Thought it would be nice to have a thread for small updates 
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Here’s the first…
Our initial set of book portals are now up 
These are essentially portals for books where people will be able to quickly find the hottest discussions around them, including reviews and discussions
They will also make things a lot easier for book authors and those wishing to post errata and suggestions as the links will pre-fill the required tags and section info when posting a new thread. We wanted to get these portals up asap as there was some confusion for PragProg users on how/where to post errata - as such we used the existing portal template but will refine it for books at some point in the future.
You can see an example here: https://devtalk.com/books/distributed-services-with-go 
What’s next?
With that done, the next thing we’ll be working on is automatic alerts to the Elixir Forum of threads posted here tagged with elixir . If this works well, we’ll rollout availability of it to other language specific forums - it will be a great way for those communities to be made aware of threads posted here relating to their languages.
We also want to do something specific for blog posts, so when a thread is started here tagged with elixir, we’ll make a post in the Elixir Blog Posts thread. It will mean people can simply post the thread here, and it will automatically get posted there saving them having to post it in two places Again, if this works well we’ll rollout to any other language specific forum that might be interested.
We could also do the same for libraries, but we’ll see how things go with blogs first
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New ‘info’ (/guides) and ‘review’ thread icons added 
Also the cross-posting of giveaway bonus days to the Elixir Forum
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Initial cross-posting of Elixir related threads is up 
This means that when a new thread is posted that is tagged with #elixir we will post an alert on the Elixir Forum letting members there know. If it’s a blog post, it will be posted in the Elixir blog posts thread, and if it’s a general thread it will be posted in the ‘Elixir on the web’ thread in the adoption & media section. We’ll expand this to screencasts and then think about learning resources, jobs, etc too, then look at expanding this to Erlang and Phoenix tagged threads too
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Quick update…
We now have a Cross-Platform Dev category for cross-platform desktop dev - eg, for apps made with Electron etc. However it can also be used for general chat about cross-platform apps, eg Obsidian, Wireshark etc (unless the thread is specific to an OS version, in which case it can go in the Windows/Mac/linux sections).
Also renamed the Libraries/Tools sections for the Mac, Windows and Linux sections to Apps/Libraries/Tools
Also removed all of the Projects sections as threads that would normally go in there can go in the various Chat/Discussions sections
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Cross posting of Elixir, Erlang, Phoenix and Gleam blog posts is now complete - if a thread is posted here about a blog post and is tagged with either of those, we’ll automatically cross post on EF in the respective blog posts thread
Next we’ll look into doing the same for screencasts
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Finally, the cross-posting of BEAM threads is finished. We kept changing the goal posts 
and went from simply posting to one of the blog post threads to posting a thread for each blog and via the user’s own account if they have the same username/email on both sites.
We will also automatically post published book threads and also do the same for screencasters
Now let’s move on to some internal bot stuff - stay tuned for updates!
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Just finished the bot to randomly pick a winner for our spotlights (that’s what that test thread was for - thanks to everyone who helped!)
Also made a few more tweaks to the EF cross-poster (will only cross-post a dedicated thread for blogs if the Devtalk user also has an account there - otherwise it will go in the general Devtalk alerts thread there).
Finished our diversity message bot too, tho it would be nice to expand this to automatically send a PM to users when they use language that may not feel as inclusive as we might like. It’ll save us having to manually do it and hopefully be enough to nudge users into editing their posts… think this can be next on our list 
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Our inclusive language bot is now completed
See this thread for details: https://forum.devtalk.com/t/testing-our-new-inclusive-language-bot/1237
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We also have a new Reviews section and the review tag will activate the review icon for the front page 
And for those of you who like these icons, here’s the one that shows with the rant tag:
(Tho we might get rid of it if it begins to get abused 
)
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Time for another update!
Whenever a thread is cross-posted on the Elixir Forum under a user’s own name there we’ll now also send them a PM to let them know. We’ve also added an opt-out field in user preferences here in case anyone would prefer their threads are not cross-posted there. Just go to your control panel > preferences > and it should be towards the bottom under External forum opt-outs
This is now most of the work done on cross-posting and our bot, watch this space for a thread on what we should add next…
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GitHub stats have now been added 
EG:
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We now have a Science & Technology category, as well as a new Biotech section too. Our General Tech section and Health & Diet sections have also been moved into it.
