Gleam Product Updates from 2015

Issues With wn.nr Links - Resolved

We are currently experiencing a DNS outage for our wn.nr domain that we use to power Viral Share links. The outage appears to be impacting all .nr domains.

This means that Viral Links created in the past may not be resolving for users trying to access them. We are waiting on resolution from the DNS Operations team that control the .nr TLD.

In the meantime you can enable your Bit.ly integration under Settings > Integrations to get around this problem.

Keep an eye out on Twitter for updates.

Webhooks (Beta)

We've rolled out the initial stages of our support for Webhooks. This allows you to send data from Subscribe actions (including custom fields) to your own specified endpoint.

New Feature: Webhooks Integration for Gleam.io

It's currently in BETA for Business customers, just submit a support ticket.

You can now split the User Details form up into multiple steps if you want to capture certain details from a campaign.

Step 1 - User Details

New Feature: Multi-page custom field seperators for User Details form

Step 2 - Custom Fields

Create custom fields in the User Details form

New Installation Methods for Gleam Competitions

We've made available 2 new button types for the Tab Install in Competitions. You can see one in action on our Competitions page.

New WYSIWYG Action Builder

We just released a visual builder for creating content inside actions (and a few other places like terms & conditions). This also comes with a bonus button generator which supports the usual Font Awesome icons 😎

New WYSIWYG Action Builder in Gleam.io

Improved Facebook Visit Action

We've improved our Facebook Visit action to function in a similar way to our Google+ Visit.

This now means that it's a two step process:

  • User Visits Facebook Page
  • Has the chance to Optionally Like the Page or click Continue.
Improvements to the Facebook Visit Action on Gleam.io

Up until now submitting media from different social sources required multiple actions. We've listened to customers who want a flexible consolidated media submit action.

Improvements to the Submit Media Action on Gleam.io

Facebook Photo submit actions now function more like Instagram and Twitter by pulling in the last 21 photos to select from. Facebook Photo Submit now also supports #hashtag filtering too.

Improvements to Facebook & Twitter for the Submit Media Action

We've also increased the number of historical Twitter messages we'll scan looking for images.

All media submit actions now have duplicate photo checking, we were seeing issues were users could submit the same image over and over again.

Upload actions now support the ability to allow users to add a Caption to their photo.

New Feature: Ask for a Caption in the Upload Action

This caption will also flow through to Galleries.

Improved Interval Options For Photo Submit + Import Actions

Up until recently you could only allow users to submit a single photo or submit a photo daily. This works well for widget based submissions but is not ideal when you're importing data from #hashtags.

We've improved this to allow you to choose how often you'd like users to be able to submit a photo, this will also propagate to the #hashtag import part of the action:

  • Once will only pull in the first #hashtag from that user we find
  • Hourly will pull in the first #hashtag that we find in the hour
  • Daily will pull in the first #hashtag we find from that day
  • Unlimited will pull in all images for all users

6 New Email Providers

We've added support for 6 new email providers, they work will all campaign types.

Categories

MailerLite Integration

We've added MailerLite to our list of supported email providers. Works on all campaigns including Competitions, Rewards and Captures.

Categories

Unexpected Outage Postmortem

At 3.55am AEST we started getting notifications of degraded performance across our network. Then suddenly, everything stopped working, none of our servers were talking to one another.

As a startup this is your worst nightmare, entire systems just failing during the middle of the night without explanation. We are actually prepared for this scenario with redundant failovers of systems.

But this was different, all our hardware was completely fine. For some reason none of the servers were able to communicate with each other.

After some back and forth with the datacenter we were notified that some upstream network hardware in the datacenter failed, which had completely killed the internal network. So our servers could accept information from the outside, but not transmit it internally (when you have 20+ servers this is a fairly serious problem). We waited for them to replace the hardware and restore the network which happened at 4.41am AEST.

We're sincerely sorry for what happened this morning, even 1 minute of downtime is unacceptable for us.

Backend UI Updates

We've added a few features to improve the backend UI experience, particularly when it comes to accessing or dealing with larger amounts of data.

Multi-Select Rows & Filtering Improvements on the Gleam Dashboard

We've improved the ability to filter and manipulate data in tables across the app. This means you can delete actions in bulk, invalidate them and even moderate images in bulk inside Galleries.

You can not also filter your users page by campaigns, this means you can see a rollup of total activity by user (and also export it).

Exporting at a campaign level will also export the Viral Share URL incase you need to do a mid-campaign blast or update to users asking them to share again.

New URL Shortening Engine

You may not be aware but for a long time we were exclusively using Bit.ly to shorten links inside campaigns. Bit.ly made some changes earlier in the year that started limiting accounts to 10k shortens a month, a limit that we would use up in about 10 minutes.

We still allow you to use your own Bit.ly account under Settings > Integrations, however we needed a solution to shorten links for everyone.

Today we're pleased to announce the rollout of wn.nr, our short domain for campaigns. It's even shorter than Bit.ly, and what's more we don't need to worry about any limits now.

It'll be on by default on any campaign, unless of course you activate the Bit.ly integration.

Enjoy!

Backend Dashboard Improvements

We've made some backend changes to improve how fast campaign stats are displayed in the backend. No more waiting for stats to load, should be instantenous now (even on large campaigns with Millions of entries).

Improved Choosing Winners

We've pushed some updates to make the process of picking winners for your giveaways much easier. In the past it was a 3 step process to revoke each invalid winner (which sucked).

  • You can pick winners without needing to refresh the page (wow!)
  • Can repick a winner in a single click now.
  • You can also revoke winners in a single click.

Enjoy!

Google+ Updates - New Visit Action

We've made some changes to bring our Google+ action more in line with the Facebook Visit action and Google's guidelines. It's now a two step process.

Visit on Google+ Action for Gleam.io

Once you complete the visit part of the action the user can optionally +1 your page or follow your page. You can choose which secondary action you would like the user to take during setup.

Visit on Google+ Action with Follow option for Gleam.io

New Custom Email Builder

You can now send custom post-entry emails to Competition entrants.

Steam Actions

You can now create Steam actions for Competitions & Rewards entrants.

Additional Contestant Details Editor

You can now add custom fields to the User Details form in your Gleam widget to collect more data from entrants.

Auto Expanding Actions

We've push an update to widgets that will now auto expand the first action for both Competitions & Rewards if:

  • There's only 1 action
  • If there's only 1 mandatory action

This allows for a much cleaner user experience (and also allows you to draw attention to a particular action first).

Single Action will now auto-expand in Gleam widget

Tumblr Actions

New actions added for Tumblr, available for Pro users.

New Feature: Tumblr Actions for Gleam.io

Teams (Beta)

We have a new feature that's going live in beta for select customers today. Invite users from your organisation or agency to manage campaigns with the new Teams feature.

New Feature: Invite Team Members to manage your Gleam Site

Hashtag Entry Import (Beta)

We now allow you to import photo entries into campaigns from:

  • Twitter hashtags
  • Instagram hashtags
  • Facebook comments
  • Facebook page tags

Business users will notice extra options below the Submit Photo From action types.

Gallery App (Beta)

We have re-released our Gallery app, which now includes beautiful gallery embedding and also the ability to pull in images via social sources. More info our our social gallery page.

Gleam Gallery is now in BETA

You can check some example galleries on Loot Crate and Beardbrand.