Release notes: Dialogue v1.7.3

Upgrades to Version 7.3 are taking place as part of a staggered release from 26 March 2014.

In this latest release, we've made lots of small improvements to help you and your users, and some significant amendments to the reporting function to make your lives easier.

Below are some of the highlights:

For your users:

Access to all their contributions to the dialogue

Now, when dialogue contributors visit their profile page, they will be able to see all of the ideas and comments they have submitted. Previously only approved ideas and comments were shown, but this change enables them to view their rejected ideas too. This provides a complete record of their interactions and can help users to understand which ideas conform to your house rules to help guide their input in the future, improving transparency.

For administrators:

Easily embed images in almost every page

With our new and improved text editor, administrators can upload and embed images easily into almost any page, including for individual discussions.

The new approach means that images are stored in the Dialogue site, avoiding problems which can occur when images are stored in another system. You can also add ‘alternative text’ descriptions to all images, making them accessible to those using screen readers, and complying to government (WCAG 2.0 AA) standards.

Improved reporting for individual discussions and comments

In the reporting section you now have the option to view and download your data on both a single discussion or 'all discussions' basis. Previously you could only view all discussions, so this will save you time and effort in needing to extract individual discussion data yourself, as we've now done it for you.

This new reporting function provides you with the top line figures and CSV downloads for ideas, comments, ratings and tags that you will be used to, but tailored for your selected discussion (unless of course you select 'All Discussions'!), making your analysis of each discussion easier.

We've also made it easier to see the comments linked to specific ideas in your exports, which will help when you are analysing your discussions and looking further into the data.

Easier for you to get in touch with your users

You can now email your users directly from their profile, rather than needing to find their email in the 'user list' CSV download. This will help when moderating - for example if you want to contact users whose ideas you have rejected.

Faster moderation

To save you time, you now have the option to select 'All discussions' in the moderation section, which will bring up all the ideas that need moderating across your dialogue.

This is great if you have more than one discussion running, as you can work through the moderation queue for all new ideas submitted, instead of needing to select and moderate the individual discussions in turn. This also provides you with a place to see all the 'Rejected' and 'Locked' ideas from every discussion in one place, which may be helpful when assessing the overall moderation of your dialogue.

General improvements

As with all of our releases, we've fixed some bugs to make your use of the application smoother - these included some fixes on the reporting side which should improve your experience when analysing your discussions.