It’s great how our industry is increasingly linked to and becoming pivotal in other fields - without computers and programs devs write, so many of the advances in these sciences wouldn’t be possible or significantly slowed.
It’s also unsurprising that many of these topics are often also of great interest to developers - which makes it even more compelling to host such a category here on Devtalk - enjoy!
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News bot for languages and frameworks is now live - it’ll check a projects GH to see if they use GitHub Releases and post those if they do, otherwise, we check the project’s official blog and post those.
We envisage that Devtalk users will be most interested in version release info, however blogs contain important updates too… the only issue is not all projects post all releases to blogs (sone just posting major versions) so we’ll review how this goes, perhaps switching to blogs for all projects or finding a way to utilise both but where we avoid duplicate items being posted (once as a GH release item and again via the blog).
It’s certainly been interesting seeing how different projects put out news 
Next:
- We’ll add more portals to see how these news items look with more projects
- We’ll start on our more general In The News system (where we post tech news from sites like the BBC, HN, etc, and then members get to decide which warrant a dedicated thread )
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First iteration of this is live 
Currently we have added BBC Tech News and Hacker News (though not for any HN threads, just external links posted there) but we’ll add some of the others suggested in this thread too.
It’s also possible we may need to put together a Mod team for news as many items getting posted will need to be placed into more appropriate/dedicated sections with tags added too, if this might interest you please let us know!
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We’ve added a few more portals and their respective news feeds and, now that the news system has been live a few days we’ve updated the front-page algorithm to better reflect trending topics
Previously we were using a more liberal scope to accommodate the (fewer) threads, but now that we have many more being posted on a daily basis we’ve brought in the original algo to better reflect the respective time-frames. The filter-by pages will use the old system for now, however we intend to update this when we when have added all news sources and these sub-pages get more threads too.
If you haven’t checked out the homepage in a while please take a look
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Our new Tweet Bot is live!
Previously we were using a generic RSS to Twitter service which simply posted our latest threads to Twitter with a link. However there were some downsides to this:
- We could not customise tweets (so couldn’t add the appropriate hashtag for the language or framework)
- There was a limit to the number of tweets we could post a day
- We could not link back to the tweet as it was a one way service
We have fixed all of these issues by now tweeting directly ourselves
We’ve also added the most common hashtags for each language/framework (if they have a portal) and tried to use the same format that each respective community has settled on. For instance, the Elixir community seems to prefer #ElixirLang, whereas the Ruby community seems to prefer #rubylang - if you spot a hashtag that doesn’t reflect what the community are using please let us know and we’ll update it. We’ll probably link to these hashtags in our portals too at some point.
We hope you like our new Twitter Bot!
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A few more additions/changes to our In The News threads and Tweetbot:
When a thread posting is initiated by a member via one of our news trackers in our #members-only:news-alerts section, we’ll now:
- Automatically add tags if a word in the title matches any tag used on the forum
- Try to move the thread to one of the main categories (such as Frontend/Backend/iOS/Android parent categories, etc) if the thread also has a corresponding portal. We’ll also do some rudimentary checks to see if the thread might be a blog post or talk, and if so we’ll move to the blogs/talk section for that category. Otherwise it will default to the Chat section for that category.
The above makes it much easier from a maintenance perspective as there’s less need for us to manually categories things ourselves
The Tweet Bot will now run every 5 minutes but only tweet threads 10 minutes after they’ve been created - to give the thread starter a chance to edit the thread, add tags, or make any other changes if they need to before it being tweeted
We’ve also changed the accompanying text to simply be Corresponding tweet for this thread:.
We’ll keep an eye on how things go with the Tweet Bot, for instance it might be worth simply PM’ing the member who posted a thread to let them know the URL of the tweet (in case they want to retweet/like it) and/or insert the link to the tweet into the first post for the Bot threads (to prevent them being bumped 10 minutes after they’ve been posted). We’ll see how things go so please let us know what you think in the Help/Feedback section after living with it for a little while
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For anyone following this thread, a slightly longer updated posted here:
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Share links for tweets now added - as suggested by @Exadra37
Example:
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