Happy Hump Day, team! Back by popular demand. 😎

I want to put a few of our forthcoming live community features onto your radar. These new live features are designed to encourage members to further engage with the community. Check these out:

Who’s Typing
 

We just implemented a live Who’s Typing feature into our own community. If you're quick, you’ll see a member typing a reply in real time when going to submit your own reply at the form located near the bottom of the topic. 

 

Who’s Viewing

We implemented a live Who's Viewing feature into topics on our community as well. This may sound familiar to you - we already created a "Recently Browsing" block that shows what members are viewing a topic, however that block was a snapshot over a small chunk of time. The new Who's Viewing feature shows what members are viewing a topic (and when they leave) in the present moment.   

 

Image search analysis
 

We're also improving our native search by automatically informing the platform to look for items featured in photos.

In this example, @Matt posted a photo of an apple in a topic. 

I used the search tool and looked up the word "apple" and voila! The platform found his image of an apple. The new smart learning technology will identify as many keywords as possible in an image to make searching faster, more efficient and accurate. 

Speaking of Matt... he published a new dev blog about some of the things to expect in the near future, including updating the minimum PHP requirement to 7.4 and the recommended version to 8.0, as well as working on PHP 8.1 compatibility for a June release.  

As he mentioned, there will not be a May update release, however June's is already looking extra spicy.

See all the updates that are coming.
 

 

It's worth mentioning the live community features will be available on our standard plans. If that sounds of interest to you, please feel free to reach out to me. We do have some new features in the works for self-hosted clients as well, but more on that later. 

PS - we're testing out a new sentiment analysis feature that scores a topic based on how positive, neutral or negative it is. Let's keep this one as high-vibe and positive as possible please. I'd love to get a high score. 😇 

Let us know what you think in the comments! We're looking forward to hearing from you. 

The new features of free puppies, unlimited sunshine and good fortune for all will have us jumping in delight.

9 hours ago, Charles said:

Those features do not use PHP/MySQL so do require a more advanced setup that cannot be done on self hosted environments. 

Well that's a lie, it's hardly beyond most people's means to use an AWS Access and Secret key for the self-hosted client to talk with services such as Rekognition and Comprehend...