One of our most popular feature suggestions was for liking individual comments/replies.  Today, we are rolling out our "You Like Me" release, which includes that and more, for both Hoop.la and UBB Forum.

Here are the highlights of this software update:

1.  "Like" Comments and Replies

Sometimes posting an actual comment or reply is overkill and all you want to do is give a quick thumbs up. You can now do so with our support for comment/reply likes.  Such likes will appear in the site and profile activity streams. In addition, comment authors can be notified about the likes, if they prefer.  

2.  New Theme Settings

You can now set an outside border on shaded content areas, providing more definition to those areas.  In addition, we added support for styling the side navigation menu differently from the top navigation item.  By default, however, the side navigation menu will match the top navigation menu styling.  Finally, we added support for a new "Private Content" section.  This will be used more for our upcoming QuestionShark service, but it will also be used for errors and warning messages.

3.  One-Click Suspend Notifications in Emails

We have fundamentally changed the way we send content notification emails and this allows us to add support for un-subscribing from all content notification emails in one click from the email.  When a user clicks on the link to stop email notifications, he will not have to sign into your site, making the process extremely quick.  The action is equivalent to checking the "Suspend All Email Notifications" link on the member notification settings page. 

4. Hoop.la Premium Memberships is now FeePod

Now that we have more than one service using our premium membership service, we realized we needed to re-brand our premium membership service so that it is not tied directly to Hoop.la.  Thus, while the premium membership system itself has not changed (or changed ownership), we are now calling it FeePod (as in, FeePod Premium Memberships).

FeePod is a service of Social Strata and again, aside from the name change, nothing has changed in terms of the way the service operates.  Premium membership purchasers will now see FeePod as the billing entity.

5.  Stock Avatars

For member avatars, we now support both user-uploadable avatars and/or stock avatars (avatars that you upload and that your members can choose from).  Some sites do not want their members to upload their own avatar images, so supporting stock avatars gives you another way to control the experience on your community.

6. Parental Consent Option

If you site is targeting children, it’s important that you follow the COPPA laws in the United States.  With our new Parental Consent option, you can set a flag on underage accounts to require parental consent before the account is authorized.  You set this in the Profile Settings section of your control panel (under the “Birthday” field).

When enabled. you will see a new Parental Consent Queue under your Manage Members control panel section.  That is where you would mark pending underage members as approved so that they can become authorized members of your community.



7. UBB Forum- Choose Powered-By graphic

UBB Forum customers can now choose from a selection of powered-by images, rather than having to use one hard-coded image. (Hoop.la has always had this option.)

As usual, there are numerous bug fixes and other improvements, as well, in this release.