We've made a lot of improvements to our platform in 2023 that have improved performance, expanded functionality, and updated cosmetics. 

As we're entering a new year, we wanted to take a look back and review some of the larger & more impactful changes we've made including:

• Roles & Badges
• Email Style Updates
• Follow/Unfollow Specific Posts
• Zoom Conferencing link in Events

Roles & Badges:

Communities have been asking for “badging” for a while. But when we dug into what badges were, how and why they were used, we found a need to create something with more meaning.

Community Roles and Badges are specifically designed to meet these core needs:

• Community leaders want to recognize members for their contributions to the community.
• Community leaders want their members to take leadership roles in the community.
• Community members want clarity on who they can go to for help on a given topic.

A Community Role is prominently displayed around a member’s avatar to highlight a specific and meaningful role a member has within your community. Community roles will be visible throughout the entire platform, including emails.

For achievements not tied to a specific role in your community, we designed Badges. Badges are perfect for recognizing when a member does something truly meaningful for your community – something that makes a difference to your members. This could be as simple as participating in your annual conference, or as significant as mentoring a colleague.

Badges are visible on a member's profile:

Community Roles & Badges are extremely configurable so they can meet the needs of your unique community. Check out our help article for more information on how to leverage community roles and badges.

Email Style Updates:

We've also worked hard to redesign our emails to be more legible, accessible, and consistent. We’ve also added support for dark mode!

Below is a quick comparison of what a new post emails look like after the update in light and dark mode respectively:

These design updates are for all emails sent from the platform. We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have so we can make further improvements, and you can submit any suggestions to support-community@forj.ai.

Follow/Unfollow Specific Posts:

We've also introduced the ability to follow or unfollow specific posts from the platform, so community members have the ability to leave email notifications on but choose to stop receiving email notifications on a specific post.

Conversely, some members may prefer to keep email notifications off entirely, and now can choose to follow specific posts to ensure they don't miss any part of the conversation.

To follow/unfollow a post, click the three vertical dots in the upper right hand corner of the post, and select Follow by Email (which toggles to Stop Following by Email).

Zoom Conferencing in Events

Recently, we've also added the ability to add video conferencing to the events you create within the platform. 

Now, whenever someone creates an event, they'll have the option of adding a video conferencing link to it, which will show up in event posts, on event pages, and in event emails!

Below you can see the new field you can paste a video conference link in:

Here's how it will appear on the events page:

And it will look this in a community member's inbox:

We're excited for another year of improvements and updates! If you have any questions about anything covered in this article, don't hesitate to reach out to support-community@forj.ai.