December 2020
New
An updated asset management experience
After making a few rounds of updates to the Chorus asset manager, we bid farewell to the legacy assets screen. How is the change going for you? We’d love to hear any feedback or questions.
Quick links to legacy Chorus
If you have editor or higher permissions, you might go into legacy Chorus to organize your home and hub pages, manage groups, or create link sets. We’ve added quick links to these tools and a few more under a new “admin” menu on the editorial dashboard, hopefully this makes navigation a bit simpler. (From legacy Chorus, just hit “dashboard” to get back to the story editor.)
Check your extensions, please
If you experience frequent autosave errors in Chorus, please take a moment to check your browser’s extensions and remove any you no longer need. (Here’s how to check in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.) Grammarly, in particular, is known to cause issues—we recommend turning it off for Chorus and using other tools to check spelling and grammar.
Fixed
- Adding an email address to your user account will no longer log you out of Chorus.
- If a URL linked in an article contained a # character, it wouldn’t render properly on Apple News. This is fixed now, so readers across platforms can follow those links.
November 2020
New
Optimize groups
Consider adding a SEO name and SEO description to your groups to help both search engines and potential audiences find your content. As the backbone of your community’s taxonomy, groups and super groups are already powerful tools for SEO on Chorus, but this new option allows you to optimize them even more. Read more on the blog.
Batch upload assets
No need to go to legacy Chorus to upload photos and files—it’s now possible to upload from the Assets screen in the story editor. And, you can select multiple files when uploading from your device. Give it a try and send any feedback our way before we say farewell to the legacy assets manager. Read more here.
Fixed
- PDFs up to 10MB can be embedded directly in Chorus. If you try to embed a larger PDF, you’ll see a more helpful error message now. (We recommend using a third-party service, like DocumentCloud or Scribd, if you work with larger PDFs often.) Read more about supported file types.
- Changing the order of bylines in the story editor should also change them on the published story. This wasn't happening, but everything should be in its place now.
- When editing a site’s navigation, the modal used to close if you moved outside of it. Now, it will only close when you publish or discard your changes, or hit the x to close it.
- Redirects are no longer required to be lower-case. If you request a redirect in Chorus (ie: yoursite.com/coolstuff), it will redirect correctly no matter how audiences enter the URL (ie: yoursite.com/CoolStuff).
- We’ve changed the name of the layout tool from “story layout” to “hub layout”—hopefully it’s a bit clearer.
October 2020
New
Better browsing for assets
We updated the Chorus asset manager to make working with images and files easier. You can now edit an image’s metadata from the assets screen. Plus, a new grid view with larger thumbnails lets you see more images at-a-glance. As always, you can search by date, tag, credit, and more to home in on the assets you need. Read more on the Chorus blog.
Fixed
- Some logos were missing from Google’s search results pages. They should be back, so when your stories hit the top news carousel your brand can shine.
- Instagram posts could not be embedded for a bit there, but they’re back in action now. Pizza’s on us!
- If you’re looking for a published story in your dashboard, you can now search by URL. As a reminder, we have a number of handy search phrases to help you find the story you’re looking for—read more on the help center.
- You’ll see a more helpful error message if you try to add the same story to a stream more than once.
- Sometimes an autosave error would occur when opening a sidebar. That should be less frequent now.
- The scroll bar in the story editor is slightly darker and more accessible.
- “By:me” searches in the asset manager should give the expected results now.
- We’ve clarified which IPTC metadata fields will be imported to Chorus along with photos—find full details on the help center.
- If you place a group with a title image into a home or hub page layout, the title image will now link back to the group.
- On feature stories with the overlay template, the lead art’s caption would sometimes run into the social share buttons and byline on mobile. We’ve tidied up the display, so captions can be as verbose as they need to be.
September 2020
New
Replacing lead images
We’ve made it easier to replace lead images with other media—no need to re-add search, social, and feed images anymore! Learn more about adding and replacing lead art.
Get a link for your story before publication
Now you can find a link to a story’s final URL before hitting publish. You can use this link for scheduling content in advance like social media posts or newsletters. Read more on the help center.
Pause permissions
If you don’t log in to Chorus frequently, you might have encountered issues with permissions expiring after 60 days of inactivity. Now, permissions will be suspended, instead of removed, after 60 days of inactivity, so we can easily restore permissions and help you get back in action faster.
