Release Notes for 01/26/15

Hello Rainers,

On January 26th starting at 8:30pm Pacific, we had a successful deployment of bug fixes and enhancements for the ActiveRain community. The site was down for approximately 50 minutes while we made these changes.

Here is a list of the improvements that were made to your community.

Blogging

• AR-3432    There is a "known issue" in Apple iPads that renames images as the user uploads them to a blog post, which prevented people from uploading pictures to their blog post. We came up a work around that will force the iPad to rename images that are being uploaded for a blog post. Thank you Craig Daniels.
• AR-3403    Images added to blog posts when certain members were on Internet Explorer were automatically moving to the top of the blog post and being centered.
• AR-3422    When italics and larger font sizes were used in a blog post, the text was being cut off by a few pixels in the right margin. Thank you Liz and Bill Spear.
• AR-3460    When a member edited, added, or deleted tags from an existing blog post, it become impossible to republish the blog post. Thank you Helene Kelbaugh, REALTOR, Internet Marketing Specialist.
• AR-3461    There has been some confusion around scheduling blog posts, particularly in regards to when those posts will actually go live.  We made some changes to the scheduling tool to reflect which time zone the system works on (Pacific) to clear that up. Thank you Laura Andersen.
  We also discovered one more bug while making this change that is preventing scheduled posts from going live. That issue deals with the system not requiring Topics on certain draft posts and will be addressed in our next release (February).
• AR-3367    Videos weren't centering properly when embedded in blog posts. We added a new alignment tool in the video editor to make this feature work. Thank you Lyn Sims.

Question & Answer

Most of these changes were focused on the concept of advancing our Q&A section to find the "best" answer to a question.

• AR-3476 & AR-3477    On answers within the Q&A section, the word "Like" was changed to "Upvote". We did this because we are trying to get members to vote for the best answers on questions to make the Q&A site an even better resource. 
• AR-3478    We removed the sort drop-down option from the individual question pages in order to drive the concept of "upvoting the best answers" on each question.
• AR-3479 & AR 3480    We changed the default sort order of Answers on a question page to show the most upvoted (best) answers at the top.
• AR-3481 & AR-3482    We removed the answer # from the question page to focus the site on deriving the best answer to a question.
• AR-3483    On the mobile site, we changed the Q&A home page so it always presents the newest questions first.
• AR-3426    The sort drop-down on the Q&A home page was not properly working when "Most Answered" was selected.
• AR-3364    We enhanced the overall style of the Blog Settings page and added in options for members to control their notifications that they receive from our Q&A section.

Home Page and Site Navigation

A lot of this was prep work for some really cool improvements you'll see in our coming releases including a new activity feed on the home page.

• AR-3443    There is now a live beta page where the community see what the upcoming home page activity feed is going to look like and provide us with feedback before it goes live.
• AR-3444    We created an engine that searches for blog posts, questions, answers, and members that meet a certain quality threshold. This engine will be used to serve up a higher velocity of content on our home page starting in early February.
• AR-3446    Anonymous visitors on ActiveRain will now see a call out on the home page that tells them more about our community and why real estate professionals like to be here.
• AR-3445    We increased the amount of screen space available to logged-in members by removing the grey navigation bar near the header and moving those links into a new navigation area next to the member's profile picture.
• AR-3348    An update was made to our global navigation (the blue header bar on top of the screen) so the drop-down menus will open when a mouse hovers over them. A user no longer needs to click to view their options.
• AR-3452    Added Schema Markup to the home page to enhance our SEO.

Points

• AR-3357    We changed our Leaderboard so it wouldn't include the ActiveRain corporate accounts (In The Loop, Contests, University, etc) in the rankings for King County, WA. Thank you Dan Tabit.
• AR-3389    We fixed a bug that was awarding points when a blog post was scheduled instead of when it was published.
• AR-3471    Deleted blog posts were not triggering a points deduction for the author. This does not apply when deleting a blog post that is more than six months old.
• AR-3486    Invite points were not being propertly reported in the tables on the ActiveRain Points page. Thank you Dick Greenberg 
• AR-3468    We added a link on the Points page to the blog post that outlines all of the point values, limits, rules, etc on ActiveRain.
• AR-3469    On the Points page, we added a link to the blog post that was published for these three scoring events: 1) A member publishes a blog, 2) A member reblogs a post, 3) Another member reblogs YOUR blog post.

Other Stuff

• AR-3283    The page where you can see other members first blog posts (very cool!) was loading extremely slowly. We rebuilt the page to make it a much faster and better experience.
• AR-3421    We update the SEO title on the Profile Page to include the member's primary market. This is an SEO enhancement to help Google understand where our members do business.

 

Leave your comments below to let us know your thoughts on this round of changes.  The next big release is coming in mid-February when we'll be setting the new activity feed loose on the ActiveRain home page.

 

Keep Up In the Rain!