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Viz Social Release Notes

Version 1.0 | Published June 22, 2021 ©

Viz Social Release Notes

Viz Social 1.0.2

Release Date: 2021-06-22

These are the release notes for Viz Social version 1.0.2. This document describes the improvements and bug fixes that have been made to the software since release 1.0.0.

Installer Notes

VLC Plug-ins

To preview and playout videos from a social feed in Viz Engine 4.x, the correct version of VLC plug-ins need to be installed. To install VLC plug-ins:

  • If there was a previous version of the VLC plugin installed, be sure to remove <Viz4Directory>\plugins and <Viz4Directory>\lua.

  • Extract the zip file and copy all files from:

    • vlc-3.0.11\plugins to <Viz4Directory>\plugins

    • vlc-3.0.11\lua to <Viz4Directory>\lua

New Core Features

Polls

Major performance improvements, allowing Increased speed and capacity for keyword polls. New default is to allow up to 100,000 votes before the poll is paused (the previous limit was 50,000, with a message to call support). New values can be assigned as necessary within the interface. Polls can be pre-processed to reduce periodic aggregation time, with full re-indexing available to ensure data is in sync.

Dynamic Previews

When an integrated graphics engine offers a preview channel, then Formats can select it from the Preview Channel dropdown (at the bottom of the destination set-up) in Build. After that has been done, any subsequent Format update automatically triggers the generation of a new preview image / video that is rendered using the latest parameter set (colors, labels, selections, …) of that Format.

Personal Response Opt-Out

Personal Response Format has been enriched with an Opt-Out channel. The Opt-Out channel is set-up in Build as a dedicated Search or Group. Once set, the Format interprets all posts in the Opt-Out channel as requests form their originator. If needed an auto-reply can be set-up to confirm the arrival of each Opt-Out back to the requestors.

Opted-Out Posts are immediately removed from the regular process flow and moved to the Opt-Out tab. For Posts that are in-flight (‘Rendering’ or ‘Distributing’) the system waits until their external task has been completed and then moves them to the Opt-Out tab. Apart from the Opt-Out Channel, it is also possible to manually Opt-Out originators via the context menu of a post. Manual and automatic Opt-Out are treated identically.

In the Opt-Out tab users can see all posts that have been opted out so far. When clicking on a message, users can see the post or action that was responsible for the Opt-Out. Users also have the ability to manually reverse the Opt-Out by Opting a message In again via its context menu.

Opt-Outs are processed per user, so a single request removes all previously submitted contributions from the same user. The Opt-Out action does not affect any future Opt-Ins.

Twitter Poll Improvements

With the enhanced support of Twitter Polls via the official Twitter API we have been able to make some improvements to this Format:

  • Twitter Polls now show start and (expected) stop time.

  • Twitter Polls now automatically stop calling the API when the Poll has stopped.

Exclude Facebook Replies

In the Facebook realm, ‘Replies’ are ‘Comments to Comments’ and they are the deepest nesting level (a Comment to a Reply is just another Reply). Previously the option to exclude Comments in the Filter of Gather and the Views in Publish
also implied the exclusion of Replies. There is now the possibility to filter out Replies without filtering out Comments or vice versa, both in Gather as well as in Publish.

Graphics Destinations for Nested Carousels

The UI of Nested Carousels did not allow users to set-up graphics destination for the Child Carousels. This was resolved by offering full configurability of the Child Carousels in Build. In particular, the destination tab of the Child Carousels provides all the necessary elements to link them to a graphics destination.

New Child Carousels are created via the context menu of the Parent Carousel. Child Carousels can be renamed or deleted via their own context menus. The changes only affect the set-up presentation in Build and keep the logic and presentation in Publish unaltered.

New Chrome Extension Features

Create Buckets

The Chrome Extension offers users the possibility to create new buckets on the authenticated Viz Social server. This helps extension users to immediately push posts to Viz Social, without having to wait for someone to create a bucket. The name of the remote bucket can be set in the extension’s configuration.

Return Proper Statuses

Improvements have been made in the detection of synchronization exceptions between extension and server, and the clarity of the communication of these situations. This helps to identify situations

  • Where a destination was removed from Viz Social, but used by the extension in a race condition.

