2021

Sarah S.
  • Updated

December 2021

New

New rules for usernames

New Chorus usernames cannot contain a space (or a few other, much less common special characters). This helps pave the way for our move to a new authentication system. If you’ve been encouraging your writers to sign up with “Firstname Lastname” to make sure their byline displays correctly, make sure they fill out the first and last name in their profile instead. Reach out to us with any questions. 

Turn off AMP for any story

If your story contains content that won’t work well on Google’s AMP format (accelerated mobile pages), head to the finalize screen to prevent an AMP version from being generated. Read more on the Chorus blog.

Managers: Restore permissions for your team

Chorus permissions are automatically suspended after 60 days of inactivity. If you’re a manager, you can now help your teammates get back into Chorus after some time away without needing to reach out to your support address. Just look for the “Restore permissions” option on the inspect screen. Read more about suspending and restoring permissions. 

Fixed

November 2021

New

Layout gets its own screen

The new layout screen in the story editor is where you can go to choose a feature template, add a drop cap, or adjust the placement of images and other inline story components. Moving these options to their own screen should allow us to improve performance and add flexibility with future updates. Read more on the blog, and we’d love to hear any feedback about this change. 

Fixed

  • Chorus Video lost its connection to Facebook for a few days, so videos couldn’t be sent to the social network. This is resolved, so you can publish videos to all of our supported platforms again.
  • If you embedded a YouTube video with a start time selected, an AMP validation error would occur. This is now fixed.
  • When you change your Chorus username, a message appears before you save that lets you know if your new selection is available. This message would incorrectly tell you the username was available no matter what. Now it will accurately warn you if you’re trying to select a username that’s already been taken.

October 2021

New

Emails for third-party logins

Many of us—your trusty product team collaborators included—have accidentally made a second Chorus account from time to time. Although Chorus prevents multiple accounts from having the same email address, duplicate accounts can still happen if you signed up for one account with an email, and then later tried to log in with a third-party service like Google or Twitter. Now, we’re capturing email addresses from those third-parties whenever possible, to help us know more of our registered users and to take us one step further towards preventing account collisions. If you use Chorus for work, now’s a good opportunity to make sure we have your work address on file. Here’s how.

Search for stories by group

We’ve updated the search sidebar in the story editor to make it easier to find stories that belong to a particular group. Give it a try, and once you’ve honed in on the stories you’re looking for, you can save the search. Read more on the Chorus Blog. 

Fixed

  • Videos in stories were failing to display properly in Apple News. This will be fixed going forward, but you might need to select Update from your Apple News dashboard on video stories published after Sept. 28. Due to caching in Apple News, it may take several hours before you see the video update in the app.
  • Videos sent to Rev for captioning were failing intermittently. We’ve changed how these files are processed, so they should work without a hitch.
  • You might have seen a welcome banner in the story editor, even if you’re not new to Chorus. We do want you to feel welcome, but we won’t show this banner quite as much any more.
  • Embedding an Instagram Reel in a story could cause any RSS feeds containing the story to break. Reels shouldn’t cause this issue going forward.

September 2021

New

If you find yourself always looking for the same stories in the Chorus dashboard—say, stories from a particular group, or everything that’s awaiting review—this update is for you. You can now save searches to revisit them whenever you’d like. Go ahead, get granular. Read more about this and other recent improvements to search on the Chorus blog.

Fixed

  • When you select the “chat” icon to read Chorus updates in the story editor—like, say, these release notes—you can now use your keyboard’s escape key to close the overlay and get back to what you were working on. 
  • If your newsletter’s name contains an apostrophe, it will no longer show up garbled in the story editor when you add a newsletter signup form to your story. 
  • The period at the end of the warning message for too-small images was appearing on its own line. Shout-out to any eagle-eyed editors who noticed this bug, it’s fixed now. 

August 2021

New

You can now search the dashboard for stories that use a feature template using the search sidebar—just tick the box for “Feature.” Hopefully this makes finding all your high-impact pieces easier.

Fixed

  • When someone’s permissions were suspended due to inactivity, a bug prevented them from being added to a byline. This is fixed, so your freelancers and contributors don’t need to log in to be recognized in Chorus.
  • We bid farewell to the “Volume” moniker for our video tools. You can now find them at [yourorganization].video.usechorus.com.
  • The calendar icon for scheduling stories went missing from Chrome for a bit.
  • Image cropping also went a bit wonky in Chrome, but should be picture-perfect again now.
  • After scheduling a story, a link to take you back to the dashboard appears. This link will now do what it says once again and return you to the dashboard.
  • Sidebars, which are right-aligned by default, were sometimes giving that alignment to other nearby objects. Now related stories and other insertable story objects can be placed below a sidebar while still maintaining their own default alignment. (Of course, you can adjust the alignment from there in layout mode.)
  • A formerly-benign video hosting service started sharing adult content to lots of blogs and websites—including some of ours. We did a thorough scrub of the archives to remove all of those videos and links from all Chorus sites.

July 2021

New

Search Updates

A summary of what you’ve searched now appears above your search results. These little summary “chips” are removable so you can quickly modify your search without opening the search sidebar back up.

Fixed

  • Permissions expire after 60 days of inactivity in Chorus and need to be restored if someone needs Chorus access. However, now even if someone has expired Chorus permissions, their byline can be added to stories.
  • The hide caption toggle for Instagram embeds is back! You can go back to letting some pictures speak for themselves.
  • Some types of searches weren’t initially displaying with those new summary chips. We’ve fixed this so no matter how or what you search, you can modify your search quickly along with everyone else.
  • Hitting the forward slash key (/) now will automatically open and highlight the search sidebar so you can begin typing your search right away. It’s the little things! 
  • When you search by story status your results will once again be ordered by date relevance.
  • Refreshing your browser after doing a search no longer clears your search terms from the search sidebar.

