly and is user-friendly, even for readers who lack tech skills.

We'd like the ability to allow users to review push notifications that have been sent to their devices. Currently, a user needs to rely on their device to be able to see any alerts they may have received and not acknowledged. But Android and iOS devices typically only give you one chance to review alerts (notifications), then they are removed.

It would be great to have a feature within the NowApp that would allow users to review any push notifications that they may have missed (while the device was off, while it was in DO NOT DISTURB, etc).

I think a nice feature would be a custom option within a block to schedule it for certain times.

We currently have a few blocks that I only have show up on a single day of the week so I manually disable it when we don't need it.  Having something with the block options itself where I could schedule it to enable and disable itself would be great.