Summer is upon us, and we have a great new Affino update, full of feature updates requested by the Affino community. The release is focused on a myriad of little things that add up to something much bigger in terms of making everything just that bit more productive, useful, and easier to use every day for your teams and your audiences.

Highlights include more productive Ad management and support for Ads.txt; a more productive AI training and support service; the ability to embargo breaking news until the exact second you want it to go live; enhanced metering bypass; and a lot of the commercial updates we promised we would be bringing to you this year.

There are also a great number of behind the scenes updates where we have tuned Affino to work better in the increasingly AI bot dominated landscape. Most importantly we have made a host of improvements on how Affino analytic data is captured, aggregated and retained. This means that the analytics will be by far the best yet provided by Affino. No web and email analytics can ever be perfect but this update gets us closer to the goal.It is important to note that you will see changes in your stats moving forward, in some cases significant ones.

We continue to deliver on our eCommerce roadmap and have included some important updates in this release. Being able to select a Stripe or GoCardless Subscription ID and payment on a Pro Forma enables you to tie externally generated subscriptions to an order within Affino to utilise the extensive features of Affino’s report and analysis. We’ve added a Maximum Lifetime Limit setting on the Catalogue Item so you can restrict the number of purchases a user can make for the same item. This might be useful for example where you don’t want users to buy a trial subscription over and over again.

We now list out Messages by Message Type, and you can auto-archive different message types depending on our preferences. If you send out 100,000’s of automated promotion messages in particular you can greatly optimise and speed up your Affino Messaging workflows.

There are key Advertising updates in this release. We are introducing support for Ads.txt, which improves support for 3rd party ad platforms, and reduces the chance of malicious ads being served. We have also introduced Banner types to Affino’s Ad service. This will be a significant productivity boost, meaning that you now only need to create a single Ad Campaign to serve banners to differently sized ad slots.

This would not be a Summer Special without the dozens of smaller features we have improved, including: the Analysis Dashboard has many more tooltips to explain what each indicator is, and the data series are our best yet. We have made Metering Bypass much more granular on Messaging, you can now select to bypass metering on individual messages. You can now display the alternative avatar for contacts on most screens. Added click tracking to Article Steps. Added support for Video uploads on Dynamic Forms. Made it easier to lock down Staging Sites to specific IP Addresses and many more. We’ve finally changed every mention from Twitter to X (hopefully no more social media platform rebrands for a while). See below for all the great updates.

Affino’s AI services have seen improvements across every aspect including: a higher impact AI Popup, improved conversational AI experience with more copy and feedback options and refined AI navigation. The AI Reporting, which is key to training up the AI and delivering enhanced AI answers has been greatly enhanced with the ability to track any improvements you made to the underlying content to improve each answer. The AI dashboard now also has an ‘All’ option so you can have an overview of how all your AI’s are performing in one view.

We now enforce encryption throughout Affino’s internal operations, tightening up security from the ground-up. We have also invested a great deal of time and effort into smoothing out as many of the low level issues as possible with moving to the new Tech Platform last year, meaning that Affino is no more robust than ever.

For more details see the Affino Updates.

Upgrade Guidance

This is an essential update for Affino, and we strongly recommend updating as a priority. There are both security and analytics enhancements in this update which make it critical that it is applied at the earliest opportunity.

NOTE - 

It is essential to liaise with the support team to schedule an update window where they can be on hand to support the update. This is particularly important if you have custom code as we have re-worked key security elements which require custom code to be updated.

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the sequence of the system and design updates laid out on the Control > Update screen.

Key Features

Ads.txt

Ads.txt or Authorised Digital Sellers provides a means for you to identify authorised sellers such as AdSense to present inventory on your site. We have created a new Ads.txt Profile for you to enter this information.

Article Embargo

We have added a new Embargo End (date and time) setting on each article. This means that you can set a precise time before an article is cached and published, particularly useful where there is a strict contractual obligation applied. The reason we have added this setting in addition to the Publish Start (date and time) is that articles are cached up to 5 minutes before the Publish Start time to ensure site optimisation. Using this setting means the article (detail) will be available immediately after this time and will not be cached beforehand. Note: you must set the Publish Start time up to 5 minutes after the Embargo End time to prevent it being available on the listing.

