Today we’re happy to present a Privacy Setting available to all forums.  This feature filters out audience member logins based on email addresses.  If a non-member were to stumble upon your page, they could request to have access, but the forum Admin would have to either accept or reject the inquiry.

Forum Admins will find this new setting in the “Edit Forum” section of the admin dashboard (see image).

We think this is going to make many users happy.

Maybe you’re one of them?!

Allegedly, there was a discussion about social media & feedback at the Fuel Conference last week.  One of the responsible party members, Ryan Carson of Carsonified, was nice enough to have mentioned UserVoice.

Yesterday he announced they had set up a page for their upcoming Future of Web Design conference in New York. The announcement generated a fair amount of traffic, however not all of the traffic was helpful. A number of anonymous types left some rather unusual posts – which prompted a conversation about anonymous posting.

In some cases, having anonymous posts can be healthy, good and productive.  In other cases, there may be an excuse to be silly and generally unhelpful.

Yesterday’s experience with the FoWD page showed what happens when silliness gets out of hand. Ryan & company had sincere efforts for gathering feedback for potential speakers – but a few readers took advantage.  So after hearing his concern – we rolled out a fix ahead of schedule.

If you are an account owner on UserVoice, sign in and click on “Manage Account“ in the upper right hand corner of your UserVoice page.

You’ll see it now says, “Allow Anonymous Feedback?” on the right-hand sidebar. It says “true” by default – but, if you are an account owner, you can click this link and select, “false” which will prevent all further anonymous feedback.

So again – thanks go out to Ryan Carson for utilizing UserVoice and also for pushing the agenda to make anonymous users optional. There was also a request that prompted the original consideration of this feature by our user redrum - so we also want to thank redrum for contributing the initial idea.

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We’ve switched to a design that more closely resembles that of an embedded forum. Our primary goal was to put more emphasis on your brand and make it clear to your users that this is *your* page.

Our secondary goal was to explain to users our role as a facilitator of the discussion. We’ve placed ‘powered by UserVoice’ logos at the bottom of the login and signup forms something we hope, along with the more forum-like layout, will better explain the difference between a UserVoice account and one from the parent site.

This also sets us up to be able to embed UserVoice into any page on your site. We’ll keep you posted on our progress

A few other improvements:

• Admins may create as many suggestions as they want without spending their votes. This will let them import suggestions or “seed” the page with existing ideas.
• Ability to embed a single suggestion in another page. Useful for referencing a suggestion when blogging about how you fixed it. Note that this suggestion requires you to click-through before adding votes, comments, etc.For example:
  <script src="http://uservoice.uservoice.com/suggestions/454.embed" type="text/javascript"></script>

  We’ll have a dialog in the sidebar of each suggestion page to make this easier shortly.