  • Where there are duplicate messages.

Auto-Generate Server Name

Each time a new server is added to the Chrome extension it now uses the Viz Social URL to suggest a convenient server name. Of course, this can always be overridden by a personal preference.

Make New Bucket Available Immediately

The Viz Social Chrome extension already allows users to create a new bucket and use that to deposit their fetched Posts. Viz Social now automatically pushed this to all users that are working in Gather at that very moment, so that the newly created bucket immediately becomes visible and available.

Manage Visibility of Searches

All Searches in Gather now have an option on the Advanced tab to make them invisible as targets for users of the Viz Social Chrome extension.

Twitter Historic Search

A new Search type, this Search collects the Tweets between two timestamps Tstart and Tstop that satisfy the Search criteria.

Search Set-up

In Gather, go to the overview of Twitter Searches and choose “Search for historic Tweets containing terms or #hashtags”.

The Search set-up is similar to that of other Searches, with two exceptions:

  • Tstart and Tstop must be specified. Tstart must be earlier than Tstop and both must lie in the past. Tstart can be at most seven days old.

  • At this moment, Twitter requires that time intervals start and stop at midnight UTC. To help users to decide what the most appropriate local time interval is for them, UTC timestamps are translated into local time ones.

  • Users can choose between selecting all Tweets between Tstart and Tstop or only the most popular ones. This collection of popular Tweets is prepared by Twitter on a daily basis for relevant topics. At most 15 Tweets per day are prepared per topic.

All other elements, including the Filters and the Advanced settings, work like the other Twitter Searches.

Search Behavior

In contrast with other Searches that go forward in time and that have to keep up with new, incoming Tweets as they happen, this Historic Search is about collecting a well-defined, finite set of Tweets that have already been Tweeted. This causes this Search to behave differently than others:

  • The Search starts at Tstart and works backwards, collecting matching Tweets all the way until Tstart is reached. The speed at which this happens can be set on the Advanced tab (100 Tweets/minute by default).

  • Once the Search is started, its Search criteria can no longer be modified. This is to avoid that Tweets matching different logic are mixed in the same collection without knowing which Tweet is there for what reason.

  • Once a Search is completed, it is stopped permanently.

  • While running, Searches can still be paused and resumed. On the Advanced tab, their speeds, maximum volume or end time (for the Search process, not for the content) can still be set and modified as usual.

  • Search results are retrieved from newest to oldest. Newly fetched Tweets are by default appended to the bottom of the list in the third columns of Gather and Build. Hence the introduction of a button to reverse the ordering in those columns and see the most recently fetched Tweets at the top.

  • Viz Social also collects the Retweet and Like counts for historic Tweets as most of them will have had sufficient time to settle on or near their end value. This helps in judging the social value of individual Tweets.

  • Perhaps most importantly: in all other aspects, either in Gather or in other modules, the Historic Search behaves and can be used like any other Search.

Personal Response

The Viz Social Personal Response Service offers users the ability to send personally rendered assets back to opted-in campaign participants in Tweet Replies.

Blasts

The biggest enhancement is the ability to send out blasts of additional messages (as Tweet Replies) to all or some participating users of a campaign. This new functionality is added without affecting the core service and can be used to remind the campaign audience or to share meta information.

Each Blast passes through three phases: creation, set-up and execution.

Creation

Blasts can be created with the New Blast button on the Personal Response top row in Publish. For identification purposes, the system assigns each new Blast its own name “Blast <N>”. A Blast’s name is unique per Format. The Blast is stored by pressing the Save button.

Blast Set-Up

Before the Blast is executed, it is still editable. On the main tab it is possible to choose the originating Twitter account, to compose the message text, the upload (optional) attachment and to choose optional tags that are added to each participating message. The system itself also adds tags depending on the delivery outcome, which helps identifying which message participated in which Blast. One Personal Response Format can be used for multiple blasts to (part of) its audience.

Audience Set-Up

On the audience tab it is possible to define the receiving audience of a Blast. The starting point is always the full audience of the parent Personal Response Format. Additional Views can then be used to narrow down the audience of this particular Blast. By using the tag View it becomes possible to select posts that did or did not participate in certain earlier Blasts, or even on their delivery success or failure.