June 2021

New

We rolled out a new search sidebar in the dashboard to make searching for content more straight-forward. We hope this lets you spend less time remembering search phrases and more time finding the stories you are looking for.

Fixed

  • If you minimize the search sidebar, the dashboard will now remember that preference the next time you visit.
  • Image uploading is now faster. We know those milliseconds can add up, and hope this makes composing stories a bit snappier moving forward.
  • Some GIFs were failing to upload as expected. We’ve fixed this so GIFs and other images within Chorus’s size limit  should upload without issue.
  • Images would sometimes fail to upload if the extension was .JPG instead of .jpg. Feel free to use caps lock as you please.
  • Along with our big search update, we tidied up a few other parts of the search experience. When you search by status or story type, stories that have been worked on recently will be ranked as more relevant.
  • And, if you weren’t on the first page of results when changing the sort option on the dashboard—for instance, changing from Relevance to Last modified in a search result—Chorus wouldn’t take you back to the first page of results. Now it will, so you can start from the top.
  • We patched up a security vulnerability that could lead to unintended redirects.
  • Instagram posts were failing to embed correctly. We’re still working on getting the captions toggle back, but you can embed all the Instagram-worthy posts now.

May 2021

New

Accessible embeds

Alt text isn’t just for images—if you’re using an HTML block, make sure to include an alt attribute so folks using a screen reader know what’s in the embed. A new warning on the finalize screen will help you remember.

Fixed

  • When uploading images to the asset manager, metadata like IPTC captions or keywords weren’t coming into Chorus correctly. This is fixed now, and you can read more about photo metadata on Chorus here.
  • The dashboard was displaying stories with the community timezone, instead of each person’s preferred timezone. This is fixed, and we started displaying the timezone in the dashboard to make things clearer going forward. If you need to edit your timezone, here’s how.
  • Also in “what time is it?”: Submitted times disappeared from the dashboard for a bit. And the assets screen was displaying the current time for each item, instead of when the asset was uploaded. Things should be ticking along smoothly again, please accept our apologies whenever it’s convenient for you.
  • In preview mode, links within insertable objects (like sidebars or action boxes) weren’t always clickable. We’ve fixed this, so preview more accurately reflects how the published story will work.
  • If you use the story editor on a mobile device, you’ll notice some spacing adjustments in the dashboard to make it easier to use (and to remove an extra-tiny community logo).
  • Short links in the story editor weren’t always redirecting to their published story right away. We’ve made a change that we’re hoping will speed things up.

April 2021

New

An update to Apple News publishing

Previously, some embeds would prevent a story from being sent to Apple News—think PDFs, audio players, and certain image hosts. Now, stories with these tricky embeds will be sent to Apple News with the embed removed, instead. Keep an eye out for platform warnings, and make sure your story will still make sense without the embedded content. (Hint: Explaining the content or significance of an embed in your story is great for accessibility, too.)

Fixed

  • Text formatting icons in the story editor were mixed up for a bit. Donuts on us!
  • If a contributor’s username contained a period, a search for their stories in the dashboard would come up blank. We’ve fixed this error, so search away.
  • Subscribe links weren’t working in podcast breakers that appear on some home and hub pages. They’re back in action now so your listeners can subscribe wherever they get their podcasts.
  • If you use Chorus Video on mobile, it was possible to type letters into fields that should only have numbers, like Episode #. No more, those boxes will only accept numbers now.

March 2021

New

New URLs for Chorus tools

We moved the story editor to a new home, [yourorganization].stories.usechorus.com. Soon, Chorus Video will follow suit, to [yourorganization].video.usechorus.com. These updates lay the foundation for our work to introduce a whole new login and authentication system to Chorus, so stay tuned for more. 

Fixed

  • We occasionally use a banner to send messages in the story editor—for example, when we need to put Chorus in maintenance mode. This banner has been updated from green to blue. We hope this reduces confusion going forward. 
  • We removed a confirmation page from the log-out flow to save everyone a click. Now when you hit “log out,” it happens right away.
  • You can’t edit an image’s credit when the credit is hidden. The experience of updating an image’s metadata in the story editor now matches this reality. 
  • We’ve cleaned up some text formatting on the recently-redesigned asset manager screens.
  • A table on our cookie pages was being cut off in some browsers. This particular table is now scrollable so readers can get the full picture.

February 2021

New

Support for headless Chorus in the help center

Our help center, chorus.help, is being updated with specific guidance for organizations that use Chorus in a headless mode. (This currently applies to a small number of organizations.) See an example here, and read more about coupled versus headless Chorus here.

Fixed

  • “Most read” recirculation objects disappeared from the right rail for about a day. That data is updating appropriately again, hot cocoa’s on us!
  • Search result pages have been modified to make them less attractive to would-be spammers.
  • We fully retired legacy product objects by migrating them into newer product cards.
  • RSS feeds for super groups weren’t all showing stories from around the network. These are updated now so readers can get the full picture.
  • If you have manager permissions, you can now inspect other users without also needing moderator permissions—for example, to help someone else reset their 2FA.
  • When sorting the story editor dashboard, the option formerly known as “first published” is now “original publish date.” Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer: This option shows stories ordered by the date they were originally published.
  • Stories that are password protected will now be hidden from homepages and link sets by default—but it’s still a good idea to make sure autotweets are off and the story is hidden from third-parties until it’s ready. Read more about story passwords here.

January 2021

Fixed

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