You asked for it –– and now it's here: Group chats 🎉

Group chats on Circle allows you to spin up a group chat room with anywhere from a few members to as many as 50 people. With real-time group chats, you can create more connection in your Circle community:





Name your group chats and add a description. This is perfect if you have different coaching groups, or groups of online course students, or private client groups. Name your groups whatever makes most sense for your use case.

Assign room admins for group chat. Perfect for letting coaches, moderators, group leaders run their own group chat rooms.




Group chat is seamless on mobile and Circle’s iOS app. Group chat is especially useful on the go. Your members can now spin up group chats on the go when in the mobile browser or Circle’s iOS app.



See analytics on group chats. Understand how your members use group chat. Ideal if you’re running a community and trying to drive value and engagement for your members.



Invitation links for group chats. While anyone can always add members directly to group chats — sometimes it’s easier to invite members to a group chat and let them decide if they’d like to join. Invitation links for group chats make this as easy as sharing a link.




Automatically create group chats via Zapier. Want to automatically generate group chat rooms when you have new coaching groups, online course student groups, accountability groups, or other use-cases? You can now use Zapier to make group chats work with your other tools.

If you had messaging enabled, group chat has been automatically enabled for your community! Of course, you can turn it off at any time by going to Settings → Messaging.

If you want to learn more or get a live demo, join Mathilde  at one of our upcoming Office Hours sessions.

Finally, a big thank you to the 100+ beta testers who joined our private beta and contributed helpful feedback that helped us improve group chat for everyone. 🚀

Got a question? Have feedback? Want to share your specific use cases? As always, we'd love to hear from you in the comments. ⬇️

After a few months of extensive beta testing, we’re happy to share that our new text editor has been turned on for all communities! A big thanks to everyone who participated in the beta and helped us iron out all the kinks.

You can now use the colon (:) key to select emojis, or press the smile icon in the bottom right of the editor to pull up the emoji selector.





You can click on the "GIF" icon at the bottom right of the text editor to spruce up posts and comments with a GIPHY-powered GIF selector!




Pressing the slash (/) key at the start of any line now pulls up a powerhouse selector of formatting options, file uploads, and embed types. We'll show you everything that we've got!




Link previews from any website or blog post with Open Graph tags are now supported. Just copy a link and hit enter!




Selecting text anywhere in the editor now shows you an inline toolbar, making it much easier to adjust formatting options for longer posts.

Drag multiple image files into the editor, and we'll turn it into a full-size image gallery for members to look through.





To improve document consumption and context switching, PDFs can now be viewed inside the browser tab.





You can now make a bulleted list by starting a new line with a dash and a space (- ), an ordered list with a number and a period (1. ), and add a horizontal rule with two dashes.





'nuff said.

🚀 We're not done yet! More content blocks are on their way. What would you like to see us support? Give us your feedback in the comments! And if you've been using the new editor for a while, tell us which feature you've been using the most. 🙂

All good things must come to an end… and be replaced with something better. Today we’re beginning the rollout of a more intuitive user interface for creating new posts.

You might have seen it around the Circle community already. It looks like this:



In the next few days, this new modal will replace the full-screen post interface. This will make post creation quicker, simpler, and frictionless 

And here's something you’ll love: adding a cover image for your post and picking its space in a matter of seconds. No need to play around with settings and toggles. It’s all right there, below your message.

Functionally, everything stays the same. Your post settings are just a click away.




Glad you ask! At Circle, all our product decisions are informed by data and feedback.





This posting paradigm has been proven to be better for member engagement in products that serve billions of users. 🌎

Over the next few days, we're going to be gradually rolling out the new posting interface across our communities. From May 7, 2021, the full-page posting interface will no longer exist. 

Adding a post is done by clicking the “New Post” button or the “+” at the top of the page (from anywhere in your community), which will bring this modal screen. 

Unfortunately, there are times when maintaining two separate versions of the same feature is simply too costly and complicated to support. 

In maintaining two versions of the same feature, we increase the potential of introducing unintentional bugs in the future, and the amount of time it takes to add more improvements to the post-experience given it's now double the work for our engineers! This is one of the unfortunate times which involves deprecating the old UI.

But, worry not: by the time this UI is rolled out to the majority of our communities, we're going to do our best to ensure a 100% clean and bug-free experience which is proven across communities to increase engagement and reduce friction.

Yes! Full-screen mode will be available before we commence the broader roll-out next week.

Happy posting! 📝

Circle's iOS app is turning one month old. Despite it being so young, it's already proving incredibly popular amongst all of you. Today we are excited to announce that two of our most popular features from our desktop experience are now available in the app.

Circle's Home feature is the front door to your community, giving your members a personalized feed to discover all the latest posts across their spaces. Now your members get exactly the same experience on the go.





Any custom code you've embedded in your posts will now show in the iOS app. From Google Calendar to VideoAsk, the possibilities of what can be embedded are endless!



A special shoutout to  Damir Stuhec  and  Darko Spasovski   for bringing these awesome features to the iOS app! 👏

As you probably know, we're working on a host of major product updates this year. While the big updates are exciting, the smaller and more incremental ones matter too! We thought we'd share some of the smaller improvements we've shipped recently.

Ready for a roundup?

1️⃣  If you don't know VideoAsk, you should. It's an awesome way to start face-to-face conversations with your members. You can now embed video messages from VideoAsk just like this one from Circle's text editor. Just type in a link from VideoAsk and hit Enter! Your members can respond using text, video or audio, without leaving your community.


