Howdy friends!

I hope you’re having a lovely day! Here’s a nice little round-up of all the things we’ve been working on in the past few months.

Lots of great new features and improvements.

Please, take a peek and let me know what you think in the comments!

1) Biography field now accepts HTML 🎉

We just realized that for some reason our biography field wasn’t supporting HTML (which is odd, because we love HTML!) It all been fixed now.

So, go ahead, try and edit your profile and use HTML to give your bio section more sparkle.

2) Fixed a missing button for interpreters 🎙

Well, that’s kinda embarrassing, but we just realized that everyone who signed up for The Open Mic account with Interpreter role couldn’t publish any articles because the Publish article button was missing. Sorry!

Anywho, it all been fixed now! You should see the button in the menu!

3) Post on forum instead of your personal wall 💪

As you know from our previous community update we’re disabling the wall functionality because less than 1% of people have been using this feature and we now have a pretty awesome forum so you could easily start new threads there (or join existing discussions).

To post on forum click the new Post on forum button in the menu:

Please, note that you’ll need to create separate forum account in order to use the forum (and receive notifications about new replies). But it takes less than 30 seconds.

Check out the video below to learn more about our forum.

4) The search is now working! 🔍

Well, what do you know? As it turned out our search functionality was broken and when you tried to search for an article it would bring you to a blank page.

We fixed it. 🙂

Kudos to Giovanna for pointing that out!

5) You can now request features on The Open Mic 😍

The Open Mic is pretty awesome, right?

Well, we think so too 🙂

BUT! There’s no limit for perfection, that’s why we’d love to hear what else you’d like us to build.

Send your feature request by going to Menu > Need Help? >Request a feature and send us all your ideas!

Or you can visit this link

P.S.: You can also vote on existing ideas. This will help us better understand what should we focus on next.

6) Stories are now Articles 📚

Stories are now called Articles.

Not a super significant change, but it will help us eliminate some misunderstandings going forward. 🙂

7) New moderation rules for first-time bloggers ✍️

As you know we never had a moderation system per se.

Anyone who signed up for an account could publish an article on The Open Mic.

We did encouraged our members to read the site rules before publishing, of course.

However it became obvious that in order to eliminate spam and low-quality content we need to stay vigilant.

So, from now on, articles from first-time bloggers will have to go through our moderation system prior to being published.

We’ll be reviewing each and every submission manually to make sure it doesn’t violate our site rules and meets our quality standards.

We’ll do our best to review your articles within 24 hours or less.

If your article is approved, we’ll publish it on The Open Mic and send you a message confirming that your article was approved and published.

If, for some reason, you haven’t heard back from us within 24 hours after the submission, feel free to open a support ticket

Hey, what about existing bloggers and authors?

Good question!

We have white-listed our current contributors, so you should be able to publish articles without any restrictions, as long as you don’t violate any rules, but you won’t do it now, would you? 😃

We will also do our best to add new authors to the white list after you publish at least 2-3 articles on The Open Mic.

In other words, follow the rules, play nice and write something that resonates with translators or translation buyers and you’ll get into our good kids list in no time! 😉

8) Database improvements 📡

We shuffled a few things around in our website’s database to address some performance issues and improve site loading speed.

We don’t want to jinx it, but it seems like we’ve made some great progress over the past few weeks, significantly reducing the size of our database. Yay!

9) New onboarding flow for translators 🏄

We have improved our onboarding flow for new members.

It’s a nice little addition that greatly improves accommodation of newly registered members with step by step instructions (and lots of gifs, of course!).

Check it out by signing up for an account if you’re not registered yet! 😃

10) You can now filter articles on our home page! 👍

At long last!

You can now be in total control of your reading journey!

Choose what you want to read on The Open Mic with our new smart filters.

Select between:

• All articles;
• Featured articles (a hand-picked selection of our team’s favorite stories);
• Or articles from the people you follow on The Open Mic;

We also have a new directory of our most popular authors.

Just follow the ones you’re most interested in on this page and their articles will show up in your home page feed.

So, what are you waiting for?

Go follow some of our awesome authors and start customizing your reading experience!

11) Check out our new page with most popular bloggers 📰

We’ve added a dedicated page where you can check out the profiles of our most popular bloggers.

Make sure to follow people you like and their articles will show up in your home page stream.

This page can now be found in Menu > Community > Our authors

12) Check out our new team page! 🏟️

The Open Mic is possible thanks to the hard work of our awesome authors and a group of dedicated volunteers who generously donate their time.

Checkout our new team page to learn more about the fine folks behind The Open Mic.

P.S.: You can also find this page by going to Menu > About > Our team

Last but not least: The Open Mic for Clients is here! 👨‍💼👩‍💼

You probably didn’t notice that, but we soft-launched The Open Mic for Clients!

From now on anyone looking for professional translators can easily find them on our platform.

We’ll share more details in a separate post in the upcoming weeks, but here are the main highlights:

• If you’re a client looking for translators simply click Start a Project button in the menu and we’ll guide you through the process;
• Are you a project manager or a translation agency? You can create a free account on this page;
• Clients will be able to browse through our directory, send private messages and requests for quote and even post their jobs online;
• Clients can write reviews (aka testimonials) for translators;
• Registered translators can request reviews from existing clients from Menu > Your Profile Photo > Request Reviews;
• Positive reviews affect your ranking in our directory (more happy clients = higher ranking);
• Direct clients can either sign up for an account or send their projects to our team;
• We now offer on-demand project management services to busy clients. More about it can be found on this page;
• When clients submit their projects to our team we handle project management, finding the right talent and processing payments via our secure system;

These are just some of the highlights and we’re very excited to share more in the upcoming weeks (you can also ask us any questions in the comments)