Word counts for Google News
Google aims to surface the most relevant, complete, and authoritative stories to its audience. A new warning on Chorus’s finalize screen will let you know if your story is under 150 words, which is a good target to aim for to increase the chances of your story’s acceptance into the Google News index.
Fixed
- A group’s title image now displays slightly larger in stories, so it can be clearer to readers at-a-glance on all screen sizes.
- When a gallery is added to a story, its name is now visible from the compose screen.
- Across the Chorus-verse, several tweaks were made to breakers, newsletter signup boxes, and the like.
August 2020
New
Story Expiration
It’s now possible to schedule a story to be hidden from audiences at a specific time in the future.
Make URLs evergreen
Based on your feedback, we’ve moved the toggle to create an evergreen URL to the permalink area of the compose screen, instead of the finalize screen.
Recirculate older stories
The “Most read” module typically shows the most popular stories published in the last two weeks. Now, there’s an option to show the stories that have received the most traffic during the last two weeks, regardless of when they were published. Contact us if you’d like to let evergreen content appear in your community’s “Most Read” list.
Network-wide author profiles
If your network has multiple communities, you’re used to your contributors having multiple author profiles when they’ve written for more than one site. Now, you can make your national author profiles the default, so bylines from any community in the network will link there. Contact us to enable this setting for your network.
Don’t lose access to your Chorus account
If you’re planning to get a new mobile device, make sure to reset your two-factor authentication before switching over (managers can help out with this, too). Here are more tips for when you need help logging in.
Fixed
- Images in sidebars were displaying an error message on the compose screen, even though they were being added correctly. Everything’s working as expected now, and it looks that way too.
- California refined their legislation, so the wording of “Do Not Sell My Personal Info” links was updated on all sites. Chorus remains CCPA compliant.
- Working with very large Google Sheets sometimes caused issues with Chorus tables. Things should be much zippier now!
- Searching for USA Today images sometimes only returned a single page of results. We worked with their team to resolve things, and search results should be back to normal now.
- Multiword video keywords were not being sent properly to Roku feeds, but now they are.
- Links within tables should stay within their cells now.
- Selecting a feature layout sometimes took more than one try.
July 2020
Fixed
- We’ve made some improvements to the way images appear on the compose screen, so things should be a little zippier now.
- Tweets sent from the story editor now show Chorus publishing platform as the source, instead of Vox Media.
- You can once again embed content from Twitch without any HTML.
- YouTube videos will now display at their selected start time in AMP.
- YouTube playlists are also looking their best in AMP.
- Gallery titles now display on the compose screen.
- We made some visual improvements to the way galleries display on small screens.
- We removed the legacy “promo settings” feature from the site layout tool.
June 2020
New
Customize default story group
It’s now possible to customize which group is added to stories by default. If you don’t want stories to be added to the front page automatically, get in touch and we’ll update this for you.
An updated legacy Chorus dashboard
While the legacy Chorus dashboard has long been retired, it’s still a helpful entry point to a range of Chorus tools. We’ve updated the language and links here to make it much easier to find what you’re looking for.
Curate stories from across the network
Contributors on communities that are part of a larger network of Chorus sites can now surface stories from across the network in the home and hubpage layout tool.
Clearer search headline help language
We’ve updated the help language around search titles and descriptions in the story editor to reflect current best practices. Learn more about customizing these fields.
Support for Twitch embeds
Twitch changed the way they support embeds. We’ve made updates to ensure previously embedded content will continue to display for audiences and documented how to embed Twitch content going forward.
Fixed
- Story previews were often failing to load. We resolved this issue, but are continuing to work on improving the preview experience.
- No more refreshing the site layout tool between searches—just clear out your search team and hit find.
- The button to create a new group disappeared for some users. It’s back now!
- Speaking of buttons, the modify buttons in the story layout tool were looking a little off. They’re all buttoned-up again.
- There’s no limit to the number of stories that can appear in a stream, but the story editor was only displaying 30 stories on the compose screen. We’ve added some pagination here so that you can see all the stories in a stream.
- Author profile images can now be removed entirely, you no longer need to select a replacement image.
- Dashboard search used to be finicky about capitalization, but now it’s not. Learn more about searching for stories.
May 2020
New
News disclaimer
Some stories change rapidly! Editors can now add news disclaimers to groups so audiences are always in the know.
Apple News banner
Want to promote a newsletter or podcast on your Apple News channel? We can set that up for you—here’s how.
Unlimited username changes
Go right ahead: now you can update your username as many times as you like without contacting us.
