This seems like a no-brainer, but currently pre-roll ads in video assets only play when the video is viewed in the video asset itself. When a video is embedded in a story, such as a long-form article asset, the pre-roll ad does not play. Example can be found here:

Pre-roll ad plays in video asset: https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/multimedia/jhn_g_videos/video_a0761ba8-46ca-54a1-97e9-6285ea337178.html

Pre-roll ad does not display when video is embedded in a story: https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/valley/feature/article_1561a181-d971-50c0-8ce4-3c2833c348af.html

The value of video assets to potential advertisers is obviously diminished when we cannot show their ad before videos that are embedded in stories. This is an update that needs to be addressed ASAP.

PS — While you're at it, please allow a video asset's Description and Byline fields to display with video assets when embedded in article assets, similar to how they display when image assets are embedded into articles.

Moving to Bootstrap in Flex has been great! 

However, as layout options are increasing, and with new versions of Bootstrap, is there a plan to keep things up-to-date?

It's definitely not urgent now, but wanted to see if there was a plan in order to prevent things getting as stale as "Zen" got by the time Flex rolled around.

At our May customer webinar, Doug Green, product manager for TownNews, will introduce BLOX Offers and show how you can launch a turnkey digital coupon site that drives engagement and thrills advertisers.

Topics will include:

• An in-depth overview of BLOX Offers
• The benefits of coupons in the digital age
• Tips you can use to launch a successful coupon site
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Join us on May 2nd at 10:30 AM CDT.

We've got piano.io pitching our publisher:

a SaaS platform helping media companies convert anonymous web and APP visitors into registered subscribers, combat ad blockers, as well as customize newsletters and user site experience according to their content affinities. Some of our clients include: Chicago Sun-Times, Hearst, Bloomberg, Gatehouse Media, The Economist, and Business Insider.

Anybody using this or something similar with Town News? 

It gets a little confusing at times 😀

1. Is there a way to trigger repeat notifications on the same asset? This is a fairly big deal, as breaking news stories are constantly updated as more details are available. The same story could be sent out 3 or 4 times.

2. Is there a way to define custom Facebook preview text? Currently, it seems Notifier grabs the story lede. Could, perhaps, the ‘Summary’ area on an article asset to define custom preview text? Of course, if no Summary text exists, it could default back to the story lede.

3. I’ve attached two images – one shows a Twitter post via Zapier/Buffer; one shows a Twitter post via Blox Notifier. You’ll notice some repetition with the lead text, as it’s also in the story link preview. Ideally, we would like tweets could be structured more like the Buffer version that is a photo post. That means: Structured as a photo post (<Raw Enclosure @URL> element) Text (<Title> <Raw Link>)

Hey ya'll,

Yesterday, I noticed that a person named xxxx Hairdryer made a User account. Their email address was "xxxx@yeah.net" and their bio, while hilarious: 

"What is going to be open today is a hair dryer, a hair dryer that all the girls love, a hair dryer that initiates innovative revolution, a hair dryer of four hundred pounds, and that’s right – it’s the xxxxx Supersonic hair dryer."

("xxxx" instead of the company name, as to not SEO them here too)

...confirmed to me that this was another account made to boost some SEO off of our User system. Usually these accounts have something listed in the "Home page" field, which as I understand it, is essentially like us having a link to their site from our site (a coveted opportunity, if I'm not mistaken). I think you can see the ones that are doing well for themselves if you parameter your Analytics to /user pages. Sometimes these are easy to spot at a glance when looking at your Users, as many are pretty foreign sounding names, or email accounts like @robot-mail.com but sometimes are names like Dallas Moore, and you don't realize until you open their bio and see whatever bogus link / info they've got. Calendar spammers typically leave their bios blank and instead, try to submit events for medical conferences in Dubai or Spain with a link in the website field.

The reason I'm worried about these (they are easy / entertaining enough to ban manually, but that's not ideal ) is that they are auto-opting into my Email Reach as well, effectively messing up my Open / Bounce rates. My intern is "bot-hunting" this stuff right now, but I could see there being more problems in the future.

I'm wondering how these accounts are getting past the email verification step? Also, kind of related - it sucks that the email verification goes to so many folks' spam folder. I probably tell three people to check it a week.

What does everyone else do to combat this stuff?

You know on any given day that I spend using blox (or nep for that matter) I run into at lease one instance where my life would be easier if I could specify "Not" for a search option.
For example show me everything that's not wire... show me everything that's not sports... show me everything except breaking or developing. 

I understand your UI design goal is to make it so easy a trained monkey can do it but how hard would it be to modify check boxes... 
Empty (not selected)
Click - Checked (selected)

Click - Red X (search excludes this item)

Hello. I set up group access rules that gives users the ability to only create and modify editorial assets within a certain section. Upon testing this, I discovered that the access restrictions do not apply if the user switches to the mobile interface. That means the user could modify as well delete any article no matter what section. Is there a way to make the group access rules apply to the mobile interface? I love the mobile interface -- very clean and easy to use -- and was going to recommend it to my writers. But I'm not so sure I want to give them across the board access.

The Guardian is adding a year on their social share images, which is a genius idea.

We've seen several articles that are years old get lots of traffic through social shares that don't indicate that the article is old. Generally, it's not an issue (one that comes up every summer is a guy who died about 4 years ago from a snake bite), but one that resurfaced was about a girl who reported an attempted kidnapping, and people were sharing it like it was new. To the point the PD had to post to Facebook about the issue (they were getting calls). 

Here's why they're doing it: https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-fake-news-bid-timestamps-social-sharing/

Here's how they're doing it (github): https://github.com/guardian/frontend/pull/21306

I'm going to talk to internal developers about this, but it would be something I'd hope Town News could look at implementing as well. 

I know this has been asked in a similar post a couple of years ago, but ....

We just switched to Blox commenting from Facebook. A lot of commenters immediately complained they didn't have the ability to edit their own comments. Most other major commenting platforms have the ability for users to edit their own comments.

Do you all think this would a useful change for TownNews to make?

Thanks,

Thomas

article interaction and scrolling

Hi:

There's been some discussion at Collegian about the impact of article length with user behavior. A question of how far do they go.

When we were on the Blox ad server I could get some idea about user behavior on articles by looking at ad stats by position. I recently ran a sponsorship ad through Google Ad Manager for a couple of days which gave me some additional information. At least for the bottom of article utility section.

My first thought was to add some pixel image tracking at the top, middle and bottom article utility sections, but we don't see stats on images in Google analytics.

So now I'm thinking of creating a new ad size in GAM of 300x1 and create sponsorship ads for the top, middle and bottom.

I would then be able to get at least 'the average' ratio of top to middle to bottom of article views.

Is this the wrong thinking on obtaining these metrics? Is there a better approach?

I noticed the post / news release of Telemundo Atlanta using Blox. (Here is the site)

Is there any resource on using different language(s), etc. in Blox? I could not find anything and always assumed it was English-only.