Banner Type

We have added a new way to select different sized Creatives for an Ad Campaign, making it much easier and quicker to pull in all your creatives into one campaign and then filtering which sizes need to be displayed into each ad campaign placement slot. To do this select the Banner Type on the Creative, select the required Creatives in the Ad Campaign and then simply choose which Banner Types to serve on each placement item on the Ad Campaign Theme.

Bypass Metering

We have added a new setting on Messages for bypassing the metering gate. This, in addition to the setting on the Metering Profile for all Message Campaigns to bypass the metering gate, means you have more flexibility to choose which articles users can view before being asked to register or log in.

Contact > Alternative Avatar

We have extended the Hi-res functionality (originally for uploading a hi-resolution file for print purposes) to now be available on the Contact Listing Design Element. Renamed to Alternative Avatar, you can now select to display a different sized profile image on the Contact Listing Design Element, compared to the avatar image size set on the Public Profile. A use case here might be to list speakers of an event with a larger profile picture. Note: Ensure you have enabled the Show Alternative Avatar setting on the CRM Settings.

Message Types / Storage Time Frames

As messages and notifications are used extensively throughout Affino, we have now split out the four different types on the listing screen on Message Campaigns and Messages. This helps to optimise the database queries, particularly where our clients have 100,000s of messages. You can also set how many months of messages you wish to store for each message type. Keeping this in tabs will ensure your site performance is optimised.

Pro Forma Orders - Subscriptions

We have added a new feature for you to tie a subscription created outside of Affino (directly within Stripe or GoCardless) to an order created via a Pro Forma within Affino. This ensures you can bring those external orders into the Affino reporting and analysis features. You need to select the correct Subscription ID and payment (where there are multiple payments) on the Pro Forma Order and this will carry through to the Order when created.

Fixes and Minor Enhancements

Fixes are elements which didn’t work as well as they should, and have now been made to work better. Minor enhancements provide subtle improvements that most people won’t notice (some will love), but which nonetheless improve on the overall Affino experience.

The fixes and enhancements highlighted here will be meaningful to a number of Affino users.

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Accounts - fixed an error with the tag column link.

Ad Campaign - added Banner Type to the Creative popup selector.

Ad Campaign Channel - fixed an issue where no data was being displayed.

Ad Campaign Theme - added a setting to select the Banner Types to display within each Campaign Item and Campaign Placement Area on the display-side.

AI Dashboard - fixed an issue with the dark mode not loading correctly.

AI Profile - added a Zone selector filter for multi-zone site setup.

AI Report - updated the Action column to enable the checkbox for all rows, previously just active for those containing a feedback response.

Analysis Dashboard - improved the data aggregation of users within segments; added some explanatory text on each key metric.

App Bar - fixed an issue not displaying forum names.

Article - added Embargo End date and time setting, fixed an issue with the Channel and Section filters not opening the popup window; displaying dimensions metadata for images uploaded to an article; fixed an issue embedding iframes into articles; added support for embedding twitter cards containing the x.com URL; fixed an intermittent issue with images being removed after the article is saved.

Article Export - added Embargo End column to the export spreadsheet.

Article Feature Scroller - fixed a full width layout issue.

Article Import - added Embargo End column to the import spreadsheet. We are also showing when the sample file was last updated with a link to the sample spreadsheet.

Article Report - added Filtered and Identified toggles for the Message Clicks column; updated the data aggregation for the 90 day time frame.

Article Steps - added click tracking to steps, Note: click stats are attributed to the article to which the Step is linked.

Assign Conversion Events - fixed a timeout issue where the number of contacts to assign a conversion event was greater than 1000. In this scenario, we now run a scheduled task to process users in batches of 1000 instead of executing this real-time.

Catalogue Item - fixed an error when deleting a catalogue item. 

Catalogue Item Export - added Hide From Listing column.

Catalogue Item Import - added Hide From Listing column.