Execution

A Blast is started by pressing its Start button. Once a Blast is started it is no longer possible to make any changes to it. It identifies all posts that satisfy the defined criteria and pushes the configures post to the via a Reply Tweet. The rate at which the delivery happens is set system wide. By default, this is around 1 Post/minute which is the default maximum set by Twitter. On request, Never.no can assist in arranging elevated access to much higher delivery rates. The Overview tab offer some real-time insights in the progression and ETA of a Blast. Multiple Blasts can run in parallel, but please be careful that in such a case one cannot rely on the presence of Blast-related tags.

When a Blast has delivered all its queued Replies it enters a permanent Stopped state. It remains available for administrative purposes. Blast participation for each message is indicated on the original opt-in message on the Overview page of the parent Personal Response Format with a separate article tab. The Blast tags are available there as well.

Personal Response Modes

Viz Social also generalizes the functional definition to the Personal Response Format. Its main flow and purpose it still to collect personal assets submitted by campaign participants, render them into a selected template to create a personalized clip or image and to reply the result back to the original participant.

However, two new modes have been added to broaden the set of supported use cases. Personal Response mode selection is done during Format set-up in Build. The three Personal Response modes are:

  • Classic Personal Response: each participant receives a response with their own personally rendered image/clip, based on an earlier submitted asset. In addition, an arbitrary number of Blasts can be run to further engage with the audience.

  • Static Response: each participant receives a response with the same attachment, based on an asset uploaded by the Viz Social operator. In addition, an arbitrary number of Blasts can be run to further engage with the audience.

  • Blasts-Only: no responses are sent to the participants. This mode is only used to push an arbitrary number of Blasts to engage with the audience.

Single-Reply

For each Personal Response mode and both for the responses and for the Blast messages, there might be a constraint to limit the number of responses/messages to 1 per recipient. For instance, when a Blast response message contains a QR-coupon. For that reason, Viz Social introduces a single-reply checkbox for the main Personal Response in Build. A similar option is also provided on the set-up tab for each Blast separately. Functionally this means that when enabled, the reply at hand is generated for the first opt-in message from an originator while all subsequent ones from same originator are ignored. For Blasts, skipped posts are tagged with a unique tag to differentiate them from regular successfully/unsuccessfully delivered posts.

Miscellaneous

Wild Cards for Exclude Lists

The Exclude Filter in Gather now supports the wildcards ‘?’ (one arbitrary character) and ‘*’ (0 or more arbitrary characters). This helps filter unwanted content from incoming feeds.

Manage Pre-Aggregated Polls

Pre-aggregated Polls like Twitter Polls, Facebook Reaction Polls, Viz Social Widget Polls or Facebook Live Video Polls are generally aggregated elsewhere and share their standings, questions, alternatives with Viz Social. Viz Social manages these Polls in a better way by implementing the following improvements:

  • By default, the Poll parameters (question, alternative label, image, …) provided by the remote pre-aggregated Poll are protected against overrides on Viz Social. This leaves the remote Poll, where the aggregation is done, also charge of all other parameters.

    Note: Different Poll types share different parameters, so also different parameters are protected depending on that same Poll type.

  • When the provided parameters of the remote pre-aggregated Poll change after their set-up, then these remotes changes are picked up by Viz Social and propagated into its own published Poll data.

  • When the new ‘Prevent local overrides of Poll parameters’ checkbox on the main Poll tab in Build is unchecked, then local overrides of externally provided parameters become possible. In this case, external changes are ignored and local (overriding) values are propagated into the Poll’s published data.

  • When the new ‘Prevent local overrides of Poll parameters’ checkbox on the main Poll tab in Build is checked again, then local overrides are forgotten and the Poll data as provided by the external entity are accepted and propagated again.

Instagram #-Search Timestamps

A small change in the Instagram API allows Viz Social to mark the results from Instagram #-Searches with their proper timestamps. Previously Viz Social was forced to use the time of retrieval instead, which often is a good approximation except for the first bunch of (usually) 50 historic results.

