2023 September: Product Feature Releases
All the product features released in September of 2023
Featured Feature
Forum
Forum is here! Forum is your community’s message board where members can make async connections and spark discussion and debate through interactive posts and comments. Community members can make posts that include rich text, photos, and gifs and tag topics that are pertinent to your community. Other members can comment on the posts, reply to commenters directly, and even up-vote and celebrate comments with claps.
The Forum populates the most recent and the most popular posts for readers to stay on track with new and hot topics and discussions while being suggested similar posts on topics and tags.
Have full control over post and comment moderation from the dashboard, and assign trusted members to be Forum Moderators to help you moderate the conversation on the front end, and remove any posts or comments that don’t follow the community rules.
Learn all about Forum here.
Other Great Features
Chat UI
You may notice some recent changes and upgrades to the chat UI in events, channels, and messages. Chat messages you send will appear in a colored bubble, versus the gray bubbles of others, and emojis are now easily accessible to add some fun to your messages, questions, and posts.
If a number of chats are sent in succession, they will appear stacked below the user who sent them, versus as unique chats. And, the time lapse since the chat was sent will appear above the message.
You can also directly message other attendees from a meeting room without leaving the video call. To start a private one-on-one conversation with a fellow attendee you simply hover over their name in their profile card, select ‘Message’ and a direct message tab will open for you to start the conversation.
Meeting room UI
Meeting rooms have an updated and redesigned toolbar for attendees. Attendees can opt to hide the chat thread and/or the members list to focus on the conversation, and now have the option to send a number of emojis to reflect their reactions to the discussion.
Event Check-In App Updates
For those using the Gradual check-in app for their in-person events, there have been a few updates to the badges. You can now choose from a variety of badge templates for your on-site name tags; templates that include QR codes, logos, etc. on the printed sticker badges. The QR codes work to scan within the Gradual Go event app, to connect attendees to one another for one-on-one meetings, messaging, and more. If you have pre-printed name tags for the event you can also check folks into the event using the app without printing a physical name tag.
Learn more about the check-in app here.
Subcommunity profile questions
If your subcommunity has the exact same profile questions as the main parent community, the profile questions are linked. If and when the user initially completes their profile in one, their answers to those matching questions will automatically populate in the other community at initial onboarding. This saves them time and energy in answering the same questions twice and can provide consistency for your member data and exports.
If a member wants to change their answers in one of the communities to reflect the group, they can always make changes or edits to their profiles in real-time. Any edits made will not automatically change in the other community beyond the initial onboarding.
Learn more about Subcommunities here, and about profile questions here.
Profile Picture in Member Export
You can now see if members have uploaded a picture or avatar to their profile from the member export list. Profile pictures, while not always mandatory, are great assets to profiles to put faces to names in your community.
Learn more about what information you can find in a community member export here.
Increased Event Permissions
You can now add up to 6 community members as event admins, managers or editors in Event Permissions within the event dashboard. These members help collaborate on the event assigned without access to the full community dashboard, or other event dashboards.
Learn more about Event Permissions and how to grant access to members here.