Release Notes - 23rd March 2010
A major release for improved admin management of forum posts and shop reviews. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.
Improved admin management of forums and shop item reviews
We've made some major changes to the way that forum posts, document feedback and shop item reviews are managed in the Web Office in order to give administrators powerful control over what can be posted. This allows you to facilitate visitor interaction without the worry of malicious or abusive comments.
Up until now, all forum posts (other than those considered to be spam) appeared on your site immediately, and were only removed if another visitor flagged them as abusive (at which point an administrator had to intervene, in order either to reinstate the comment, or to delete it).
We have now added fine-grained controls which allow you to specify exactly which comments should be automatically published and which need an administrator's approval.
Moderation queue
Each group now has a moderation queue on the "Forums" tab, showing all the forum posts which need the attention of an administrator and, analogously, a similar queue appears on the "Reviews" tab for shop items. Here, you can choose to Approve, Edit or Delete the comment in question.
Forums or shop sections which have items in the moderation queue awaiting attention will be highlighted in the Group Tree with a red exclamation mark  .
You may find that your site has several exclaimation marks next to groups, particularly if it's an older site thats had many posts in the past. This is because these posts didn't meet the new security settings on the forum, when its security was modified in the past, and so the posts were hidden. We've now made these posts available again to forum moderators so you can choose to either reinstate them, or delete them permanently.
Watch a demonstration of this new functionality.
Security settings
In common with the rest of Insight, the comment security settings operate on a powerful inheritance model, so that you can set site-wide defaults, which you can then override as necessary for specific forums, shop sections or shop items.
You'll find a task on the bottom of each "Forums" or "Reviews" tab, allowing you to change security settings for both the reading and writing of comments. Here you can choose either to let this forum, document, section or item inherits its comment settings, or to override them.
If you want to override settings, you have a choice of three "presets" to define who can read or write:
- Anyone
- Only site members
- Only members of the current group
If you wish, you can set up even more detailed rules on how comments should be treated, by choosing the "Use custom rules" option. Here you can combine any number of rules on whose comments should be automatically accepted or rejected - based on their group membership, whether they have purchased the shop item in question and based on the contents of the comment itself.
The site-wide defaults are set in the "Settings" area by choosing the "Comment Security" page from under "General", and the shop-wide defaults are set on the "Comment Security" page under "E-Commerce".
Document feedback
For documents that have the "Allow Feedback" option selected, any feedback to these documents was previously posted into a topic in an automatically created forum.
We have now added a tab in document editor where these feedback comments will now be listed, along with the comment security settings for the document.
Let us know what you think!
We'd love to hear your comments - good or bad - on our latest release, so leave a comment below and let us know what you think!
Other enhancements and bug fixes
- As promised, following our recent release to improve Summer Time / Daylight Savings support, we have re-organised the dropdown list for selecting your timezone on the Technical page in the Settings area, to make it easier to find your timezone.
- Fixed an issue with the country phone code being set incorrectly when importing from a csv file.
Looking ahead....
In the months ahead, we have some exciting new features coming, which are already nearing completion. Watch this space for details of:
- Administrator notifications - Allowing you to configure email notifications and assignable jobs for a whole range of actions occurring on your site, such as applications to join, form responses, photos needing approval, payment group registrations and edits.
- Redesigned rota interface - We know that for many of you, Insight's rota-building functionality is central, but it's one of the oldest parts of the system. We're blowing off the dust and creating an interface fit for the 21st century with drag-and-drop and many of the features you've been asking for.
- New servers - For our UK-based sites, we have brand new state-of-the-art servers in a new data centre which will bring a significant performance improvement and plenty of scope for us to continue to grow the system. We will begin the process of moving sites across to the new servers in the course of the next month - we'll keep you posted on this in case of any downtime, or action needed on your part.
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