College newspaper here -- we resumed publication after summer break and noticed that all of the maps on articles were not working (grayed out with a "for development use only" message).  It looks like Google Maps has gone to a paid usage model: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/

I had to go through a bunch of rigmarole of setting up a Cloud platform app, enabling a tons of APIs and putting in a credit card since usage is no longer completely free. It was annoying because we don't do any cloud computing and don't need any of the datacenter-type features.  They do provide $200 of free credits every month, but there is no easy way that I could tell to stop it from charging you $20 or $200 or $2000 or $20000 if the site gets DDOS'd or has a huge traffic spike, or to set a $199.99 max usage and then have it disable itself.

Would you all please start investigating the feasibility of having integrated maps that use a free/open alternative, like maybe OpenStreetMap?  

I would like to remove my credit card from Google and not have to think about it.

 

I would be very interested to hear from other users about improvements they'd like to see to Blox-native commenting. Here are my suggestions so far.

(And to head off the inevitable: I am not switching to Disqus or FB just to get features. This is about improving the Blox system.)

• The ability to moderate comments from the article page, rather than having to go into the Blox back-end.
• "Trusted" commenters or some other sort of ranking system. Trusted commenters would be able to post links without review and their comments would be filtered nearer to the top of a comment list with a "Best Comments" sort order.
• A "Best Comments" sort order, which would be decided by the upvote/downvote system.
• See above: An upvote/downvote system for comments.
• Ability to have clickable links
• See above: Ability to hold comments for moderation if they contain links
• Ability for users to edit their own posts.
• Ability for users to upload images.
• Ability for newsrooms to specify a period after which comments on an article close automatically.
• Ability to show comments already posted AFTER commenting has been disabled, rather than having them all disappear.
• Pipe dream: Real time comments.
• Others?

Hello, I'm new to TownNews and Blox so forgive the simple question, but how can I get/find a direct url to an individual asset thats hosted in our Blox (Flex) CMS? For example, if I batch import a bunch of pdfs and then search for them in the CMS, I'd like to be able to add a text link to one of them in another CMS for those viewers but I am unclear what the url is for that specific asset. Thanks for your help!

We are attempting to use the new promo designer block. When a reader abandons his/her unfinished AdOwl order, I would like to offer the reader a button to call us. With an active click-to-call button. Tech support says it isn't possible. Can that be right? Ideas?

I'd like to sort Classified ads placed via AdOwl by category for a given date range. 

To do this. I need to be able to export a search result which includes both an AdOwl identifier and category information. I'm not finding a way to do this.

Category is not a filter setting for AdOwl Orders or Transactions searches.

I can export AdOwl Transactions, but the export does not include category information.

I do not appear to have the capability to export search results for AdOwl Orders.

AdOwl ads contain a unique External ID. but this does not appear to be searchable/indexed content in a Classifieds search: also. I am unable to export the results of a Classified search.

We would use this feature several times per year, perhaps monthly.  

This feature would be used by two people (Classifieds Manager, CEO), which constitutes 50% of our users.

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Is it possible to have the "breadcrumbs" that are at the top of section pages by default continue to be displayed above articles? This would allow easy back-tracking into the section.

I thought I could do it with Utility Regions but it won't allow me to place the standard "Section | Utility: Page heading | Dynamic" block there.

Is anyone else doing something similar?

It's so frustrating how a parent or child asset becomes an automatic sidebar in our layout. So you can lay out an article beautifully. But if, a year later, you add that original article as a child asset to a new article, then it ruins the layout on the original article -- putting this "sidebar space" on the left column with one article in it, and shifting the layout of the whole article to the right. So then every time I add an old article as a child asset to a new article, I have to go back to the old article and fix the layout, so that its new "parent" is inserted at the end, rather than default being moved to the left side and ruining the layout.

Following up on Rob Weir's question, but with a Facebook focus. A Wordpress plug in was just announced making it easy for all publishers to access instant articles. Does TownNews have a plan to quickly match this?

I know this has been asked in a similar post a couple of years ago, but ....

We just switched to Blox commenting from Facebook. A lot of commenters immediately complained they didn't have the ability to edit their own comments. Most other major commenting platforms have the ability for users to edit their own comments.

Do you all think this would a useful change for TownNews to make?

Thanks,

Thomas

In the new BLOX NOW app, we'd like to be able to select a landing page when you open the app. This way people can select if they want local news, business, homepage or what when the app opens. We had this in our old app and I think people really liked it.

I came across the block template "Email card: Summary horizontal" (among

a few other Core email block templates) that don't support custom "Read

More" text.

I needed this feature for moving an obits newsletter from Zen to Flex, the text for the custom block template on Zen was " View Obituary / Sign Guestbook," which is more sensitive and empathetic than "Read More" I would imagine there are other use cases for this as well.

However, I did notice that the Core block template uses the macro email_assetLead in the Core Flex Email component.

Blocks using that macro can use "read_more_text" as a custom property to

support custom text.

I made a custom copy of the Core block template "Email card: Summary

horizontal" for now, but of course it'd be nice to have this in Core.