SugarClub Updates and Upgrade - Friday, 11 August 2023

August 2023 marks the 3rd anniversary of SugarClub! Thank you to every single member of this community for making it what it is. It's always inspiring to see customers, partners, employees, and other Sugar enthusiasts come together to share their experience, expertise, and knowledge, to make each other more successful!

Behind the scenes, our Customer Experience team, which oversees and manages the site, has been hard at work on a variety of updates to help improve your SugarClub experience as a member of this community.

I'm very excited to announce that these changes will be released on Friday, August 11th!

The upgrade will begin at 7:00 am EDT / 12:00 pm BST / 9:00 pm AEST. During the upgrade, SugarClub will still be online and accessible, but you may encounter unexpected changes or interruptions along the way. Our team apologizes for any inconvenience, but we hope the impact will be minimal and worthwhile. This upgrade includes the following changes:

New Navigation "MegaMenu"

We updated the top-level navigation in SugarClub to enhance your user experience. The new update makes it simpler to locate the specific areas of SugarClub that you need to access. The previous menu had become overly complex and difficult to navigate, so this has been cleaned up and updated. You'll also see another menu with some quick links at the very top of the screen, allowing quick access to DevClub, PartnerClub, the Sugar Support site, SugarOutfitters, and SugarCRM.com.

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New

New Events Experience

The Sugar Events page has been improved to give you an easier experience finding upcoming events from SugarCRM, as well as easier ways to find additional events being shared in SugarClub.

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New

@Mention Updates

You can now @mention any piece of content in SugarClub, not just users and places. Also, when @mentioning, you'll see a breakdown of different suggestion categories - Members, Content, Applications, and Groups. These categories are also context-aware, so they will prioritize results based on the location of your post. For example, when @mentioning in a forum post, other people who have participated in the discussion will be prioritized so that they can be easily tagged.

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New

Peekable Content

Hover previews are now more interactive and content-rich. They also include content-specific previews used for inline previewing of mentioned content within the community. Also, user hover pop-ups are easier to navigate, allow you to see all of that member's badges, and generally more robust.

Content Preview

Group Preview

New Embeddables in Posts

You can now embed additional types of content into forum posts and more:

  • "Tips" embeddable types to render Information, Warnings, and Errors
  • "Navigation List" embeddable type to list a set of navigation links in content (Like a table of contents or a mosaic list of references)

Note: These Embeddables will not be immediately available in all circumstances for all members. Please review the Insert menu to see available options.

Tip Embeddables

Navigation List Embeddables

General updates

  • Multiple experiences and interfaces have been updated, including the home page, user profile, User Groups, and more. You'll see a refreshed look and feel, as well as more contextual and personalized information for you when viewing a page.
  • Privacy Indicators on group banners showing if you're in a private group in SugarClub versus a group that is public-facing
  • Added cancel option when creating and editing content
  • Added QAPage structured data on question forum threads so SugarClub answers will be visible when running a Google search
  • Comment search results have been moved to their own Comments facet instead of from their content type's category
  • General site-wide search and performance improvements

Content Moderation

  • Conversation messages (Direct Messages) are now processed through the same automated moderation tooling as all other posts. If a message is identified as abusive or otherwise against SugarClub Guidelines, it is not shown to the recipient(s) in the conversation, they are not alerted of a new message, and the author can appeal the moderation to the SugarClub Administrative team.
  • Moderation automated tooling improvements to better recognize "legitimate" content versus spam making it easier for regular and active SugarClub members to not have content automatically moderated

Scoring Improvements

SugarClub uses weighted metrics to analyze Community data and provide 'scores' that are used in a variety of ways. The underlying system has been overhauled, resulting in improved performance, search results, and other rankings.

Sliding Login Expiration

Member authentication cookies will be extended periodically while they are active in the Community. When there is a period of inactivity, members will see a message allowing the user to extend their session manually, otherwise they will stay logged in longer without having to re-authenticate as frequently as before.

This is only a summary of the changes being added with this upgrade. As always, our team here at SugarCRM is continuing to update SugarClub and identify ways to improve your experience. Along with these changes, we're excited to share some more changes coming soon to the Sugar Support Site. Keep an eye on Sugar News for more information coming soon!

Starting on Monday, 14 August 2023, if you notice any issues with SugarClub, please fill out this form, comment below, or email sugarclub@sugarcrm.com to let our team know. Thank you in advance for alerting us to these issues or other feedback so that we can continue to improve your experience. 

Last, but not least, as with any community, we are stronger with the support and participation of community members. A special THANK YOU!!! to the Sugar customers and partners who took time out of their days to help with testing, feedback, and more, including as well as many Sugar employees across our whole company who pitched in to help!