Planned Champ Features (July 2020)

It's 1/2 way through the year. I want to wish my fellow Canadians a Happy Canada Day, and my American friends a wonderful Fourth of July.

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

Upcoming:

• Upgraded backend software with Shopify API
• Add moderator badge to avatar - July
• Add upvote at the Topic level - July
• Fix bug where tags with hash prefix cannot be deleted
• Add a new forum type where only original authors and moderators can view topics (but everyone can view topic titles)
• Improve tagging (autocomplete, allow users to tag) - July
• Allow topics to be sorted (by views, latest post, created, upvotes)
• Update Sitemap with user profiles - TBD
• Improve forum caching - TBD
• Better user on-site notifications (eg. Facebook style) - TBD
• Improve search result design

Deferred:

• Timestamps for private messages - TBD
• Investigate improvements for forum schema markup

Considering:

• Bulk updates to forums
• Push notifications
• Group (public) chatroom
• User level bookmarking

Last month's thread: https://getchamp.myshopify.com/community/champ/forums/7-support/topics/17177-planned-champ-features-june-2020

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.

Backend system has been updated this evening. Usual checks did not show any issues. Please report any bugs as per usual.

Would love to see the ability to add a short bio / profile description!

@anonymous

Users can already modify their bio description by going to their preference page. For example, the one for you would be here: https://getchamp.myshopify.com/community/champ/preference

I have decided not to incorporate adding a moderator badge into a feature of the app as it is veering quite a bit into the design aspect of the app.

If you notice next to my avatar, these is a checkmark to denote my moderator status. I will instead publish an article at https://getchamp.net/guides to show you how to create this effect in the next couple of days.

This can be done with a bit of JavaScript and CSS within the app's existing design.

For those of you who are interested in this, this will be under the Customization section. I hope to have this article published in the next week or so.

Update:

Here's the link to the instructions
https://getchamp.net/guides/customizations/#adding-moderator-badges-to-avatars

A 4th of July release here...

Topic level upvoting

You can now add upvotes by heading to the Settings in the dashboard and enabling it. Screenshot:

This is turned off by default. Once you do this, your logged in users will be able to upvote and downvotes like so:

Now, before anyone asks me why there isn't a downvote arrow, let me explain. This is a fairly strong opinion on this matter, but my reasons are simple. Downvotes is the same as the lack of an upvote. But downvotes are inherently mean and, having grown up when the internet was a much friendlier and collaborative place (eg. say, the 90's), I just felt downvotes weren't something I wanted to incorporate into my software. I feel the internet could be a better place, and so downvote does not (and will not) exist here.

So what's next?

Having an upvote feature is okay, but it doesn't do much other than allow users to signal they like an entire topic.

I'll be working on creating a simple algorithm (which you can enable in the settings) to allow the app to bring topics that are upvoted and recent up to the top more. There will be a weighting to this, and it won't be perfect (so brace yourselves that the app doesn't perform the way you think it should).

That's it for the weekend!

@champsupport great updates, thank you!!

New weekend release:

For those of you who are running education forums, you can now set a forum where all students can view topic titles, but only the original author of the post and moderators can view and respond to the post.

As with all new releases, expect bugs! Shoot me an email at support@getchamp.net and I'll get it fixed asap.

This setting is set on a per forum level to allow maximum customization.