Community release notes for January 29, 2024

[#1]

Welcome to the first Community release notes of 2024! After a short break the team is back energized, focused, and ready to ship you a whole bunch of goodies.

The HUGE news

You may have been impacted by the recent issue where community emails were being marked as spam.  A fix for that issue is rolling out this week, currently scheduled for Tuesday.  We'll keep you posted on when the update is made and when you should see emails running smoothly once more. Thank you for your patience dealing with this frustration!

ETA: This fix has now rolled out to all users! Let us know if you're experiencing any ongoing issues.

New

Have you ever casually scrolled down the quarterly leaderboard it and wondered where you're at? Scroll all the way to the bottom, and the Kudos leaderboard now displays your quarterly point accumulation if you're below the cut-off. Now you'll know how many challenges you need to complete to reach that top 100. 

                   

Updated:

Your profile now shows a count of your Kudos badges instead of the "New!" lozenge. Note that this usually takes a few extra seconds to load. 

Enhanced: 

The tagging system underwent an overhaul to optimize search performance and return more results. Members who have the ability to add tags to their articles will see significant improvement when adding tags to their content.

Enhanced

Ever clicked on a topic in a group and wanted to respond just to realize you needed to first join the group and then go back and find the topic you wanted to comment on? Yeah, that's a thing of the past! With this release, in Groups, you can now join AND comment in one action. Type your response, and you will see the "Comment and join" button as shown below.. 

                 

Updated

We've updated the language for notifications to reflect, well, that they're notifications! You're used to seeing these labeled as "Activity” in some places and “Notifications” in others. We’ve updated this to make our language and URLs consistent. 

Enhanced

Finally, several accessibility updates were made to the Events widget in the right sidebar to better support assistive applications and screen readers.

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We’re happy to have such a great list of updates and improvements for you and hope your new year is off to a wonderful start! Leave any questions or suggestions for us, as always, in the comments below. 💙

[Andy Gladstone]

Comment & Join is possibly the best combination since spaghetti met meatballs! Awesome updates here.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi, and thanks for the update info, @Monique vdB ...and because you asked for suggestions :^)

What do people think of...

• Changing the Notifications Feed (formerly known as Activity Feed) to show all entries with date / time rather than intermixed with date / times and relative ages?  The consistency would help when trying to catch up on activity using the feed.
• The ability to name and / or group bookmarks?  I often use those to refer to common answers to questions, but need to spelunk a bit as the original title often has nothing to do with the solution approach (or the problem).

Kind regards,
Bill

[Dave Mathijs]

Thanks for the update @Monique vdB welcoming all new features.

On that note: Sometimes, I'm unable to find the name of a person I want to give Kudos to (and yes, they are subscribed to the Kudos program).

Is there a way to improve the fuzzy search when you don't know the exact name?

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Glad to hear (and see!) that fix for spammed emails has been rolled out. Just this morning emails were ending up in spam folder but like a couple of minutes ago I saw that one community notification automatically landed in correct email label without me having to move it from spam 🎉

[Taranjeet Singh]

Thank you for sharing these amazing Community updates, @Monique vdB !

[Monique vdB]

@Bill Sheboy We have a lot of improvements we'd love to make to bookmarks! I'll add that to our list, thanks for the suggestion. 

We have a ticket in the backlog around standardizing the notification date/time. I'll nudge the devs on that one and see where it stands. If it's a heavier lift, it's possible that will need to wait for Aurora.

@Dave Mathijs who are you trying to look up? I usually just try last name only but it depends on the name.  

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I only learned about the bookmarks feature last week (I can't believe how many Chrome bookmarks I have under my Confluence folders!), but I already have found that @Bill Sheboy's suggestion of folders or another way to categorize the bookmarks would be very beneficial. 

[Hana Kučerová]

Awesome updates, thank you.

[Monique vdB]

@Bill Sheboy check out today's release notes, an update I hope you like!

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks to you and the team, @Monique vdB !

[Elizabeth Gadsby]

Hello!

Is there a way to sign up for email notifications of new Announcement Articles, without the inundation of every comment on every article? I only want to know when new articles are posted.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Elizabeth Gadsby once you comment on a post, you become a 'watcher' of that post. This means you will receive notifications for all updates and responses on the post. I see you are likely being inundated with the responses to a post you commented on: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Confluence-tables-get-drag-and-drop/ba-p/2602534

 You can stop watching the post by clicking the 👁 Watching icon under the post. After you comment on a post it will be turned on, you can just click it to turn it off.

Hope this helps!

[Elizabeth Gadsby]

Hi @Andy Gladstone

Thank you for responding, however that is not the issue. I am receiving a weekly digest with notifications for comments on a variety of threads. All I want is a weekly email of new articles that are posted. Is this possible?

This is the way that I tried to sign up for notifications of new articles and I get notifications for new articles, but they are buried in notifications of comments:

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Elizabeth Gadsby 

That is an interesting idea...perhaps a setting in profiles to only receive notifications for updates to things  (e.g., articles, discussions, questions) created in the last X-days. 

That would reduce the "noise" from community members posting product endorsements to years-old threads, and help get past the "clutter" of threads marked as "Featured" content when they are also years-old.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Mihir Ajmera]

@Monique vdB

Thank you for sharing these amazing updates with the community! 

[Monique vdB]

@Elizabeth Gadsby yes that is possible! First click Watch on the Announcements homepage and then select only Articles.

Then go to your notification settings (this should be your personal link) and make sure that your preference is set to "Only new posts" instead of "All posts and replies."

@Andy Gladstone is correct about the way this works for individual posts and how you can unwatch a post, but you can adjust your settings there too if you'd like to.  

Hope this helps!