Identification of Trending Posts

Viz Social has always had the powerful ability of pulling in social Posts as soon as they were published online. Obviously, this is essential for live and continuous engagement between audiences and producers. Viz Social also has a Trends module where it presents a ranked list of trending topics per location every 15 minutes. We are now adding functions that help identifying the specific key posts that are most popular and that drive the conversation around popular and trending topics as they happen.

Twitter Improvements

Most improvements relate to Twitter, which usually is the most appropriate channel for identifying trends, so let’s address that environment first.
An import observation is that even the most popular Tweet has no retweets or likes when it is created. So, when you look at freshly submitted original Tweets, you can’t say much about their importance (yet). The popularity of trending Posts is determined by the subsequent number of Retweets and likes and since a Retweet is merely a copy of its original (or even only a reference to it), searches that yield a Tweet generally also capture all its Retweets. This is what is used in the following.

The changes we present here are for the middle column of Carousels.

  1. All Posts from Twitter now show the Retweet and Like counts that were received when Viz Social fetched them. We also display a timestamp when that was. If nothing is shown, it means both counts are 0. New Tweets, new Quotes and new Replies have zero counts most of the time, as they are usually harvested shortly after having been published (except when you use the Twitter Historic Search).

  2. However, this does not hold for Retweets. Retweets are references to another Tweet, merely implying indicating that someone has Retweeted the original. When a Tweet is popular it has a lot of Retweets and each of them show an increasing Retweet count (and Like count) on arrival.

  3. Viz Social introduces options to order Posts based on their Retweet or Love counts, besides the existing ordering on time. This means that with a single click you are able to see a ranked list of Retweets based on their Retweet or Like counts. In other words, the trending Retweets ordered by popularity.

  4. The Fetch Original function then allows you to fetch to original trending Post by the original author from those trending Retweets.

  5. Almost by definition you often see a lot of Retweets of the same Tweet when that Tweet is trending. After you’ve fetched their original, there is no use for its Retweets anymore (it may even become annoying having to scroll through many identical Posts). For that reason, we’ve added the “Delete all Retweets” function to the context menu of Tweets, which basically flushes all Retweets of a particular Tweet.

You can repeat the Fetch Original + Delete all Retweets procedure for all Tweets that you want see / display as part of a trend. Some notes:

  • The Delete all Retweets function only acts on Retweets that have already been collected, not on future ones. New Retweets, arriving after the procedure was run for the last time, are not affected. Therefore, we suggest to first pause the original Search and then to start the trend analysis.

  • When you have fetched the original of a trending Tweet, you can choose Update from its context menu to update its counts at all times. Updates can also be used for Retweets, Quotes and Replies.

  • There are sorting option based on Retweets (descending/ascending), Likes (descending/ascending) or Replies (descending/ascending). The Reply counts are currently not provided by Twitter, but this is expected to be solved in the near future.

Generalizations for Facebook and Instagram

For Facebook and Instagram the same concepts and reasonings apply. From now on, non-zero Social counts are always retrieved / shown and the update function can always be used to synchronize the socials counts after a post has been retrieved.
Posts can be ordered based on their social counts. We have generalized the social count categories, linking count type of different social media, so that even collections with mixed content can be ordered in an unambiguous way. We use the following mapping:

This means that when ordering based on Twitter Retweets, Facebook and Instagram Posts in that same collection are ordered along, based on their Share Counts. The social counts in the yellow cells have not yet been made available via the respective social APIs (the Twitter Reply count is expected in 2021).

Improvements in Managing Graphics

In Viz Social, we introduce an improved module for managing the playout of individual Carousel Posts via integrated graphics engines (either our own HTML5-based sCG or one of the supported 3rd party ones).

Configuration

We’ve decoupled the Carousel’s starting mode from its driving mode. These two parameters can now be set separately and independently of each other in the Playout tab of Carousels in Build:

  • The Start Mode controls how a Carousel reacts when the user presses Start:

    • If set to Manual, the Carousel waits until the user decides to Take the first Post.

    • If set to Automatic, the Carousel immediately plays out the first Post.

