Welcome to the BLOX Digital (formerly TownNews) customer community! Connect with other BLOX Digital customers—and with us—to suggest features, share best practices and ask questions.
Though BLOX Digital 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.
Domain Subscription Services
An example of one of the ideas we’re considering is a partnership with a community college or school district. Our thinking is we could possibly have them pay $X,000 per year and allow all of their employees and students (with an email account on their domain) free access to our website. A perk of employment or enrollment at that institution.
As several recent studies have revealed, millennials are adverse to paying for news, but maybe we can convert them into readers if they can get it for free. It could be a win-win for both us and the institution. They could easily incorporate the newspaper into their teaching if they know all students can access it for free.
One of the stumbling blocks we’re considering is how to disable these free accounts once someone is no longer a student or employee.
What we’d love to see is an option to “re-confirm” accounts created under these Domain services at set periods of time. e.g. Have BLOX send out address confirmation emails every year and then disable (or remove from the service) any accounts that no longer have valid/active email accounts.
I’d love to hear what others think. As it stands this seems to be the real limiting factor in putting these Domain Subscription Services into use.
Ability to review push notifications on NowApp
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).
Scheduling blocks
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.
Vinarice - đại lý gạo tốt nhất Việt Nam
Vinarice là đại lý bán gạo ngon nhất Việt Nam, bao gồm các loại hạt như ST24, ST25, hạt ngọc trời, hạt lứt huyết rồng. Website chính thức tại http://vinarice.com.vn/
Vinarice - đại lý gạo tốt nhất Việt Nam
http://vinarice.com.vn/ chi-tiet / 277 / Dai-ly-ban-gao-Viet-Nam-ngon-nhat
Request: Apply End Date to Polls, but still show results.
We have been voting on this feature for over 3 years, I would assume the would be common functionality. Ending a poll manually or automatically after the ballot has run it's course. I am asking incase I am missing something. Otherwise please consider this a request.
-Jeff
Ability to customize email receipts for marketing.
It's important to remember that a customers trust is at it's highest right after they complete a transaction with a company.
Email receipts are the easiest way into an inbox, yet they’re the most underutilized form of email marketing, especially when working with Town News.
Having the ability to further communicate with our already engaged customers opens up opportunities to cross sell, upsell, offer discount codes on future transactions, promote social media accounts, set up a feedback loop to better understand the process/customer experience and offer logical next steps to customers who have completed a transaction, submitted content or posted a review.
Today's companies want to reach and engage more customers with every contact and e-receipts are an easy way to do so.
FEATURE REQUEST: Printable Page Thumbnails in Page Tracker
I think it would be great if there was an option to print out editions as thumbnails from Page Tracker, where you only see the actual pages on the printout.
Using Chrome's built-in print interface only prints what is visible, and if it's a large edition, there's no way (that I can see) to print it all at once. Chrome also prints the windows on the side, which are not necessary for thumbnails.
AdOwl export for print edition
Hello!
We are going to start using AdOwl as our primary manager for both web and print classifieds,
I understand we will be able to export files for our print edition, but will need to find a developer to write a script so we can import the file into InDesign. (We use InDesign 5.5 on a Mac system).
Does anyone have any experience with this or know of script developers to recommend for such a project?
Thanks in advance! :)
Feature Request: Make the e-Edition half-circle "Pages" button transparent
What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.
The Pages half-circle button is red and non-transparent, so some text on the page is always being hidden behind the button. This problem is especially noticeable once you’ve scrolled to the bottom of the page, are unable to read the text behind the button, and are unable to scroll down any farther to reveal the text. Subscribers have repeatedly expressed frustration to us about this problem. They get frustrated trying to guess to fill in the blanks on every page, and it becomes even more difficult on an ad (such as when it covers a price). The side arrows that aid in moving to the next and previous pages are transparent, so it’s much easier to see the content behind them. It would be great if the Pages half-circle button could also be transparent like those side arrows.
How often would you use this feature?
Our subscribers would use this feature daily.
How many people in your organization would use this feature?
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people would use this feature since our subscribers would also be using it.
Using email blocks without Constant Contact?
Has anyone used Email blocks, on an email URL, to send custom code emails without Constant Contact? E.g. we would set up newsletters on an email URL just like we would now, but send them using a different ESP.
TN Customer Support has told me it's possible with a bit of development. I just wanted to first see if anyone else had tried, and how well it worked out.
Yes, we have many sites that use external systems to scrape our email newsletter pages.
There are two important functions that our integrated solution takes care of for you that may pop up if you use our pages with an external system:
1. There are sometimes JavaScript or tracking information included in the templates (which are not appropriate for emails). Our system removes this automatically, so you may need to ask an external system to do that.
2. Our system creates special pages to help get breaking news out as quickly as possible (by creating a specialized version of the article page for email). It is possible that if you are using an external system to scrape BLOX pages, you may have issues with caching or may need to do cache busting to ensure you're getting an un-cached page.
Let me know if you have more questions about this!
Christine
Default images for article assets without photo
We are using the grid block a lot on our sites -- and using some automatic feeds that pull in content from the TownNews Content Exchange and other sources. Some of these articles do not have images associated with them. It would be great if there was an option to have a "default" image load - rather than just leaving it empty. Similar to when you post an article to Facebook without an image, your default Facebook image loads. This doesn't necessarily have to be specific to grid blocks - but any article blocks. Anyone else like this idea?
New Subscriber Forms
I hate that I have to select each new subscriber form to export it, then again to mark it PROCESSED. Is there a way to do this en mass?
Feature Request: Collection assets should include image thumbnails
When I use a collection to create a photo gallery with multiple image assets, it would be very helpful to see a small thumbnails presentation of each image so I can easily reorder the images if need be. Currently I have to do this blindly, while only seeing the assets title or I have to open each image individually to see what it is. Thumbnails would be much appreciated.
Hi Tom!
I think this is a great idea!
As a temporary measure, however, just making sure you realize that if you hover over the icon you see a mini-popup? Not as user friendly as your idea, but good to know if you didn't. =)
Change by line color
Hello,
Where can change the byline color for all articles posted on my site. It is causing accessibility issues with my website. I am using the flex template
I'm not aware of any page customization or setting that would let you change the styling of the bylines.
I can think of a couple of ways that you can change it. The best way would be to edit the css.utl in your site's templates and create a style for your bylines. This would make the change everywhere on your site for old and new articles, and it would make it easy to change the color at any time in the future.
The other way, would be to edit they bylines in your user accounts to include a <span> tag around the byline with either a class or style= with the color you want. (Example: <span class="purple-font">Maureen Reinert | Web Developer</span> ) The biggest downside to this is it will only apply when you add the byline to a new article. Old ones would still have the bylines without any styling.
Customer support service by UserEcho
