Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.
We're barreling forth towards the beta launch of the app. It's going to bring a smile to everyone's face.
BIG CHANGES TO USER-ADDED EVENTS
Last weekend, Do512 and Do617 got hit with an onslaught of spammy user-added events. The spammers made it past both our spam questions and recaptcha - and their events were triggering band notifications for artists like TV On The Radio that linked users to these undesirable events.
To stop the proliferation of these events, we disabled the ability for users to add events on the front end until we had a better gate-keeping system in place.
Last night, after assessing the situation, we added the ability for users with any permissions (such as Event Editor, All Star or Manager) to create events, bands and venues via the front end of the site. Users without permissions will see an error message that prompts them to contact CM@DoXYZ.com to attain the necessary permissions.
If a user reaches out to you (and seems legitimate), we suggest letting him/her know that due to spammers we had to turn off the ability to allow everyone to enter events. However, because you trust and love them and appreciate them supporting the site, you are giving them special permission to continue adding events. Until around two years ago, any user could edit any event no matter what their permissions were. That system rarely caused problems - and our current one will be much more restrictive than that.
We highly recommend navigating to your metro’s Radmin and granting Event Editor permissions to all of your key partners and users who regularly add events to your site.
We’re also going to be working with our product team to help you automate this process by:
- Exporting a list of all users who have added an event to your site in the past 6 months
- Removing all of the users who have been marked as a spammer from the list
- Removing all users who seem like bots / spammers / sketchy people
- Granting ‘Event Editor’ privileges to the rest of the users en masse
Once this process is complete, we also highly recommend sending a mass email out to all of the folks that we automatically add - letting them know about the changes to the site and their special VIP permissions. This is a good reason to reach out to your core users and let them know that they’re important. We’ll send over their emails the moment once we’ve granted the permissions.
BIG CHANGES TO REPEATING EVENTS
You will soon have the option to treat all weekly repeating events exactly like single-day events within your category shortcuts. For each category shortcut, metros will be able to pull all of their weekly repeating events out of the widgets and onto the main listings by checking the (soon to be added) "Include Repeating In Main Listings" check box in Radmin -> Content -> Shortcuts.
This is highly recommended for shortcuts such as Happy Hours and Karaoke / Trivia that feature mostly weekly events.
A couple things to note:
- This will not affect the treatment of ongoing events within these shortcuts.
- This will not affect the treatment of events within your main listings pages.
Also, the maximum amount of events that can be displayed in one ongoing and repeating event widget has been increased to 25. Prior to this update, these widgets only displayed 12 events - and some metros felt limited in the amount of content that they could surface within them.
Please note that this change will affect the widgets in both the main listings and the category shortcuts.
OTHER AWESOME STUFF
We squashed a bug that was preventing scrapers from checking the ‘free’ box on events that were identified as such when scraped. Content Managers will soon be able to once again filter their Approved Events by ‘Free’ to surface awesome events for their free lists.
Scrapers will now ‘obvious dupe check’ incoming ongoing events that share the same title, venue, metro and end date as existing ongoing events. This will fix metros’ issues with duplicate instances of the same exhibitions getting brought onto the site.
Exhibitions have historically given our system trouble because they are often not listed with a ‘Start Date’ on gallery websites, so our scrapers automatically set their Start Date to the current date and don’t correctly match them against existing approved events. But all of that that ends this week.
Dev has also put a lot of work into speeding up our listings pages - both on the app and on the desktop sites - so we can wow our Tastemakers with our new product.
TIP OF THE WEEK
You may already be A|B testing your email subject lines - but have you considered A|B testing the content of your emails as well?
MailChimp makes it easy to A|B test different pieces of content in your emails using merge tags - and doing so is helpful for learning how to best engage with your audience. We’d recommend checking out their documentation and then reaching out to us with any questions you may have.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts to share? DO!