  • The Drive Mode controls how a Carousel plays out subsequent Posts:

    • If set to Manual, the Carousel expects the user to manually Take each individual Post.

    • If set to Automatic, the Carousel navigates through the list of Posts by itself, using the configured interval.

As compared to earlier releases, Viz Social now also recognizes various invalid or inadvisable template / channel / project setups and prompts users to fix their errors.

Playout

The playout control for Carousel Posts in Publish has improved as well.

  • Each Post has a Cue button to assign it as ‘next’

  • Each Post also has a Take button that plays out that particular Post immediately.

Both actions are available for manually and automatically drives Carousels.

On Format level manually driven Carousels have a new Take next button in the left column that replaces the old Next and Previous buttons. It always takes the cued / next (yellow) Post to air. Automatically driven Carousels retain their existing Format-specific start/pause buttons in the left column and all Formats continue to have their Format-specific Off buttons. We added a new Story-level All Off button to the top row which executes an Off for all active Formats within the active Story.

Polls in Analyze

In Viz Social, we introduce the possibility to track the voting evolution per Poll alternative over time using the Graphs of Analyze.

Pre-Aggregated Polls

Pre-aggregated Polls are Polls that administered externally and for which Viz Social does not do the counting but only receives the aggregated standings periodically. All Polls listed in Build except the top one (“Keyword / Hashtag Poll”) are of this kind, so that includes Twitter Polls, Facebook Reaction Polls, Facebook Live Polls and those of supported 3rd party Poll providers such as Apester, Crowdsignal and Monterosa.
To start tracking how the votes per alternative evolve, the Poll in question has to be set up first (please refer to the existing Product Description for this). It is important to realize that Viz Social is not able to show the evolution of votes that were cast before the Poll Format was set-up.

Once the Poll itself has been set-up go to Analyze, create a new Graph and from its context menu choose Add Format… (instead of the usual “Add Search…”) and the select the Poll you want to track. Since the Poll itself is already running, there is no need to rush this step; it can be done at any time. Only one Poll can be shown at a time in a Graph.

After the Poll has been added to the Graph, Viz Social automatically collects all its data and shows the evolution of each alternative with a different line. Use the Refresh button to update the Graph with the most recent result.
Views cannot be applied to these pre-aggregated Polls because by definition Viz Social only receives their aggregated numbers and not the atomic votes themselves. For the same reason there is no Users tab. Otherwise, all Graph functionality is the same as for normal Graphs.

Keyword / Hashtag Polls

Keyword / Hashtag Polls can be set-up in much the same way as pre-aggregated Polls and show comparable data. There are two important differences:

  • A refresh of a Keyword / Hashtag Poll requires a recount of all cast votes, which might take longer than a few milliseconds. Therefore Keyword / Hashtag Poll are not loaded after their set-up or selection but require the user to click on the Refresh button. It is currently advised not to make Graphs for Keyword / Hashtag Polls with more than 50k votes.

  • Since all votes are available on Viz Social, Views are available to show the voting evolution for a filtered set of Votes only.

Management of Carousel Live Queues

So far, Viz Social Carousels have always assumed that a limited set of pre-moderated posts is either played out linearly from first to last and then stopped, or from first to last and then continued cyclically. To support feed-style publication where new posts are published continuously, Viz Social introduces management of its Live queue by restricting its length and the age of the posts in it. In doing so, the system avoids that queues can continue to grow indefinitely. These parameters are set in the New Carousel screen in Build.

Posts that do no longer satisfy the queueing criteria are taken off first (where necessary) before they are unpublished and deleted by the system.

Chat Mode Playout of Graphics

Chat Mode is a particular case of feed-style publication. Messages come and go relatively quickly and there is usually little use to read / plough through old ones (in some cases ‘old’ means a mere minute ago). Chat mode can be enabled for non-looping Carousels on the Playout tab for graphical destinations.

When Chat mode is enabled it brings:

  • After the last post of an auto-playing Carousel has been played out, the Format is no longer taken offline, but continues to wait for the next post to arrive.

  • Instead of starting the playout with the oldest post at the top of the queue, users can choose to either start with the most recent post at the tail of the queue or one or more posts earlier than the most recent one post.

