I’m looking for help sorting out block sorting rules…

We can use the standard “ASSET | Main Index | Dynamic Section & Children” block for the example here, but it applies to all asset blocks equally.

The problem we’re trying to fix is that when we update an existing article asset and check the “This update is important” box it doesn’t float the story to the top of the block. It remains buried under articles with more recent Start Times.

We should be able to fix this with the block sorting rules but have run into a wrinkle. It seems like a bug to me, but might be intended behavior.

The current sorting of our blocks is as follows:
Start date (descending)
Display priority (highest first)
Start date/time (newest first)

What I assumed would get the behavior we are after is:
Update time (newest first)
Start date/time (newest first)
Display priority (highest first)

However it appears that the “Update time” being referenced in the sort logic is the internal “Last modify time” and not the public “Updated:” time. This means that if we fix a small typo in a story it would bump the article to the top of the list even though nothing of substance was really changed.

The fix would appear to be making the “Update time” sort rule reference the “This update is important” checkbox and public display time whenever a site has the “Manually declare important updates” option enabled. The current behavior would be fine for sites without the “Manually declare important updates” option since then every internal edit results a change in the Updated: time displayed on the public site.

We basically want our block sorting to be based on the public “Posted: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 8:13 pm | Updated: 10:09 am, Thu Apr 23, 2015” text that readers see displayed on an asset.

Please let me know if I need to elaborate more or explain in more detail.

We're using the Infinity Scroll feature now that it supports the sidebar. We also like the fact that we can put ads in this section as well. But this is where we're seeing some issues from a user enjoyment/experience standpoint.

Currently, it injects an ad every 2 headlines. This results in the user being bombarded with ads, sometimes the same one over and over again (if only one ad in the position.) As much as we like visitors seeing ads, too many and they will turn adblock on and we lose out.

Solution: Allow us to change the amount of headlines between ads. This is the same as the option for when to show ads in a gallery setting. We can set it to show every 3 headlines, 5 headlines, 10 headlines, or any whole integer that is put in on the back-end.

Other thoughts: The ability to choose between different ad sizes would be nice as well. Having a "leaderboard" style ad between headlines would also give it a nice look and not take up a lot of space.

I would like to see in the syndication panel if a story asset has been locked at a specific time before I add the story using the curated news. It's frustrating to add a story and then find that they have the time locked and it won't allow me to adapt it to my needs.

We have a block on the homepage and every section that pulls in a feed of headlines from new stories as they are posted. If a story is updated, reporters and editors can manually (based on our site settings) mark the update as "important." On the article, this shows the original publish time and when the story was updated. It's great.

But the "important" update doesn't recirculate the story through the "latest stories" column. I can pull stories by date and time (done) and by "update" time ... but that applies to any update to the story. Fixing a typo isn't "important." Adding three new paragraphs to a breaking news story is. So I'm interested in a sort rule that would pick up "important" update times.

1. What problem(s) does this idea solve? See above.

2. Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible. Greater promotion of breaking news and updating stories. Otherwise, reporters change the start time of the story. That works, but isn't really a best practice.

3. How often would you use this feature? Daily. Hourly. Every time an important update is made.

4. How many people in your organization would use this feature? All of them. OK, all of the reporters (about 35) and digital staff (about 5) and section editors (about 7) and senior editors (3). So at least 50 people.

We created a custom block to display the front page of a print article, which we'd like to redirect to a different dedicated site. How do we create the hyperlink, so that the image is clickable??

Premise: Advertisers love it when they are featured or mentioned in a business article. LOVE IT.

Problem: Those same advertisers hate it when their competitors' ads appear in or near an article they are in (see above). HATE IT.

Solution: Enable exclusionary keyword targeting that we can apply to ads for competing businesses.

Example: If the words "Century 21" appear in a piece of content, then do not serve ads for "Re/Max". In this case, we would apply the exclusion target on the Re/Max ad. The reverse would be applied to the Century 21 ad.

It would be great if you could integrate Instagram the way that you have integrated Twitter. Right now, we are using HTML assets for our Instagram embeds because pasting the Instragram embed code into the article body often results in the Instagram caption not showing up.

But even if that weren't the case, your Twitter integration has been great and has made embedding tweets super easy. We'd love to see more of these sorts of integrations.

I see in the help site that to auto bind you have to set verification to email. The problem is that our circulation system doesn't have emails for all customers. We do have phone numbers for all customers though. Is there any way to allow auto bind based on phone numbers?

We're running into problems when someone's subscription lapses and their online does too. Then they have to go back in and sign up AGAIN. That's a cumbersome process and not one that people expect to have to make.

We use MyCapture for photo purchasing and would like to be able to use it to allow readers to buy e-edition PDF prints as well. However, right now our TownNews implementation isn't sending over our files to MyCapture marked as PDF. We need to be able to include ispdf=1 on the querystring in the buy link.

Has anyone else had this issue?

Hello,

If this type of post is not allowed, please delete.

We are a small, locally owned newspaper in Huntington, W.Va. Our daily circulation is around 26,000, and Sunday circulation is about 28,000.

We often get requests to license our photos for commercial use, such as books. I have been tasked to research what other newspapers charge for such things.

Does anyone have a rate structure they could share?

Thanks!

Andrea

I see that there is a meta itemprop tag for "datePublished and "dateCreated", we would like the "dateUpdated" tag for purposes of articles being rescraped.

I made the mistake of seeing how 16:9 ratio looks on a Showcase block. When I switched to 1:1 thinking it would revert it the image was still cropped. I tried to create a completely new Showcase block and it still didn't give me the full image. I had to find another Showcase that still had "Original" selected and copy it.

So there seems to be some sort of bug with 1:1 and "Original." I'm assuming they're the same thing but 1:1 doesn't behave like "Original" does.

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It would be great if readers could use the left/right arrow keys on their keyboard to scroll through photo gallery collections, instead of having to use their mouse and click on the < > arrows. I'd even like to see this enabled on article assets that have multiple photos displayed at the top.

This is a feature that is enabled on so many websites that I personally get annoyed when I come across one, like our own, where it isn't.

What do y'all think?

EDIT: Here is a good example, the photos are about halfway down the page.

The arrow keys work to move through the photos both as they are embeded in the article and also if you use the gallery or thumbnail view option to make them larger.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/houston-police-officers-shot-update-mayor-10968605.php

I like to see how many subscribers we have at any given moment. This is especially good at the end of the month. However, I just realized that subscriptions marked as "Disabled" still show up as "Service exists." This doesn't make any sense. If it's disabled it can't exist.

So all this time I've been looking at the number and it's inflated. Now I realize all the disabled subscriptions aren't real and I'm looking at 100 fewer subscribers than what I thought.

And for whatever reason since most of these are CSV service subscriptions that are no longer on the CSV(thus being disabled) I can't give them fake expirations to get them to switch to "Expired."