Crowdpurr's September Product Update is here! And it's worth the wait. This month we're bringing you several new features including Start Time Scheduling, Custom VIP Guest List, Instagram Social Walls, and several enhancements and bug fixes.
Start Time Scheduling
We first mentioned this next feature back in May and now Start Time Scheduling is here! And free to all users on all plans.
Set it and forget it!
You can now simply set a date and time when you want any of your trivia games (or other experiences) to start! Choose the exact date and minute up to one year in the future. Combine Start Time Scheduling with Fully Automatic Mode to create entirely automatic trivia games that run completely on their own with no host intervention. Create an entire schedule of virtual trivia games!
With Start Time Scheduling all of the following are possible:
- Create a scheduled series of daily trivia game in advance that run on their own at the time you set! Our weekly 100% original trivia games make this super easy!
- Educators can create an evening trivia quiz at 1PM from their classroom and schedule it for their students to take at 7PM later that night! No worrying about logging back in to start it!
- Schedule trivia games to start in different time zones at different times without having to actually be at the Experience Dashboard to start the countdown or trivia game.
- Combine with Countdown Timers and Fully Automatic Playback to make a completely automated virtual trivia game experience.
If using Multi-Round Trivia Games with our Next Round feature and Fully Automatic Playback modes, your trivia games will even jump from round to round completely automatically! You can create entire sequences of trivia games that kick off and run entirely on their own.
Check out our Help Center article that goes into more detail at Schedule Start Time Explained.
Custom Field VIP Guest List
Back in May's Product Update, we released an all-new VIP Guest List feature that allows you to verify your participants to a pre-imported list of emails or phone numbers. If a participant's email or phone number isn't on the list, they can't get into your trivia game! This is great for verifying participants, requiring pre-registration and/or having participants pay an entry fee, etc.
Also in May we added a Custom Lead Capture feature that allows you collect any type of lead capture field you want.
This month we've combined these two features into an enhancement called Custom Field VIP Guest List! Now you can select any one of your Custom Lead Capture fields and use that field for the VIP Guest List!
So instead of only allowing email and phone number, VIP Guest Lists can now be created from any of the following for example:
- Twitter or Instagram handles
- Employee IDs
- Ticket/Pass Numbers
- Any unique arbitrary participant-distributed code, number, or ticket
You can even create a spreadsheet of a random or sequential list of ticket numbers and assign those to your participants to use as their access to your virtual trivia game! This can also be used to create secure polls and voting where each participant is issued a secure code that can only be used once to gain access to a poll.
To learn more, see the Set Up A VIP Guest List with a Custom Field section of our Help Center article Verifying Participants with VIP Guest List. To use this feature, you must be on the Seminar Plan or higher.
Social Wall Instagram Integration
After some time being down, our Social Wall Instagram integration has been restored! You can now configure your Social Walls to query for posts and images from Instagram based on a #hashtag. Your crowd simply posts on Instagram using your #hashtag and our Social Wall magically displays the posts and images.
Additionally, Crowdpurr Social Walls can aggregate tweets from Twitter using a specified #hashtag and/or your crowd can simply post text and images using the Crowdpurr Participant View at crowd.live.
To learn more about adding Instagram aggregation to a Social Wall, check out the following Help Center article Set Up Twitter & Instagram on a Social Wall.
Bug Fixes
In addition to the performance improvements above, we squashed a few user-reported smaller bugs in September including:
🐞Blank White Screen on Participant View Using Internet Explorer 11
Yes, there are still people using Internet Explorer. All 6% of you. Jokes aside, Internet Explorer still sees a lot of corporate use where browsers and operating systems are slow to upgrade. And Crowdpurr fully supports Internet Explorer 11. The blank screen was caused by a configuration issue the new Question Media library options added in July’s Product Update. The issue has been corrected.
🐞YouTube Videos Fail to Load on the Participant View
Some users reported that YouTube videos were failing to load on the Participant View for some players. We identified and corrected an issue that was, in some cases, attempting to display YouTube videos before they were ready.
🐞YouTube Issues in Crowd Controlled Mode on the Participant View
Using Crowd Controlled Mode and adding YouTube videos to multiple questions was causing YouTube videos to play over top of one another, start early, and several other chaotic issues. Our team went back and did a deep dive into Crowd Controlled Mode and made sure YouTube videos are managed properly between question tabs. The experience now is wonderful.
Keep the bug reports coming! We love fixing issues our users report. Simply email us at help@crowdpurr.com.
What's Next?
We have some exciting new features in the works. Many of which we’ll be revealing in our upcoming $1000 Virtual Holiday Party from October’s product updates!
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