  • Finally, when the rate of incoming posts is larger than the rate of outgoing ones, the queue of posts that are waiting to be played out grows. To prevent that the played out posts lag by so much that they’re no longer relevant, an auto catch-up feature is available that resets the cursor to the head of the queue when it has started to trail by too much. The threshold for this is configurable. Some remarks about this feature:

    • The auto catch-up threshold only makes sense if it is smaller than the maximum Live queue length.

    • Using auto catch-up should be regarded as a last resort mechanism to make the most of an inherently unbalanced, flawed situation, namely that the
      incoming rate is higher than the outgoing rate. A proper solution would be to lower the incoming rate or to increase the outgoing one.

New Supporting Features

Two Factor Authentication

Two Factor Authentication can be setup by a local administrator for individual accounts or all accounts. Access 2FA settings for individual users from the Manage users window. Users can scan a QR code or enter a code manually in an Authenticator application. Once set up, users will be asked to enter a six digit code generated by the Authenticator app upon login. 2FA tokens can be managed from the new dropdown Manage 2FA tokens. The expiry time for tokens is configurable, but set as default to 30 days.

Privacy Policy

A link to the privacy policy was added to the login page.

YouTube Video Size

YouTube videos have been embedded at a larger size to meet Google requirements.

Renaming of Unpublished / Published Tabs

From Viz Social forward, the Carousel tabs in the third column in Publish are no longer called “Unpublished” / “Published”, but “Staging” / “Live”. The action to push Posts into “Live” continues to be called “Publishing” and the reverse is still “Unpublishing”.

Managing Rate Limiting

To protect their stability, all social APIs limit the resources that external applications like Viz Social are allowed to consume within a certain period of time. When an application consumes more than it is allowed to, it is ‘rate-limited’ by the network. This usually means that for a while the social network will not respond to calls for new Posts. Clearly this is a situation that should be prevented. Viz Social marks rate-limited Searches more clearly and presents suggested actions in a mouse-over tooltip. More importantly, to give users the ability to proactively undertake actions before rate limiting actually occurs, Viz Social already starts warning users that rate limiting will happen, well before it actually happens.

A rate limited status usually affects one social account (e.g. someone’s Twitter @handle) and one action (e.g. Search Tweets). For curious users, but mostly for troubleshooting, new Twitter, Facebook, Instagram categories have been added to the ‘Third Party’ column of the 4-light Status menu. In situations where too much is being asked from the social APIs, the third light of the status menu becomes orange and the issues with network in question can be investigated.

Color Palette for Polls and Graphs

The default colors for Polls and Graphs are no longer identical to the primary UI color but are chosen according to a balanced palette that fills the whole color spectrum with maximum contrast between the options. The default palette can be changed on request.

Searching for Alphabets Without Word Boundaries

The ‘Text’ View has been enriched with a ‘partial match’ option. This option matches substrings everywhere in the message text and should be used when looking for ‘words’ in alphabets without word spacings such as Japanese, Chinese or Thai.

New Format Actions

The Format action in the context menu of Posts is an easy way to normalize Posts before they’re played out. Users can even combine actions into their own favorite combination. Two new atomic actions have been added to the existing building blocks

Remove Emoji from Name Fields

We already had an action to remove all emoji from the message text and in addition there’s now a complementary action to remove emoji from all name fields (full name and alias). Both can be combined into a new action to remove all emoji from a Post altogether in one go.

Update First

When combining different Format actions, users can now indicate whether Viz Social should first do an Update of the message. The update function gets the Post’s latest social counts and retrieve an up-to-date copy of the whole Post, accounting for late edits or missing fields. It is the same Update function that’s already available in the context menu of each Post.

Improved Delete / Update Actions

Viz Social adds some streamlining functions to the its moderation functions.

New Mass Actions in Staging / Live

In Viz Social new action buttons are introduced:

  • A Delete All/Selected button to delete Posts in Staging or Live.

  • An Update All/Selected button to refresh (social counts, changed or missing content) Posts in Staging or Live.

Each button works on the Posts in the tab that’s active at that moment.

