Friends,
I wanted to start by saying thank you so much for being a Fireside user, especially now. As a podcaster for over 14 years and a podcast listener for even longer, I know how important podcasts can be at times like these. It is our honor to be able to provide you (and your listeners) with a service that we've worked very hard on for about four years now, and that I hope helps you connect with people all around the world.
We're on the verge of making some announcements that will hopefully be helpful to those of us affected by COVID-19 in the near future. I'm excited about them and I hope you will be too, so stay tuned for the details very soon.
There are also a handful of exciting new features that we've been working very hard on that I can't talk about just yet, but I did want to take a moment to share some of the updates we've made behind the scenes over the last weeks which grew from your input, comments, and suggestions:
Bulk Episode Editing
You asked for it, and we built it. You can change episode permalinks, titles, seasons, statuses, and publish dates for all of your episodes on one page, at the same time.
This feature is especially useful after an initial import, or if you've decided to change something podcast wide that will affect all of your episodes.
You'll find this feature under Settings > Advanced > Episode Bulk Editing in your podcast Dashboard.
Spam Filtering
Many people were experiencing spam as a result of using the comment form. Fireside podcasts not using a custom domain could benefit from a CAPTCHA, but those using custom domains weren't able to take advantage of this feature, due to Google CAPTCHA's limitations.
So we came up with a new solution and integrated Akismet, an anti-spam service used by millions of websites to filter out hundreds of millions of spam emails and comments every day.
Initial reports have been encouraging, and I hope you're seeing less (or a total abscence of) spam via the contact form now.
New Help System
We've switched from Zendesk to HelpScout for our support ticket system. This was a big change behind the scenes, but now, when you need help, the process should be faster and easier for both you and for us.
The knowlege base is still in place, but the support form is now deeply integrated into Fireside for a cleaner and better experience.
Email Modernization
This is one of those big, time consuming, tedious updates that you as a customer won't likely ever be able to see or notice, but emails from Fireside should arrive faster, more reliably, and shouldn't ever show up as spam.
Thank you again for being a Fireside user, it means a great deal to us here at Fireside. We wouldn't be here without your support.
-Dan Benjamin and the Fireside Team
