Community Platform 23.3 Release Update

Thanks for the update, Chris! Appreciate the work.

Would also like you to consider the option to add custom profile information. 

Thanks!

@Hannah_Wiginton thanks for your comment, would love to understand more of what you are looking for from a custom profile addition. Can you share more details on the custom components you'd like to see on the profile? 

@ChrisShernaman, thank you for the mention and the list of improvements. 

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your informative post but I'd like to clarify one point about changing usernames you remarked on.

You stated that you have to attained (I assume) a minimum rank of 3-Contributor to be allowed to change your name.

My rank is higher at 5-Automation Enthusiast but I still do not have the ability to change my name.

Can you please help me out her it's driving me crazy 😉

Post to my previously asked question about this very issue.

https://community.airtable.com/t5/other-questions/how-to-change-your-airtable-community-username-not-your-airtable/m-p/146900

Current bugs I’ve found, is that when searching for unanswered threads, the forums don’t seem to respond to that query request and keep on showing all threads, regardless if they have answers, solutions or no answers. 

This is a big problem, for without the ability for those wanting to help to easily find people that need help, the community becomes less reliable and responsive as awhole. 

I enjoy writing Scripts for Scripting Extension and Automation Scripts, and don’t mind helping those with questions on these when I have the time. But if I’m constantly fighting the forums platform to get to those users, then that’s less user issues addressed.

Hi @DavidPonder., thank you for flagging this! I noticed you joined the Community right before we created and deployed the formula for the Contributor rank, this has been corrected. You can now change your username. My Settings > Personal > Username

Please reach out to me directly if you continue to experience this issue, I am more than happy to help! 😊

Hey @ChrisShernaman - There used to be an About Me section where you could provide at least a little more background on who we are and how we're using Airtable. It helps provide insight into who's answering questions and what they do. Would like to see this again! Thanks.

Hi @Karlstens, the best way to find unanswered/unsolved threads in Search is by running an empty search and following the below 5 steps:

1. Select the Community tab at the top
2. Sort By Created Date
3. Under Sources filter select Discussion
4. Under Solution filter select Unsolved
5. Under Created Date filter you can choose the Created Date.

With this search criteria, you won't find just unanswered posts, you'll also find posts with replies but there has been no solution.

Once created you can save this search as a Bookmark (name it) and revisit this search by navigating to My Settings > Subscriptions & Notifications > My Bookmarks. You can also distinguish which posts you've reviewed by the color of the post title (Purple means you've read the post).

I hope this helps, if you run into any issues please reach out to me directly. 

Thank you,

Chris

Hi @Hannah_Wiginton,

You can set up your personal information (About Me) section today by clicking on your profile avatar at the top right of the page

Select My Settings > Personal > Personal Information. 

Once you've inputted all the information you'd like to share with other members of the community, click Save. The About section will be located in a component on the right side of your profile page.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.

Thanks,

Chris

@ChrisShernaman Amongst my top 25 biggest problems with this community forum, perhaps the biggest one is that we are unable to subscribe to just a category (such as "Announcements" or "Job Board") and receive email notifications of new posts that are created in that category.

Oh sure, it "seems" to give us the ability to subscribe to "Announcements" or "Job Board", but then we get an email notification of every single comment/reply in every single thread that was ever posted in that entire category — including old threads, too!

This is totally undesirable behavior, because what this means is that we are bombarded with dozens or hundreds of emails every single day. This is especially ludicrous if we've never even participated in any of those threads!

What we need is exactly what the old community forum offered, which is that if we subscribe to a category, we simply want to receive emails of NEW POSTS in that category... not email notifications of every single comment that was ever made as a reply to any post in that entire category.

If we personally reply with our own comment in a thread, then MAYBE we might want email notifications of every single email in that entire thread, but even then, usually not.

Another annoyance that I'm hoping can be addressed, is the constant need to sign-in multiple times a day to the community.

Can the active session please be extended until the user logs out manually?

Hi @ScottWorld,

Thank you for your feedback. You can subscribe to a community board and receive email notifications only for new posts by configuring your notification settings.

Follow these steps below to turn on notifications for new posts only:

1. Click on your profile avatar and select My subscriptions

    

2. Go to Notification Settings 

    

3. Scroll down to General Settings and navigate to For my forum subscriptions, notify me for > Only the first topic in each post 

    

4. Scroll down to Email Notifications and deselect Any comments on the knowledge base articles, blog articles or events in boards I subscribe to.
5. Navigate to New replies posted to content I subscribe to > Never

Please reach out if you have any questions or need further guidance.

Thank you,

Chris

Hi @Karlstens, thank you for your feedback, and I hear your sentiment on having to sign-in multiple times a day. The inactivity time before auto-logoff has been set to the maximum allotted time our platform currently allows. This is in an effort to mitigate potential security risks and to protect our members.

Best,

Chris

Thanks @ChrisShernaman - it's worth noting that other forums that I frequent (Microsoft, Autodesk) that use the same Khoros platform don't have this same issue/requirement, as I appear to remain actively logged in upon revisiting their sites.

Another Community item that can hopefully be addressed is the currently unused Idea Exchange Dashboard status - I don't think any ideas have been marked/tagged - and further to this, there's the problem of legacy ideas stretching all the way back to 2016.

Hi @Karlstens, thank you for flagging this issue. This is a top priority for us and we are currently working with our internal teams to resolve in the next coming weeks, but have added a notification banner at the top of the board to provide awareness. We highly encourage everyone to continue submitting ideas to this board in the interim.

I look forward to sharing our progress in our next platform update!

Much appreciated,

Chris 

Thank you for the detailed instructions, @ChrisShernaman !! I greatly appreciate it, and this solves a big headache for me! 🙂 

Hi @ChrisShernaman ,

Unfortunately, the instructions you gave me above don't work across the entire community, because it seems like the community categorizes some categories as "forums", some categories as "boards", some categories as "blogs", and some categories as "topics".

So, for example, I am continually receiving all replies for all threads in this "Announcements" category... even for threads that I have never participated in. But it seems like that is happening because this "Announcements" category is listed as a "Blog", and the preference setting that you told me about doesn't seem to control "Blogs".

Hi @ScottWorld, thank you for flagging this. I've added in an additional step in the process above, you'll have to deselect the Any comments on the knowledge base articles, blog articles or events in boards I subscribe to, to block any comments across the different categories of the community. 

The Notification Settings will work across all community categories, it just takes some time to configure the settings to where you'd like it. 

Please let me know if you run into this issue any further. Thanks!