Update without Originating Account

In Viz Social it is no longer necessary to choose a social account in the left column in order to execute an Update action.

Word Clouds for Graphics Formats

So far Viz Social’s integration with graphics platforms (either our own sCG or any of the third party ones) has been limited to Carousels, Competitions and Polls. Viz Social also supports Word Clouds as destinations associated with a graphics engine.

Virtual Trimming of YouTube Videos

The on-board Viz Social video editor, available in Publish for trimming video attachments of Posts, now also supports YouTube videos. Since YouTube videos reside on youtube.com and cannot be downloaded, trimming is done virtually by separately registering start and stop frames and adding the information to any externally published link to the ‘edited’ YouTube video.

Carousel Play/Pause States

Carousels can now be put on hold to temporarily pause the display of new incoming posts (but without completely stopping the feeding Search). This helps moderation when there is a large flow of incoming posts but you still want to concentrate on what’s already there and not see all the newly collected material yet. Carousels are put on hold by choosing ‘Pause’ from their context menus. Their usual behavior is re-established by selecting ‘Play’ from the same context menu.

New Renderer for Personal Response

Viz Social’s Personal Response service has adopted Adobe After Effects as its rendering engine. The consequence of this is that templates can be designed with the help of the ubiquitous After Effects design environment.

Support for E-mail Addresses in Filters and Views

On most social channels usernames are restricted to alphanumerical characters. Email addresses, however, may contain a much wider set of allowed characters. Besides the usual alphanumeric and UTF-8 characters, the locale of an email address may also contain the printable characters !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~ and the dot . , provided the latter is not the first or last character.

Viz Social now allows address matching in the Originator Views of Publish based on the complete set of allowed characters of email addresses. The address matching of the Originator Filters of Gather has also been upgraded to support the set of allowed characters of email addresses, with two exceptions:

  • The question mark ? which is reserved as a wildcard matching exactly one arbitrary character.

  • The asterisk * which is reserved as a wildcard matching any number (including zero) of arbitrary characters.

Legend in Analyze

The main area of Analyze now always displays a legend specifying the name / color of each data set. This allows users to recognize data in glance, even when the Graph in the left column is collapsed.

New UI Features

Multi-Post Moderation Buttons

The set of multi-post moderation buttons between middle and right column in Publish Carousels has been enriched with reordering buttons.

Enhanced Login Security

Viz Social offers the possibility to define a maximum password lifetime and a maximum number of failed logins. Both are disabled by default for backward compatibility.

Status Menus Enhancements

The status menu of Viz Social now shows the UI version, Personal Response key data and the state of the Push Service + its queue length.

Improved Auto-Loading of Posts

In the scroll areas for Posts, older Posts are pre-emptively loaded so that scrolling remains smooth, even when going several pages back in time.

Hover Indicator for Facebook Posts

Hover information has been added to Facebook Posts, Comments and Replies from Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups. In particular the difference between Page and Groups Posts has been clarified.

Prevent Accidental Removal of Max Gnip Budget

When users accidentally remove the maximum budget for a Search based on the 100% complete Twitter Firehose, they are now warned to make sure that their decision is a conscious one.

Peak Minute in Graph

The key data on the overview tab in Analyze now also identify the peak minute, next to the peak hour.

Default Name Poll

The default name of a Polls is its question.

Delete Function in Publish

The moderation functions on the Published and Unpublished tabs of Carousels in Publish have been extended with a Delete / Delete All button on each tab. When Published Posts are deleted, they are first Unpublished.

Controlled Delete from Gather

In Gather it is possible to execute a hard delete and to remove a Post from a Search. At the time that Post can be a part of a multitude of Formats. Viz Social now takes care of the removal of this Post from each Format and unpublishes it in case it was actively published.

Original Aspect Ratio Preset

In the Post editor of the various Carousel Formats, a new preset aspect ratio is introduced, namely, the same as that of the original image.

Variance for Average Polls

One of the Poll modes supported by the Viz Social widget Polls is an Average Poll. This means that each alternative is associated with a score (say 1 – 10) and the audience judges by voting. The Poll shows the distributions of scores over the various scores and provides the average score. Viz Social now also provides the variance of this result to help determining to what extend the voters agreed with each other or not.

