Planned Champ Features (January 2020)

As usual, a monthly thread is created to keep our customers informed about what new features are coming up.

Completed:

• Fixed issue with notification worker
• Added RESTful API for writing to the Topic and Post resources
• Major database upgrade (January 18, 2020)
• Backend code base update -- I will need to complete this before proceeding with any further enhancements. I anticipate this will be done by about January 22 to 25.
• Hide forum completely for users who don't have permission
• Improved search functionality
• Icon/picture for forums

Upcoming:

• More moderator controls for users (eg. points) - January
• Allow tagging of topics - January
• oEmbeds - TBD
• Improve PageSpeed - TBD

Deferred:

• Timestamps for private messages - TBD

Considering:

• Bulk updates to forums

If you have any ideas or suggestions, please add it below here. I ask that you create an account and log in if you post so that I can follow up with you directly if I have any questions or need clarification on suggestions.

Someone suggested back in the December feature thread to have some feature to bulk update forums. I'm currently thinking about this and how it might work. If you have any thoughts on this, please post this below.

What do people think about a feature to allow users to quote other text (eg. a response)?

Hi team

For the tags and users to quote text and bulk forum edit (I'm the one who suggested it), those are great ideas :)

We can already quote using the markdown character right?

quoting someone

2/
I'd like to suggest an upgrade for the user profile page available from
Forums > My Profile > Preference.
In their personal Forum profile page, what about adding a description field also so that the users can introduce themselves? This field should be optional.
Even better, would be wonderful if the forum/shop owner could create a custom HTML form with checkbox - for the users to select their center of interests.

Let's assume I'm a store selling clothes for men, women, kids.
The customer on his/her profile can specify what he/she's into.

Example:

Are you interested by:
<form action="/preference" method="get">
< input type=checkbox name=clothes1 value=Men>Men clothes<br>
< input type=checkbox name=clothes2 value=Women>Women clothes<br>
< input type=checkbox name=clothes3 value=Kids>Kids clothes<br>
< input type=submit value=Submit>
</form>

Putting my public chatroom request here also
https://getchamp.myshopify.com/community/champ/forums/6/topics/12389/page/1#post-32388
Having more than 1 public chatrooms (based on customer profile) would be a great addition also

Thanks team

API resource added for writing to the Topic and Post resources. Note that the API is not an officially supported feature, so YMMV. Please refer to the guide here: https://getchamp.net/guides/api/

Yet another feature request..... in Discord we can use commands
For example, the forum moderator will set !command and !command will display a pre-formatted text
Could be a nice addition for the public chatroom

The idea is to configure pre-formatted answers to the most frequently asked questions that the users can get answered

Thanks

Example of public chatroom I have in mind
Could be located in the forum but in a specific page within the same domain

Or we could even access it through an icon located at the bottom left or right of the forum

Feature request - when a forum requires a tag to view content and the user does not have the tag, I would like to be able to hide that forum from the user in the list of forums. The current behavior is that the user sees the forum but then gets You do not have permission to access when they try and view the posts.
I would be fine with this being an additional toggle in the forum set up so the current behavior is unchanged.

Thanks

Hi @Anonymous / @brianwatson, I think that is doable. Added to the list.

Major database upgrade underway this afternoon and was completed within 10 minutes or so.

Completed major backend system update. Took about 5 days! But everything should be faster. More importantly (and unfortunately I'm unable to show any of this) is that the code base is now cleaner (and leaner) than before and is ready for additional enhancements.

You will also notice the user interface for the app's dashboard has been cleaned up and refreshed. Please notify me at support[at]getchamp.net] if you notice anything broken.

In addition to updates to the codebase, we've also upgraded two of our databases with more ram and CPU cores. Things should be slightly snappier.

For the next few days, I'll be adding additional automated tests to the app's codebase to make things more robust and to prevent changes from breaking features.

Forum hiding is enabled as of this afternoon.

By default, all forums are listed in the forum pages, including the ones that a user/visitor does not have access to.

You can now set (on a per forum basis) which ones are visible to everyone (regardless of access), which ones are only visible to those with access (eg. to tagged users, logged in users), and which ones are only visible to moderators (ie. your internal forums).

Search functionality was updated this evening.

Previously, the topic titles were not indexed. Now they are included in the app's internal search indices, which should provide an improved search experience for users.

Added oEmbed support to the list.

Added support for forum images (you can see it's active now in this demo forum). Go to the forum and upload the image you want for it :-).