Release 1.16: In-App alerts, Twitter handles, and friends for the cowboy

Good folks of Plow -

Our latest release introduces in-app alerts for the first time. Until now, you’ve relied principally on email alerts to be notified of relevant activity. Many of you love your email and we’ll keep that coming. At our Plow Nation event in SF earlier this year, several folks lamented that when they logged into the app, they couldn’t see all of the stuff their friends were up to, or what was going on with items they had seeded. The veil has been lifted!

Release 1.16 also introduces Twitter handles for select keywords. If the keyword has been setup with a Twitter handle, you’ll find it on the keyword page, just below the ‘follow’ button. We’ll use these handles to broadcast activity relevant to the keyword, so please consider following the Twitter handles of keywords you follow. Over the next few releases, we’ll add more handles and we’ll juice them up with an expanded set of features that will help integrate your Plow and Twitter experiences.

Release 1.16:

In-app alert system:

• Initial alert front-end presentation: a number on your avatar indicating the number of alerts you have to review.
• Overlay on click front-end presentation.
• Alert bubble alert: If someone has completed a registration as a result of the user’s invitation.
• Alert bubble alert: If someone has @replied the user AFTER the user’s last visit to that item page.
• Alert bubble alert: If someone has endorsed an item that the user has seeded AFTER the user’s seed action.
• Alert bubble alert: If someone has commented on an item that the user has seeded, endorsed, or commented on AFTER the user’s last action (seed, endorsement, item page view) with that item.
• Alert bubble customization for keyword pages: only actions relevant to that keyword.
• ‘Clear new’ function.

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Initial alert view[/caption]

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Alert view on click[/caption]

Default profile images: our default cowboy avatar now has a collection of victorian shadow figures to keep him company.

• Default Profile Images: Supplemented our current cowboy avatar with a series of additional avatars. When new users register and do NOT add their own avatar (through social or our upload tool) we’ll randomly assign them an avatar from our new avatar pool.
• Default Profile Images: Ran through our existing users that have NOT customized their avatars and assigned them a new avatar from our avatar pool.

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Victorians of Plow[/caption]

Other features:

• Keyword Twitter Handles: Introduced specific Twitter handles to select keyword pages.
• Updated the floating ‘Feedback’ tab. It’s now a ‘Support’ tab. Stripped out our vendor and now linking directly to email and Twitter channels for questions and feedback.
• Added Julie Karasik to the About Plow section.
• When a user redeems an invite, they are now automatically followed by the user that invited them.
• Various dev infrastructure improvements.

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Keyword Twitter handle[/caption]

Bug fixes:

• Bots were showing up after mods — they are now at the very end of both leaderboards (after all mods and users).
• Addressed hanging seed dialogue.
• Digest email: Eliminated duplicate items.
• The ‘all time’ leaderboard briefly disappeared.

Have fun with these new features — and let us know how it goes!

All the best,

Colin