Private posts are now displayed publicly on both page listings and episode permalinks with a title and teaser to create a membership. Previously private content was completely hidden. This change will let potential fans know what content they will gain access to once they join and create their membership.

Login link emails now have unique subject titles and clearer copy. Gmail was collapsing all of the login link emails with the same subject into one massive thread that made it hard to actually find the latest email with the relevant link to login.

Emails sent on registration, accepting a gift and confirming an email have been improved.

You can now add multiple emails to your account and configure if you'd like to receive notification emails or not on each address. Its a good idea to have more than one email associated with your account in the event you unexpectedly lose access to an email account. These notification settings on emails apply to both user and manager features across Fans.fm. Only emails with notifications enabled will receive page manager notifications for example.

The new editor introduced last release has been integrated into all rich text situations within the page manager experience.

Phone contacts in the call system can now be assigned a grade and now display both contact name and number when there is a match.

Page managers with membership systems can now set the title and body of the page to show after someone cancels a membership.

The key new feature of this release is a new rich text editor for writing posts on Fans.fm. Prior to this new editor posts were written in a raw textarea component with support for Markdown (if you knew it). Now there is a simple rich editor with support for basics like bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, links, lists and quotes. What I like is that the content written in the editor pretty much appears how it will once its published as you write it.

The editor is based on QuillJS which is widely used and has broad web browser support. One big reason I chose this editor was the ability for it to cleanly handle pasting in content from other editors which is a hard problem to solve. Now you can copy and paste content from say Google Docs and the formatting that applies (bold, links, etc) should carry over correctly. Specific size or color formatting will now be brought over but that is by design. If you run into issues with the new editor please don't hesitate to email help@fans.fm.

In addition to the editor I spent a lot of time upgrading the underlying framework of Fans.fm which is written in the Stop language and its web runtime. Stop is an open-source language I developed to describe the logic of software systems and the data that moves through them. Think of it as a blueprint for a software system that is not specific to any particular programming language implementation. Anyway, I made some key fundamental upgrades to the Stop language and its runtime to improve Fans.fm's reliability and then wrote a ton of tests to increase the test coverage of the site's implementation. If you'd like to learn more about Stop check out https://www.stop-lang.org.

Active memberships will now receive an email 7 days before an upcoming payment and a receipt email after a payment has been made. Upcoming emails and a double check on membership statuses are now done every morning at 8AM ET. Memberships that are found to be in an official unpaid state will be expired and an update payment method email will be sent.

Two Factor Authentication is now supported on any Fans.fm account. This is a TOTP RFC 6238 Two Factor implementation that is commonly supported by Google Authenticator, 1Password and others. When setting up a two factor device you will be presented a QR code to scan in your app of choice and a valid generated is required to officially enable two factor on your account. After activation a series of 10 recovery codes will be presented that should be printed or saved immediately (because this will be only shown once) so you can still log into Fans.fm in the event your two factor device is misconfigured at some point or inaccessible.

Notifications are now sent to page managers when fan memberships are created or cancelled.

Complimentary memberships have been improved for both the page manager created them and the end user accepting them.

The gift membership experience has been improved for the recipient accepting the gift and creating an account in one step. The recipient can also now clearly see the duration of the gift and when it expires.

Private fan membership only posts are now generally accessible to anyone but will only show content to those with access. Visitors without access will see a message that the post is locked and to gain access you have to become a fan and create a membership.

Welcome to the new Fans.fm! I released a major update about a month ago and will now podcast as new versions of Fans.fm are released.

This release addressed an issue with a CDN dependency on Cloudflare which crashed earlier today. I quickly removed the javascript/css dependency and uploaded the files in question to the Fans.fm CDN.

In this episode I discuss the upcoming release 2019.1 which will be all about emails! More notification emails for podcast managers and emails to fans of podcasts when new membership only episodes are released.

Subscribe!