Checkout - added a Maximum Lifetime Limit setting on the Catalogue Item to restrict users purchasing multiple quantities of the same item; fixed an issue with not displaying a gift recipient’s contact details whilst Hide Delivery If Not Required is enabled; fixed the Order History link on the Acknowledgement screen to link to My Account correctly.

Checkout Profile - adadded a setting to show the View Invoice link on the Acknowledgement screen.  Note: this is just the control-side setting - further development is required to update the display-side.

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Channel - fixed an issue not being able to copy an AI Channel due to the AI Profile being already selected on another Channel; Topic URL Filtering is now enabled by default.

Channel popup selector - updated the single Channel selector to display the same filters and columns as the multi-selector.

Contacts - renamed Hi-res to Alternative Avatar, fixed an issue adding filtered contacts to a Contact List; fixed an issue displaying the Hi-res image thumbnail on the listing, added a field to capture a user’s role within their company.

Contact Listing Design Element - added an option to Show Alternative Avatar.

Conversion Events - Include User Information In Notification is now selected by default.

Creatives - added Banner Type column to the listing.

CRM Settings - added message storage time frames.

Dashboard - removed some legacy Javascript code.

Directory - added Category Topics to the Scoped search results when using an AND operator; fixed a number of minor layout and styling issues.

Dynamic Form - added support for video uploads in MP4, WebM and MOV formats; added the media file name to the notification, linking to the form entry; fixed an issue with naming a field the same as Affino’s reserved words.

Edit Profile - fixed an issue displaying HTML tags when a user edits their profile. We are now displaying some basic formatting buttons on the wysiwyg.

Event Article - fixed an error adding a custom article to an event.

Exports (All) - added the date and time of the export into the filename.

File Deletion Logs - added a type filter to help identify files being deleted.

IP Address Filter / IP Address - used for restricting access to the zone, these two Control screens have now been combined. We have also added support for IPv6 IP addresses and display your IP Address at the top to make it easy to copy and paste.

Media Items - added support for WEBP images for uploading thumbnails and main images for videos.

Media Library Profile - renamed QuickTime to MOV.

Message - added a Bypass Metering setting so individual messages can be configured to bypass the metering gate; added validation to prevent Message Campaign and Messages Format combinations are not selected incorrectly; optimised the estimated reach calculations and storage of recipient data; updated the advisory text when calculating estimated reach; fixed an issue with the Unsubscribe link for Personal Messages; Messages are now listed by Message Types.

Message > Test Message - added advisory text detailing that the HTML will not be regenerated if the message has already been sent to recipients.

Message Campaigns - now listed by Message Types.

Message Profiles - renamed to Mailing List Profiles.

My Account Profile - added a setting to show the View Invoice link within My Account Note: this is the just the control-side setting - further development is required to update the display-side.

Order - when the Order Status is updated to Refunded, we now set the Payment Status to Not Paid. This will ensure that the reporting elements do not include refunded orders.

Order Export - fixed an issue exporting a filtered list of orders.

Pro Forma Orders - added Subscription ID setting for linking subscription payments created in Stripe/GoCardless to an Affino order; non-live terms are no longer listed on the Terms and Conditions dropdown field.

Public Profile - added a Show Roles setting to display this on My Profile.

Search - added support for event start dates.

User Export - added a setting to export archived users only.

Workflow Profile - included the Embargo Date field to be hidden if Hide Publication is enabled.

Zone - renamed Hi-res to Alternative Avatar; Short Canonical URL is now enabled by default; fixed an issue displaying a blank Main panel; Topic URL Format is now set to “ /channel/section/[topic]” by default, Twitter Account renamed to X (formerly Twitter) Account .

Removed

Channel - removed the Embed Width setting as this is no longer needed in responsive page layouts, removed Encrypted setting; removed the Encrypted setting as this is no longer needed since every Zone requires SSL encryption.

Google Sitemap Profiles - removed Auto Submit To Search Engines setting as this is no longer needed.

User Security - removed the Include Subscribers filter as the Contact Type multi-selector can filter by Mailing List users.

Zone - removed Encrypt Zone setting as all zones are now required to be SSL encrypted.