What's new in SocialSpark? A lot!

We had a huge rollout Monday night and are going to have a follow-up to that today with some minor bug fixes, so of course it’s about time I tell you all that is new in SocialSpark! Looking through the feature and bug log, there were over 100 tasks completed for this release, so a HUGE shout-out to our SocialSpark development team (Eric, Dray, myself) and Steve (our QA Manager) for all the hard work that went into making this happen.

New Features and Upgrades

• Ability to edit email address. Our single-sign-on system can now gracefully handle the changing of email addresses in SocialSpark. This will update your email address in all other sites using the single-sign-on system (PayPerPost v4, CloudShout, SocialSpark). NOTE: You cannot change your email address to another one that is already in use. Each email address can only be used once.
• Two rails upgrades made it into this release. This gives our users improved performance, but it also allows the development team to take advantage of better community support and the ability to move SocialSpark onto Amazon’s EC2 servers in the near future.
• Ability to create/take CPC and CPA opps without a verified blog. Advertisers now have the option to create CPC and CPA campaigns for any blogger in the system, regardless of whether they have a blog that has been approved for marketplace participation. Any existing Opportunities segmented to “All Verified Blogs” will still require an approved blog for participation.
• Advertiser view of money allocated to an Opportunity. Advertisers can now see exactly how much money is left to spend on any paid Opportunity. This information is printed below the other vital stats on the Opp Detail page.
• Automatic country validation is now run during each login. If you go on vacation and your country changes, it will change back when you come home. Unfortunately you can’t stay on vacation forever!
• Landing page and conversion page are no longer required to be on the same domain for CPA Opps. This is a benefit to advertisers who wish to participate in CPA programs but have shopping cart “thank you” pages (or another type of conversion page) hosted on a different server from their initial landing page.
• Pending conversions broken down by ad unit. Instead of seeing a single rolled-up Pending count for CPA and CPC Opportunities, bloggers will now be able to see exactly which of their ad units has pending conversions (valid clicks).
• CPA tracking code now using 1×1 pixel. This benefits advertisers who cannot install Javascript scripts on their pages.
• New Smart Blog Roll (Targeting) design. Advertisers can now get as detailed as they want with their segmentation. We’ve implemented functionality to combine and nest lists of requirements to give unprecedented control over which bloggers are eligible to take your Opportunities. If you’re looking for bloggers with a RealRank less than 3000 and blogs that are in one of any five categories, but will also accept any blog on a hand-rolled Blog Roll, you have the option to set those requirements in a single step. Notice in this screenshot that you can also see how many blogs meet your requirements so that you don’t over-target.
• Ability to delete custom tracking links during Opp Creation. This is going to make our account managers swoon.
• New Ad Unit size for CPC and CPA Opps. We’ve added our first non-IAB standard ad unit size to CPC and CPA Opportunities: 500×375. This is a great size for photos and ads included in blog posts.
• Opps that have ended now show a splash page before redirecting. It’s frustrating to click on a link to an Opportunity only to get redirected to the Opps list without knowing why. Our adorable “ended affiliate program” splash page finds a new purpose here.
• Better handling of flags. When you flag something, it will now open a Parature ticket for you so that our Customer Love team can look into the situation.
• Complete overhaul of our Admin panel. Our “SSLove” admin panel has a whole new design and several new features to cut down on the time it takes to review blogs, posts, and Opportunities, and minimize the effort it takes to get our customers the information and solutions they need.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug in SSLove that was resulting in overpayment for posts. The details of this bug and the resolution are here.
• Blog roll counts now update. Previously when an advertiser added or removed a blog from their blog roll, the total counts wouldn’t always update properly. Now they do.
• Classic Opps now showing up in the Opps list, every time. There was a flag in the database that is now being correctly set, so that “Classic” Sponsored Posts will now always show up in the Opps List right away.
• Better HTML filtering on Blog Summaries page. This prevents custom styles, etc from affecting the look of the RSS/summaries page for blogs.
• More frequent Smart Blog Roll populating. All Smart Blog Rolls (used for targeting on Opportunities) now populate every 12 hours instead of every 24 hours.
• The number of “Classic” Sponsored Posts left now increments properly when a post is permanently rejected, allowing a different blogger to take the slot from the one whose post was permanently rejected. This is only for Opps with a specific number of posts requested during Opp creation.
• CPA/CPC Ongoing Flag no longer out of sync. This was preventing some of the “ended CPC/CPA opportunity” messages from going out, since SocialSpark thought that the Opp had ended but the Affiliate Server assumed it was ongoing.
• Opportunities with future start dates no longer showing in the Advertiser’s “Related Opportunities” component.
• Disclosure Audit now shows most current information. Some of the posts in the Disclosure Audit were failing to show “Passed” after a blogger had corrected an issue on a rejected post, and pending posts were erroneously included. This is now fixed.
• CSV of Disclosure audit no longer contains duplicates. The above bug was also fixed in the Disclosure Audit CSV.
• Cleaned up filtering on Browse Blogs. The Categories filter, search term, and some of the sorting links were not behaving as expected, but these issues should now be resolved.

WOW! That one was a doozy. Thanks again to all of the hands that touched this week’s release. It’s been a long time coming! Stay tuned for another bug fix release very soon to tidy up any remaining known issues with the features and upgrades that went out Monday night.