Welcome to our 1.17 release notes! Curious and want to learn more? Discover Open Social.
Discover the new improvements and features in this release!
GDPR features overview
Privacy is important to us! We’ve implemented several new features that will help site managers comply with the new European General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR):
- Consent to data policy: site managers can create and update their data policy, and regular users are able to provide or withdraw consent to the data policies.
- Inform user data usage: site managers can add blocks to explain which personal information is collected on the sign-up page, the settings page, and the edit profile page.
- Disable user profile fields: site managers can disable and clear the data of default profile fields (such as email address, phone number, etc.). This allows communities to collect as little personal information as possible.
- Improved delete account and remove personal data feature: the delete account feature of Open Social has been improved by informing users clearly which information is deleted, anonymized, and retained. There are also several technical improvements to make sure it works in a reliable way.
Read more about the GDPR and our compliance.
Additional information in user export
When a list of users is exported you will now also find the number of likes, the number of private messages, and the users’ first and last name included in the export. This is a great way to get a useful overview of user activity in the community. Get ready, set, export!
Unpublishing posts
We’re taking the next step in content management. Site and content managers now have the ability to unpublish posts on Open Social. These posts will no longer be visible in activity streams. This can be especially handy when moderating platforms with a lot of activity and when you don’t necessarily want to delete the posts.
Private message recipient selection
When selecting the recipient for a private message, you will now experience an autocomplete functionality similar to when you mention users in posts or comments. You’re able to search for the user by username and displayed name. This feature makes creating private messages quicker and more convenient. And who doesn’t love that?
Comment threads
Users can now reply to comment replies in a comment thread. This makes interacting with other users much clearer and easier. When replying to a comment reply, the author of the comment reply will be mentioned automatically in a new comment. Handy!
Site managers can search for users more easily
When a user previously chose a username that deviated from their first name or last name, it was hard for site managers to search for this user in the admin people overview. The search functionality used to only look for the username. It has now been extended to search for first and last names as well to make it easier to find users.
Show display name instead of username in the user menu
Previously, the username was displayed in the user menu. This, however, can be rather strange if you are working with auto-generated usernames (We’re looking at you, User 00012). Now when a user fills in their first and last name, these will be displayed instead.
Turn off Social Sharing buttons on public content
Previously, public content always displayed the social sharing buttons in the right sidebar. Site managers now have the ability to either hide or show these buttons. Although remember, sharing is caring.
Bug Fixes
- Taxonomy term issues: Site managers were previously unable to list the terms in a taxonomy vocabulary. Additionally, there were some issues that hid the taxonomy terms when they should be visible, e.g. not displaying user expertise on the profile page even though it should be. These have been fixed.
- Several fixes related to deleting an account: When users delete their account, it is now more clear to other users that this user has deleted their account. This is reflected in activity streams and in content, comments and private messages created by that user.
- Public groups and content with public visibility disabled: When Public Visibility was disabled, regular users were still able to create public groups and public content. This has now been fixed!
- An apostrophe in usernames: We have now ensured that usernames with an apostrophe display correctly throughout the platform.
- Year added to event dates: We added a new date form in Events, which includes the year. This is displayed on teasers and the detail page.
- An event has passed a timezone: In the case where users have different time zones, it was possible that some users received the “event has passed” warning even though the event didn’t end yet. This has been fixed!
- Incorrect default image cropping: We have fixed the bug that caused the default content image cropping to not work properly.
- Better event overview page title: The title of the events overview was not consistent with other overview pages and menu links. We renamed it from ‘Community events’ to ‘All events’ to better reflect the purpose of the page.
- And many more….
Enjoy Open Social!