Hi Everyone! This month, we have some great new feature enhancements around Challenges and Town Halls, as well as the highly anticipated Markdown feature. Users will be ecstatic to add a bit of emphasis and style to their text! In addition, we have an importance announcement around Internet Explorer browser support. Check it out below!
1. Markdown
We are excited to announce that Markdown will now be supported for all Socialcast messages! This feature/language gives you the ability to add simple text formatting to message posts and comments, which makes list-lovers and coders alike, jumping for joy.
To help facilitate usage of this feature, we have added a quick-style UI menu that will appear as you edit your text. Simply highlight the text you are composing and click on one of the quick style options including: bold, italics, or hyperlink. This will add the needed markdown characters around the selected text. The style will only be applied once you post your message.
For simple instructions on how to format your text, click the question mark (“?”) from the quick style menu. The following Markdown Help dialog will appear:
You can also refer to the following GitHub Markdown Basics cheat sheet for more formatting options and examples.
For those of you that agree that things are better expressed with Emojis, we now also auto-suggest them as you’re drafting a message. Simply start typing the emoji code beginning with a colon ‘:’ and a list of suggested emojis will appear (here is a handy Emoji cheat sheet if you don’t yet know them by name).
Known Limitation for Phase 1
- Support for markdown rendering in mobile apps will be available in our next mobile release
- Tasklist items are not supported
- Inline images are not supported
2. Town Hall Export
After popular demand, we now allow community admins & Town Hall admins to export all the questions and answers from their Town Halls. Simply navigate to an active Town Hall > Settings > click on ‘Export Town Hall as CSV’.
The CSV export will be formatted so that each question will be represented in one row. The additional columns for each row will include:
- Question – the question that is being asked
- User – the name of the member asking the question
- Date – the date/time stamp of the question
- Likes – the number of likes the question has received
- *Answer_1 – this will include the answer presented for the question
- *Answer_1_UserName – the name of the user who answered the question
- *Answer_1_UserRole – the role of the user who answered the question
- *Answer_1_Date – the date/time stamp of the first answer
- *Answer_1_Likes – the number of likes the first answer has received
* The block will repeat for all the answers a given question has received
** The CSV export will not include any Town Hall polls or corresponding comments at this time
3. Challenge Export now includes State Changes
We continue to see a spike in usage of our Challenges feature. Many Challenge moderators have asked to know more information about changes in states (accepted, archived, etc) for the ideas posted in a particular Challenge. When Challenge admins now click on Settings > ‘Export Challenge as CSV’, they will see the following new columns:
- Last State – this will show the previous state of the idea
- State Changed At – this will show you a date / time stamp of when the last state has changed for this idea
- State – this will show the most recent state of the idea
4. Email Notifications for New Challenges Ideas
We now send an email notification to all Challenge moderators when someone creates an idea in their Challenge. The email includes information such as who posted the idea and links back to the idea. To adjust these notifications settings, go to your individual account Settings > Notification Settings > and turn ‘Email me when someone posts to a new idea to challenge I moderate’ on for those desired Challenges.
5. Add Moderators to Company Challenges
Company-wide Challenges can only be created by community admins and Challenge admins, but often times, they’ll need help running the show. With our latest enhancements, company-wide Challenge admins/moderators can now grant moderator privileges to a regular member of the Challenge. Navigate to the members list at the top right corner of the page > click the gear settings next to the user > select ‘Make Moderator’.
6. Topics Support in Dynamic Reach Extensions
As part of our continued work on Topics, we have enabled our Reach plugins to allow for the addition of Topics to the Dynamic Reach extension.
7. White-Labeling Enhancement
Socialcast now allows community admins to further white-label their community by giving the option to remove the “Powered by Socialcast” text from the footer of the community page. As an admin, navigate to Admin Settings > Setup > Settings > click ‘Show Powered By Socialcast Text’.
Note: this option will only be available for Premium Socialcast communities.
*Please note that On-Premise clients will receive these features in a future release.
BROWSER UPDATE: Internet Explorer 7 and 8 no longer supported
Socialcast has ended support for Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8 as of the end of this month, June 30, 2015. If you continue to use these browsers, the experience will degrade over time as new features are released, and bugs or performance issues related to these browsers will not be investigated by our Support team.
We came to this difficult decision after evaluating our usage data and noticing that our customers are trending towards newer browsers. It’s important to us that we give our users the best experience possible and focus on areas that will drive more value. Furthermore, Socialcast has a high standard when it comes to preserving the integrity of your data. Our customers trust us to provide a private and secure environment, but these older browser versions are becoming less secure and have had multiple security vulnerabilities over the years. Microsoft has also recently amended their support policy and announced its plans to end support for IE7 and IE8, which can be found here.
For the most up to date information on our supported browsers and mobile devices, please visit this page here: http://developers.socialcast.com/admin/supported-browsers-and-mobile-devices/