Category Archives: Feature Enhancements

You may not even be aware that every IdeaScale community you visit with your mobile phone will display in a special “mobile lite” mode. This is special version of IdeaScale that is made to look much better on smaller mobile phone devices such as BlackBerry, Android, or iPhone. With the continued rise in popularity of smart-phones with web browsers, its a logical next step for us to provide a special interface for these devices.

Custom fields is another advanced feature of IdeaScale that enables powerful customization of your community. There are basically two ways for a community moderator to collect information to associate with members: info can either be collected via the sign-up form when users register for IdeaScale, or certain questions can be built into an idea submission. For example, if a moderator asked “What is your department?” on the sign-up form, that data could be stored in IdeaScale for later.

The “custom fields” data can then be used in a number of ways–the newest of which is within emails that go out to community members. When the moderator clicks “email idea” from the Idea Detail screen of any idea, they can email the idea to a certain subset of people. Borrowing from the examle above, this might mean sending email only to people in a particular department, (ie. accounting, marketing, HR, etc). See the links below to learn more about custom fields and emailing.

More info:

More than one person can have the same bright idea, so sometimes it’s necessary to manually merge two or more duplicate ideas together. IdeaScale now includes a simple merge tool to assist moderators in combining redundant ideas together quickly and easily. Once logged into your community as a moderator, click on the title of an idea to the Idea Detail Screen. When you click on the “merge” icon in the right navigation, the Idea Merge Cart appears. The merge cart is used to collect all the duplicate ideas you’ve found related to the same topic. The first idea you add to the cart is the “parent idea” (or the primary idea). All other ideas added to the cart are the “child ideas” – these ideas will be added as comments to the parent idea. In addition, comments added to the child idea will be appended to the parent idea. Once you add two or more ideas, you’ll have the option to merge them together. Note that once the merge operation is completed, the operation cannot be undone. Happy merging.

More info: