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Today we have completed the last round of a series of end of the year updates to the platform, we hope you are as excited as we are about this latest update!
Over the last few months, our focus has been on adding consistency to the features and capabilities of the platform; before we develop new features that will be released next year. Consistency improves the experience for you and your members. This update process started with our changes to the Member Administration, moving most member management functions to the front end where you spend most of your time.
In our latest round of development we have improved 5 key areas:
Groups
With groups we wanted to deliver more functional, yet versatile features. Thus we have made two exciting new improvements:
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Group Events - Enabling group events from your Manage Settings > Group and Profile Settings page. Your Groups can create their own events. This should come in real handy for better organizing local or regional events.
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Group Topics Element has been replaced with our new Discussion System. The discussion system (More Details Below) delivers the same features to groups as with the main discussions feature. Plus, when members of a group post topics or replies all members of that group will get an email. To get instructions on the transition to this system, check your Administration Announcements page in your website management bar.
Discussions (Brand New Discussion Feature!)
The new discussions feature will phase out using the Topics Element in groups and eventually replace the forums system. The goal with the new discussion feature is to provide an easy to use, yet versatile discussion platform. Some of the features this new system includes:
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Deep category support. This expands upon the existing forums that only allowed for 2 levels of sub categories, by delivering the ability to add an infinite number of sub categories. If you prefer something more simple you can create topics without worrying about or creating categories.
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Nested replies, shows the reply directly under the members post with up to 4 reply sub-levels. We find this method will allow users to follow topics more carefully and allow for sub conversations within a topic.
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Subscribe to topics - When a member posts, the member has the option to be emailed anytime another member replies to the same topic or when using Discussions within a group, group members are automatically notified.
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Lock and Feature Topics - As a moderator or group administrator you can optionally lock or feature topics. This makes it easy to post discussion category rules.
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Approval options, allows you to get a notice when a new topic is posted and approve it before appearing.
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Set the viewing level by category so that only users with the correct access can view and enter a category of discussions.
Downloads (File Sharing)
We have completely re-written the file sharing system to make it easier to understand and more flexible. Some features include:
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Category support! You can now arrange your downloads by category, and you can set if you want your default page view to be a full file list or by category.
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File Type Icons, your files will have an attractive icon telling what type of file is uploaded.
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New options to control if you want comments and ratings enabled for files.
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Uploading is much easier then before with on page file uploading and editing.
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Approval options to approve new additions before the file displays on the website.
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Ability to feature files.
Member Subscriptions
We have enhanced some of the management features to make it easier to update subscription date and cancel subscribers.
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Editing and deleting of subscribers has been added so you can manually change the due date of a subscriber account.
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We have made some minor changes to the subscription signup page to make it a little more customizable.
Categories
We have really made some cool changes here, by giving categories more uses for more systems. Some of the improvements include;
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Most systems now offer a category view option (Wiki, Videos, File Sharing, Groups, Chat, Discussions). The category view changes the listing to show categories first rather then the list of items. This will help deliver more organization to your website.
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Categories now include a description box and will soon offer a who can view this category selection similar to the discussion categories.
In the near future we also plan to allow control over approving content by category. Thus you can have some categories where content is published right away and other categories that require approval of the topic before it is published.
Other improvements:
Email notification option on comment boxes! To improve the conversation on this feature, member can subscribe to all comment boxes, thus when someone replies an email will be dispatched.
We have also preformed a list of bug fixes and other improvements that should increase overall page load time.
We want to thank you for being a part of Spruz! If you have problems or issues related to this update please go to our support request page and open a ticket, this will help us track the issue better and allows us to collect more information about the problem from you.
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