Release notes for 3.36.0

Major updates

1. Analytics Engine v2 (historical channel and network stats) - This version of the #analytics engine is moving out of beta after being progressively released with incremental features over the past 1 year. Read more in the product story.
2. The next version(v3) will be able to provide fine grained analytics. This is for advanced use cases, for instance - determining how many users make it through a multi-step ecommerce funnel, how many users fall off at each stage of an event booking, which elements on the page were clicked on, etc. If you are interested in this feature and/or you would like to shape the feature while its being built, please contact support.
3. Bot prevention has been in early access for last 3 months and is moving into beta. It is already live on some networks and will be rolling out to others in stages.
4. It reflects our commitment to allow the Network Sites to be used only by humans, and prevent bots from being able to create an account and/or login and then indulge in abusive or coordinated actions.
5. It uses a superb under-the-hood bot prevention mechanism based on Cloudflare Turnstile which is meant as a replacement for the much hated Google reCAPTCHA, with the following advantages:
6. Stop abuse abuse and confirm visitors are real
7. Without the data privacy concerns or awful UX that CAPTCHAs thrust on users.
8. Note that #BotPrevention is not meant to stop spiders and crawlers. We welcome sincere search engine oriented spiders and creepy crawlers. The rest are already blocked on our edge firewall.
9. Moderation tools v1 ( #ModerationTools ) - The first feature under this toolset - Account Restriction - has moving out of beta.
10. It allows Network heroes to ban a member immediately on their network, and in extreme cases, allows MainCross staff to ban a member across ALL networks.
11. This is a complete restriction that takes effect immediately and lasts till the scheduled date/time. Read more in the help article.
12. The next upgrade of the account restriction tool will allow granular restrictions rather than complete.
13. Form workflows (#FormBuilder) has been in early access for last 3 months on 2 networks. It is now being made available on all networks, still under early access.
14. This feature is accessible only to Network heroes when creating a form, and allows a variable workflow to be setup. The workflow is used when a form is filled based on a field/choice selected, eg mail the user some info, or redirect to a link, or call a webhook, etc
15. This is a complex feature. If you would need help to set it up and/or you would like to shape the feature while its being built, please contact support.

Updates

1. The Network feed is automatically refreshed after a new post is added, and when the /network destination menu item in Nav bar (or col) or Bottom Navigation is clicked
2. This means that the latest version of the feed is always available without having to manually press the feed refresh button.
3. Comment counts are now updated in real time on feed cards.
4. Due to sunsetting of Google Universal Analytics, the MC system now supports Google Analytics 4.
5. The channel selection during posting now supports fuzzy search - this allows a far better experience for the user to find the right channel when posting.
6. New micro-feature added to #forms - The form can be disabled at a preset time so that no further form entries can be submitted.
7. #Events update - The Additional info field can now handle rich text.
8. Lettering on interactive maps is more legible now.
9. Topic character count increased to 200 for all Conversation derived posts, ie Update, Question, Event
10. The description field is no longer mandatory for a Question post
11. Capitalization abuse in Bio field of user profiles is prevented. If excess caps are used even after warning, the text capitalization is changed to sentence case. A minimum of 20 chars is now needed for the Bio field.
12. #HeroDashboard
13. Added 2 new settings to precisely control the menu selected text color on the Nav bar and Nav col. This setting can be found under Network dashboard> Visual config along with the earlier color settings.
14. When a channel is created, the prompt directly takes one to edit the channel.
15. Allow slug to be of max 180 chars for Pages.

UI changes

1. If the essential APIs that are needed for the network to load are blocked for some reason (eg ad/script blocked, corporate firewall), then a pertinent message to this effect is now shown instead of the earlier 404 - not found, which was confusing, and technically incorrect.
2. The last 5 search strings are shown below the search bar, and clicking on any will redo the previous search.
3. The "low post quality" warning has been changed to be a positive gentler nudge:
4. Ie its now an info alert instead of a warning alert - "Tips for better posting", and within the post box instead of at the bottom
5. For Update posts, 2 nudges are displayed for case of embed without text and image without text
6. The Navigation column dimming is set to ON by default. A pertinent tooltip is shown on hover on dimmer switch.

Issues fixed

1. In some cases, the system would allow an NN page to be created without slug field being entered and then would crash after Save. Note that there was no data loss in this case. A reload of the page would show the newly created page.
2. On very old browsers - Safari (as usual) and Android Webview, due to a JS feature not being available, the front end would crash.