Release 1.15: Prelim user score and ‘Clean Up’ button

Hello good Plow folks! We have another big release for you. As promised, we now bring you POINTS on each keyword page. When you participate in the curation of a keyword, you will amass points that drive the placement of your avatar on each keyword’s leaderboard.

Also, we now have a ‘Clean Up’ button on each keyword, which will be clear out any items that you’ve already read. This is a big deal! For the first time, your keyword page can be used effectively as a personal content filter. If you’ve already seen an item, your attention should be focused on the next item up, based on the the collective judgment of the community.

Release 1.15:

User score:

• We introduced a basic, accumulating user score to each user on the keyword page leaderboard. A user’s score builds with their overall activity and is specific to the keyword, so each user has a different score in each of the keywords in which they are active.
• Admins have ‘MOD’ badges and appear at the top of each leaderboard.
• Bots do not have user scores and appear at the end of each leaderboard.

Alerts and notifications:

• Added a remaining invite count to header, with a link to invite page or to request additional invites.
• Added a new butterbar alert system that we’ll use to keep you informed of important developments, starting with blog entries. You’ll start seeing this as a grey alert bar at the top of the app.

Clean Up Button:

• Read/unread: ‘Clean Up’ button for each keyword page. The ‘Clean Up’ button is activated when you login and read items. When activated, it will clear out your read items and pull in any new ones.

And more:

• Refreshed the design for our Plow blog mailing list. (Did you notice?)
• Simplified comment notification language on item page, account settings, and in digest. Now ‘follow/unfollow item’ rather than ‘enable/disable comment notifications for this article.’
• Added social login buttons to the login overlay.
• Integration of Heap Analytics.
• Improved performance of user follow mechanism.

Bug Fixes:

• User timeline code was polluted.
• Fixed logic for comment notifications on articles posted by user.
• Was experiencing some db connection timeouts.

Next up:

Based on your feedback, we’re building an in-app notification system that will alert you to personally relevant activity taking place in Plow. No longer will you be a slave to email alerts!

Also — blogs aren’t just for release notes, are they? We’re going to be broadening our editorial purview in the coming weeks. Keep it tuned here!

All the best,

Colin