Updated documentation
We get lots of questions about third-party platforms, permalinks, optimizing groups for search, and managing link sets. Find these updated guides and more in our help center.
Fixed
- Some contributors in the EU were unable to log in on mobile.
- Recirculation sidebars no longer repeat the story you’re reading (even if it’s part of that group).
- Wide block image sliders are looking their best.
- Images that were uploaded by URL now display in the asset dashboard.
- Breakers were taking too long to update due to a caching issue. They should refresh within a few minutes.
- Due to some changes from Twitter, managers couldn’t add new community Twitter accounts to Chorus. We updated how we connect with their platform to resolve the issue.
- Curly (or smart) quotes can cause issues in HTML blocks. Now you’ll see a warning whenever curly quotes are present, along with an option to convert them to straight quotes.
- Horizontal rules weren’t always visible after zooming in the browser.
- The anchor links to the Headlines, Body, and Tags fields are on their best behavior.
- Managers in Chorus Video can (once again) give other people manager permissions.
April 2020
New
Publish evergreen URLs
Keep evergreen stories feeling fresh! Now you can remove the date from the URL so it feels more timeless in search results. Head over to Finalize > Advanced to make it an evergreen URL before publishing. Learn more and get some great tips from our search team.
See when community members joined
When searching for members in legacy Chorus, managers and moderators can sort the results by when people joined the community.
Syndication refinements
We’re continuing to improve syndication features in Chorus Video. You can now see the global unique identifier (GUID) on every project screen for tracking and troubleshooting. We’ve also made some changes to ensure migrated videos can be syndicated.
Fixed
- The Quick Admin menu was failing to load intermittently.
- Some stories were failing to send to Apple News. We narrowed it down to a bug with dollar signs in the body text and patched things up.
- Opening quotation marks were sometimes rendering as closing marks after pasting from Google Docs.
- Chorus supports GIFs up to 12MB in size. If you try adding a larger GIF, you’ll see a warning in the story editor.
- We do not support WEBP images. Now the platform lets you know.
- When you paste a link into the embed URL field, you can hit Return to see the embed preview. A bug was adding a carriage return, which was surely slowing some folks down.
- Captions for image grids were larger than other captions.
- Pages were appearing in the Apple News dashboard, but not being sent to Apple News as expected.
March 2020
New
Flexible syndication options
Chorus Video now supports unique syndication feeds for third-party platforms. Customize video titles, thumbnails, descriptions, and publication times for each feed. Learn more about managing syndication.
Fixed
- Streams and author profiles are wrapping better on mobile screen sizes.
- Stories with multiple authors were only displaying one author on RSS feeds.
- Captions on grouped images were larger on mobile than other captions.
- Bylines were not showing up on full archive pages.
- GIFs are now rendering at the same height as other lead images on split left and right layouts.
- Document Cloud embeds were displaying a deprecated GIF icon for audiences.
- Breaking news banners were not updating consistently on preview or publish.
- Chorus player embeds were not updating immediately for audiences after being updated in Chorus Video.
February 2020
New
- Editors can now limit the number of navigation items that appear before the More menu on desktop.
Fixed
- Editors can update site navigation again. Please accept our sincerest apologies.
- Image captions were displaying as body text on MSN feeds. Some feeds were also displaying lead images as unformatted HTML. Thanks for your patience while we were working on these feed issues!
- Discerning audiences will note that stream and group labels now line up correctly. It’s the little things, isn’t it?
January 2020
New
- Want to find stories from the beforetimes? Now you can search by year alone, for example, before:2016.
- We made some performance improvements to group search in the story editor, and the results are speeding right along.
- When your cursor is on styled text—whether it’s a heading, link, bullet, or blockquote, for example—the styles are highlighted in their respective menus.
- If you paste text with double dashes into a story, they’ll render as one em dash.
- Relatedly, highlighting text and reselecting an existing style will remove that style.
- When you clear text formatting, links stay put now but everything else returns to normal.
- Error messages in the Apple News dashboard are easier to read and understand.
Fixed
- A bug was causing group names and subnavigation to display incorrectly for audiences.
- Full bleed images in a grid weren’t rendering as full bleed.
- Some RSS feeds were rendering nonbreaking spaces within paragraphs of text.
- In the Apple News dashboard, searching for stories by Apple’s article ID wasn’t working properly.
- Strikethrough text was not displaying in action boxes, but rendering for audiences as expected.