2️⃣  Do more with Zapier search actions. You can now leverage search actions in Zapier to verify if your members have a specific member tag, belong to a specific space, or to a space group. For example, you could use the search action "user email has member tag" to verify whether a member has a specific tag (eg: Pro member) after they purchase a product on another platform, and add then trigger a custom email based on that tag. Learn more about search actions.



3️⃣ Customize the From sender on email notifications. Enterprise customers now have the option to customize the default sender email from "no-reply@circle.so" to an email on their own custom domain. Here's how.

4️⃣ Hide the "Members" or "Posts" tab in your space. You can now select which tabs you want to appear from your space Settings > Layout > Display view > Visibility tabs.

5️⃣ More power to your members. Your members can now deactivate their own account from the Account area, saving you the time to process these requests manually. Also, in accordance with CAN-SPAM laws, they can one-click unsubscribe from email notifications from the email footer itself.

6️⃣ Improved SEO and link previews for your community home. You can now set custom meta and Open Graph tags for your home from Settings → Home. We highly recommended setting Open Graph tags for improving how your link previews look on Facebook and Twitter (pro-tip: use Twitter's card validator tool to see what it looks like).



7️⃣ More control over public posts on your community home. We've added a “Show posts from all public spaces” toggle in Settings → Home. If toggled on, posts from all public spaces are shown on members' homepage, even if they aren't a member of the public space. This is a great way for your members to discover and join new spaces.

8️⃣ Integrately integration. Want to consider an alternative to Zapier? Integrately just launched a Circle integration on their own, using our public API. Learn more about the integration.

9️⃣ URL shortcut for starting a new DM conversation. Some customers built member directories in Airtable or their own website, and wanted a simple URL they could link to for a "Message" button that triggers a new conversation with that member. This is now possible with following URL structure: [their-circle-profile-url]/message. For example: https://community.circle.so/u/142404b8/message

🔟 Updates to our API. We've added a GET record endpoint allowing you to fetch individual objects by their ID. Plus, our GET Index endpoints are now paginated. For further details, check our API documentation.


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Have questions about any of these features? You can join one of our weekly Office Hours sessions, and ask anything you want to know about using Circle.  🙂

You can now give your members the option to receive community notifications directly from their browser! This is a great way to ensure they're always in the loop about important community activity.

It's easy! Navigate to Settings → General and turn on the Enable browser notifications toggle.
 


Your members will now be given the option to enable browser notifications via the following banner.




If they click "No thanks", they won't be presented with this option again.

At any point, your members can manage their notification preferences from Account → Notifications. From there, they can specify which types of notifications they'd like to receive across email, in-app and iOS/browser.




Hey everybody! 👋 Here's some news  Sid Yadav ,  Rudy Santino  and I (Andy) wanted to share with you today...

We've raised an additional $4M to help accelerate our vision here at Circle. Techcrunch covered our raise. And you can see the announcement when you scroll down below.

We did this fundraise differently.

We had a lot of opportunities to raise traditional venture capital from top tier firms.

Instead, we chose to raise money from well known angel investors, operators, community builders, and...our very own customers / creators. 🎉 🙌 ❤️

It's special to be able to add some of our customers and community members to the cap table this time around. We exist because of you.

Those investors/advisors are:  Anne-Laure Le Cunff ,  Tiago Forte , Ankur Nagpal,  Nat Eliason , Brendon Burchard,  Ben Tossell ,  Greta Eagan , Elizabeth Yin,  swyx ,  Tonner ,  David Perell ,  Matthew Gartland (he/him)  and certainly others who I tried to tag but couldn't find 😂

This is a win for the whole community. Now we'll have more resources so that we can:

🏔 Execute on our product roadmap (which we're truly excited about)
👩🏻‍💻 Build the best community and education for folks building communities
🏅 Invest significantly in support and customer success


The creator movement is entering prime time, and so is Circle with a fresh $4M – TechCrunch

The creator movement has exploded in the last few years as platforms ranging from Substack to Clubhouse have made it easier than ever to reach an audience of willing readers and listeners. Yet the key to building sustainable creator businesses is the economics of these enterprises themselves. Get e…

https://social.techcrunch.com/2021/02/16/the-creator-movement-is-entering-primetime-and-so-is-circle-with-a-fresh-4m/



On Monday February 22 at 12:01am ET, we're planning to rename "topics" to "posts" across the Circle platform. As a result, access to your communities will be limited for a maximum of 2 hours (though hopefully much less!). Everything will go back to normal right after the brief maintenance period by 2am ET at latest.

We're performing this work at our lowest traffic hours during the week, so we can ensure a smooth transition with minimum disruption. You can follow Circle Status to be the first one to know when the maintenance is complete.




Over the past few months, we've heard from numerous customers about their confusion with the word "topic" — specifically, about how a "topic" differs from a "space". When we initially settled on the word "topic", Circle was a brand new platform. We didn't have paying customers, or even the concept of spaces!

But over time, it's become glaringly apparent to us that this confusion is worth resolving, and the best way to resolve it is by renaming it.

Additionally, "post" is more consistent with its usage on other social products: think of Facebook posts, Reddit posts, LinkedIn posts, and so on. 

If you are using the word "topic" in any of your community content, we strongly recommend changing it by Monday February 22. For example, some communities refer to "topics" in their welcome instructions, community guidelines, and other places. 

Additionally, if any of your customized CSS or JavaScript code snippets use the word "topic", don't worry! We're mindful of breaking CSS customizations, and will work to ensure that the majority of customizations are automatically updated. The same goes for API requests and Zapier flows.

If for any reason we anticipate breaking changes, we'll reach out to you with further instructions. 

If you have questions or concerns, please contact our wonderful support team: support@circle.so