Planned Champ Features (October 2020)

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

Upcoming:

• Bug fixed: latest posts were not sorting properly
• Better user on-site notifications (eg. Facebook style) - October
• Fixed some early release issues with on-site notifications
• Enable exporting of users and their post counts - October
• Improve UI for upvote arrow
• Have single parent-child cross-forum posts available - October
• Improve forum caching - October
• Update Sitemap with user profiles - TBD
• Improve search result design - TBD
• User level bookmarking - TBD
• Add emoji selector - TBD
• Original post starter should automatically upvote topic - TBD
• Improve first post design - TBD
• Ability to pin certain post to the top of a thread - TBD
• Improve thumbs up icon interaction - TBD
• Improve tagging user functionality - TBD
• Improve post ui interface - TBD
• Expand functionality to customize notificaiton email - TBD

Deferred:

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

Considering:

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

Last month's thread: https://getchamp.myshopify.com/community/champ/forums/7-support/topics/19130-planned-champ-features-september-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.

Hi Support

I have a feature request

Would be great for the search box to autocomplete and display asynchronously the available results
As an example, I attached an image coming from this website https://help.tawk.to/
If you start typing something, the search box displays the available results

Best regards
Brett

Another idea

From here again (https://help.tawk.to/), selecting the 4 squares icons change the forum homepage display to a much nicer display

Do you think we can already simulate this layout with custom liquid/JS/CSS?

Thank you

Brett Picard:
Hi Support
I have a feature request
Would be great for the search box to autocomplete and display asynchronously the available results
As an example, I attached an image coming from this website https://help.tawk.to/
If you start typing something, the search box displays the available results
Best regards
Brett

It might be possible. I'll take a look into this.

Brett Picard:
Another idea
From here again (https://help.tawk.to/), selecting the 4 squares icons change the forum homepage display to a much nicer display
Do you think we can already simulate this layout with custom liquid/JS/CSS?
Thank you

A redesign of the way the forum looks does not look likely at this point. The primary reason is that the rendering of all the components has a somewhat complicated logic structure on the backend.

I've thought about adding a feature whereby several templates are available to choose from. Again, this is at the stage of whimsical musing (ie. I think about it every now and then but no deep or serious thoughts as of yet), so there's no plans at the moment.

For the format you've specified (the grid format vs the list format), it's primarily used for technical support / documentation sites**. I have not really seen it used for forums:

• https://reddit.com
• https://news.ycombinator.com

I think the reason we don't really see that kind of design in forums is because the design itself isn't really well suited to a forum (or user-generated content). For a knowledge base / documentation site (like at help.tawk.to), yes I see it everywhere.

Having said all that, yes -- if you're handy with HTML/Liquid/JS, it might be possible. All you need to do is use a custom snippet (https://getchamp.net/guides/customizations/#using-customized-liquid-snippets) and design your layout in HTML, which will get injected into the page. You would then use JavaScript to pull the forum titles and all the information into this layout, and hide the list style layout that is currently set.

** - Shameless plug here. Check out Eager.app, a help desk and documentation site software which I'm also a part of.

Bug fix release last night.

Latest unread posts were not sorting properly after the previous release.

If your forum page does not allow guest to comment on any forum topic unless you are signed up. Can we have a way to instruct someone what they need to do if they are at the bottom of the page. “Login to comment” The polls does show “log in to vote” but it’s missing from the comment component.

I think the comment box or a button should be there instructing someone they need to log in to comment. I believe it would help grow the community.

Sorry I crated account to post above but I guess I wasn’t logged in...

@falconcraft I just added it to the software. There should be a link added now for a login prompt for forums that are readable by the public but requires the user to login to post.

Let me know if it doesn't work or if you notice anything unusual.

Sunday Release!

Basic notifications for unread messages are now live!

You can configure it to be light or dark color in the app's dashboard. I'll be adding more functionality to this sidebar in the coming weeks, including:

• Tabs within this sidebar to add additional content
• Ability to search up users
• Ability to initiate private chat
• Ability to add sticky (pinned) notifications
• Ability for you to add custom HTML content (eg. for your own ads, special announcements, etc)

There aren't a lot of configuration options at the moment. You can configure it under Unread Post Alerts for now in the dashboard. This will likely be moved as more functionalities are added.

As always, please report any bugs or issues! Thanks

Awesome! Excited about the notifications. Anyway to add the notifications to this section also this way it’s not overlooked .

Also maybe the bell notification turns red when you have a missed notification just so it stands out?

For mobile Maybe the bell notification gets moved out here. Would be nice if you don't need to go looking for it. Instead it’s just alerting you so you don’t miss it.
@champsupport

I’ve also noticed when tagging a user
@ B-Rad for example. You cannot use this symbol - (the hyphen) the tagging doesn’t register it

Also the notification bell let’s me know of every new post. Shouldn’t it be alerting me for post I was tagged in or that I follow. I’m getting alerts for posts I don’t follow and wasn’t tagged in.

Cheers

The times also seem to be out of order circled below.

Not a big deal but the digit 5 isn’t centered on the bell.

Hi @falconcraft, seems like a few bugs. Let me get on them one at a time. Keep posting any feedback here.

Falcon Craft:
For mobile Maybe the bell notification gets moved out here. Would be nice if you don't need to go looking for it. Instead it’s just alerting you so you don’t miss it.

I've added the icon to the right place for mobile view and also moved the number of unread. Let me know if it works for you.

@champsupport Awesome! That looks a lot better. Just for clarification. What is supposed to be in the notification? When someone tags you and anything else?

Falcon Craft:
@champsupport Awesome! That looks a lot better. Just for clarification. What is supposed to be in the notification? When someone tags you and anything else?

For the notification content, the plan is:

• Unread posts
• When someone @ mentions you

Right now, it does Unread posts. The UI really sucks right now -- I had wanted to get it out there and refine, refine, refine... For some strange reason, when I was developing it, it wasn't apparent how confusing it was (until you pointed it out, actually). Hence part of the reason I needed some feedback.

But yeah, right now it only shows unread notifications. I'm working on fixing the timestamps right now. I'll be expanding on the functionality of this over the next while, so let me know below...

Falcon Craft:
The times also seem to be out of order circled below.
Not a big deal but the digit 5 isn’t centered on the bell.

Timestamp ordering should be fixed.

@champsupport I Definitely think that a lot of topics people get overwhelmed with so many notification. For example if my forum has 30-40 post in a day that means when someone logs in they have so many missed things they probably would care for but instead it makes them miss any tags they had been mentioned in...

So a solution could be this.
The notification organization could be broken apart into 2 section

First section is any tags you've been mentioned in

Second should be any topics that you opted to follow.

I dont really see the need of being alerted for every topic even if your not interested in that specific topic. Instead it might just overwhelm someone to not use that function and they will continue to miss tags/mentions they were in.

Definitely think its almost there! If we could reserve that section of the notification bell to be just for topics you subscribe to and when you are tagged in a post it will be fantastic.
Thank you for all the hard work! Looking great.