January 2025 Release Notes

Features, enhancements, and fixes released by Civic Roundtable in January 2025.

Highlights

Commenting improvements
Streamlined new member onboarding
Anonymous polls

Commenting improvements

Commenting is now more intuitive, visually appealing, and easier to navigate, fostering better discussions within Roundtable.

This update introduces several enhancements:

Higher information density – More comments are visible at a glance, reducing unnecessary whitespace and making discussions easier to follow.
Clearer conversation flow – Lines now connect comments to their replies, making it easier to track discussions and understand context. Replies are now limited to two levels to improve readability. Any additional replies will reference the original comment instead of forming deep, hard-to-follow threads.
Updated visual design – Gone are inconsistent fonts and gray backgrounds. The new design ensures a cleaner, more polished look that is consistent with the rest of Roundtable.
Smarter comment input box – The comment box now starts as a single row and expands dynamically as you type, keeping the interface clean while accommodating longer responses.

Streamlined new member onboarding

The new member sign-up process is now faster and more user-friendly.

A seamless onboarding experience is crucial to making new members feel welcome and setting them up for success in Roundtable. This update simplifies and streamlines the sign-up and sign-in process:

Fewer required fields – We’ve minimized the number of fields new users need to fill out, making onboarding quicker and more user-friendly.
Progress indicator – A new progress tracker guides users through sign-up, ensuring they know how many steps remain and what to expect next.
Simplified account access – Members can now sign up or log in using their Google or Microsoft accounts, providing secure, hassle-free access without needing to create or remember another password.
Improved invitation emails – All community invitation emails use an improved, more descriptive template, ensuring clarity for the recipient.

Anonymous polls

Polls can now be configured to collect anonymous responses.

This feature is designed to encourage honest responses in larger groups, where fear of embarrassment may hinder participation. By removing the pressure of providing the "wrong answer" in front of peers, members can now respond more freely and confidently, creating a more open and engaging environment. When creating a poll where “responses are anonymous”, neither the poll creator nor the respondents can view who submitted each response.

Enhancements

Improvements to the platform that make it more powerful and easier-to-use.

[📅 Events] The event "organizer" is no longer included on events exported to your calendar.
[📅 Events] “Ends at..." deadline badges now appear only for notices and not events.
[📅 Events] Banners are now displayed when events with meeting links are currently happening, making it easy for members to quickly join.
[📅 Events] Meeting links for Zoom, Meet, Webex, and Teams now display icons on the event.
[🧭 Navigation] Confirmation modals are now visually easier to understand.
[🧭 Navigation] Member job titles are now displayed in a smaller, gray font to improve readability.
[🧭 Navigation] Logged-in members visiting URLs of other communities will now see an option to request to join that community, replacing the previous error page.
[🧭 Navigation] Invited users can now join or request access to a Community when navigating to any URL within that community.
[🧭 Navigation] The "..." menu buttons in the account modal are now more discoverable.
[🧭 Navigation] A "submit feedback" button is now included in the Help menu.
[🔔 Notifications] Notification settings now use toggle switches instead of checkboxes for easier control.
[🔔 Notifications] Community invitation emails now feature an improved template that is more descriptive and consistent with other emails.
[🔔 Notifications] Daily digest emails are now delivered based on each member's time zone.
[📰 Posts] Email forwarding now supports attachments up to 8MB, an increase from the previous limit of 4.8MB.
[📰 Posts] Email forwarding now removes "Fw:" prefix from post titles.
[📇 Profiles] The member profile photo cropper now displays a circle instead of a square, providing a more accurate preview of the final appearance.
[📇 Profiles] Member profile location suggestions are now limited to city, state, county, and country.
[📚 Resources] The resource summary error message is now more detailed, providing clearer context when we're unable to summarize a resource.
[📚 Resources] The search-to-add-to-collection input no longer clears the search input after selecting a value from the dropdown.
[📚 Resources] The "Remove File" button is now gone from the new resource upload modal as it was redundant with the existing "X" remove button.
[📚 Resources] Plain text and code files are now displayed in the resource viewer.

Fixes

Addressed issues to improve the product experience.

[📅 Events] Long event locations no longer overflow the container.
[📰 Posts] Post @ mentions now use the same blue color as other links.
[📇 Profiles] Member profile location is once again required during onboarding.
[📇 Profiles] Editing an organization name to conflict with another organization now has a clearer error message.