Board Thread:Moderator News/@comment-26339491-20160823233607

(I hope it's okay to post this here, even though I'm not a mod. I think this information is similarly relevant to users here as a mod announcement would be)

First of all, thanks for being an early adopter of Discussions! I know it's been a bit challenging to manage at times, but your feedback and experiences have really helped us to make improvements. Some of those improvements are now live, more are coming soon, and I'd like to let everyone know what they are. Always remember to update to the latest version of the Community App when it becomes available to get the full benefits of these!

Categories Users can now add a category when they start a conversation, admins and mods can re-assign those categories, and everyone can filter their feed by the categories they want to see. Thanks to the admins for setting up your categories already!

This feature will provide some structure to Discussions, which is probably much needed here as on some of the other communities with very active Discussions. This should also help to make it clear how Discussions can function as a replacement feature for the Forum. There is still more to do before the forum content will be migrated, of course.

User badges

Users of the web interface have probably noticed that admins and discussions moderators now have small badges on their avatars, to make their role clear. This addition will come to the community apps in September (it did not quite make it into the app releases for August).

Post count on profile page

A Discussions post count can now be seen on a user's wiki profile page, under the edit count. The post count is linked to the user's Discussions contributions page. This should help make Discussion activity more visible to all community members.

Email Notifications

Users will now get email notifications when their own posts receive replies and upvotes. This matches the push notifications that app users receive. There will be a new email preference that allows you to opt out of these emails, if you wish. Further in the future (not this month) we will be adding more options for following any post and receiving notifications about it.

Graphics on the web layout

Admins will gain the ability to change the graphics on the web layout, both the square community avatar image on the left and the wide discussions header up top. Please see the Help page for details about image size.

Again: Please remember to update your app! Otherwise you might not see a lot of these changes. 