First quarter recap

We kicked off 2021 with a bang, publishing 17 changelog entries covering new features and improvements over the past three months. This effort was fueled in part by our growing product team, who deployed dozens of updates to our production environment composed of changes to 60,000+ lines of code during that span.

With enhancements being released so frequently to our platform, each quarter we like to take some time to round up our favorites in our recap blog series to highlight those you may have missed. Keep reading to learn more about the exciting updates we released in Q1!

💬 Blast text message improvements

We released a host of improvements to the blast text message experience last quarter, including the ability to see how many used/remaining credits your community has, a real-time estimate of how many credits a particular combination of recipients will use, and a warning whenever the estimate exceeds the number of available credits.

👋 Default invitation message

One of our most popular feature requests is now available: the ability to save a custom default invitation message! You can quickly save a custom default message when sending invitations, or directly from the settings. The new custom message will be conveniently loaded into the message box the next time you go to send an invitation.

🕘 History of invitations

You can now view a history of invitations sent from your community website, along with their outcomes! The "result" column indicates whether the invitation was sent, skipped, etc., and the "joined" column can help you quickly identify who has or hasn't joined your community website.

❓ Reason for declining accounts

When declining an account, you can now optionally provide a reason for why the account was declined. If provided, the reason will be shared with the members of that account, helping to make your approval process more transparent and saving time when admins would have otherwise had to reach out manually.

🚨 Email accounts pending deletion count

With the addition of a red notification bubble on the "Restore deleted accounts" button, it's now more noticeable when there are email accounts pending permanent deletion.

⌚️ More intelligent “time on site” values

Instead of always reporting how long visitors spent on your website in seconds, the value will now be intelligently displayed in hours, minutes, and seconds.

🔍 View activities for members

When viewing an individual member, the activity log will be shown—but filtered to just the activities by that member.

💳 Expanded name recording for payments

Our interface will now record the cardholder (credit/debit cards) or account holder (bank accounts) name for member payments, along with the member's name at the time of payment. Both of these pieces of information will be displayed to admins, and can be particularly useful in identifying who made a payment after a member or account has been deleted.

Wrapping up

Phew! That may seem like a long list of improvements, but there's even more notable changes on our changelog! Plus, our changelog doesn't include all the many small refinements, bug fixes, and improvements we make to our platform daily.

Many of these improvements were made possible by the state-of-the-art technology powering the beta Admin Portal, and therefore are only available via that interface. We're continuing to make steady progress on our next gen front ends, with the beta Admin Portal growing ever closer to completion.

By the way, we're moving offices! Our parent company secured a significantly larger, uber modern space for when we return to in-person working in a couple months. If your community is subscribed via checks, you should have received an email announcing the new mailing address. If not, please let us know.

As always, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, watch our changelog, and read our blog for all the latest happenings here at HOA Express.

Until next time.