Time Ordering in Gather

The Posts in the third column in Gather are traditionally order chronologically with the newest Posts at the top and the oldest down at the bottom. To support the new Historic Twitter Search, which works backwards and therefore harvests the oldest Posts last instead of first, users can now choose between chronological and anti-chronological ordering.

Partial Matching for Views

A new matching mode ‘partial’ has been introduced for the Text View in Carousels, Polls and Graphs. When selected it makes Viz Social match substrings, so the entry “cat” not only matches the word “cat”, but also words “cats”, “instacat”, “concatenated”, etc.

Improved Setup Flow Grabyo Plugin

When selecting destinations for playout via our Grabyo plugin it is now possible to select more than one at a time. Viz Social then takes care of spawning of the proper management components.

Resizable Avatar

Viz Social make it possible to magnify / shrink / remove the avatar of Posts in its UI. This makes it possible to closely inspect them during content moderation or to remove them altogether in cases where they are not relevant.

High-Resolution Twitter Avatar

Sometimes when moderating based on avatars, the standard resolution of Twitter avatars is insufficient for a good judgement. We’ve added a small button to load its high-resolution counterpart in the UI for proper inspection.

Note: The high-resolution avatar variety is (and always has been) used for all Posts published by Viz Social.

Set Search / Format Names

In Viz Social users can name new Searches and Formats at creation any way they want. If no initial name is provided the system uses the existing default naming convention.

Expandable / Collapsible Destinations

The lists of Format destinations and destination categories in Build is now collapsible and expandable to ease navigation.

New Date-Time Selector

The date-time selector has undergone a facelift and now offers a much better and responsive user experience.

Continue Playing Streams / Clips During Updates

Previously when collecting comments / chat under a (YouTube or Facebook) stream or even while a video was playing, a refresh of a column to load new results paused the playing stream / video. In Viz Social playing content continues playing during and after a column refresh.

Support Multiple Video Attachments in Editor

Viz Social’s Post editor now supports editing of more than one video attachment.

UI Changes

  • Gather: New Facebook defaults when searching for posts on a page. To reduce quota issues, the default is now set to fetching ten posts, and not including all comments on every post.

  • Build: A change to the width of the destination dropdown list.

  • Publish: Unpublish all is not available when an item is active (green). This is to prevent accidentally removing content that is live.

  • Publish: Context menu Play in the formats list has been renamed to Start.

  • Publish: Removed x from Moderator Posts where there is no avatar, because there is nothing to remove.

Fixed Issues

Chrome Extension

  • Chrome extension usernames is case sensitive.

  • Helpful error for failed authentication.

  • Chrome extension: Page not automatically refreshed to show the newly added buckets.

Facebook

  • Facebook Page / Account names do not persist.

  • Double fetching of Facebook Replies.

  • Link FB reaction poll.

  • Changes to FB Search naming.

  • Publish FB post with image.

  • Handle FB Page Searches on FB Pages that used to be FB Users.

  • Fix missing error when FB/Instagram tokens are withdrawn.

Formats

  • Warning due when deleting / changing Formats with active graphics destination.

  • Prevented that truncated Format names cannot be edited.

  • Load result of Format parameter changes without refreshing.

  • Prevent Format deletion when DCS is down.

  • Made DCS remove Formats for which all destinations were removed.

  • Fix locally defined Format functions.

  • Disable post-specific Take/Cue buttons when Format is stopped.

  • Drag ’n drop doesn’t enable update button of self-made format actions.

General

  • Immediate access to management functions.

  • Make text in UI copyable.

  • Disallow negative playout number.

  • Missing manage/operate roles for Personal Response.

  • Green indicator light gets lost in certain cases.

  • Modiles are not reloaded when clicked.

  • Validate colors.

  • Group comments missed original.

  • Avoided that the refresh button for templates can enter a deadlock.

  • Fixed inconsistency when IP connectivity suddenly drops.

  • Allow Story names consisting of one character.

  • Allow numbers to be astronomically large without freezing the system.

  • Fixed error when auto-tagging originators in Gather.

  • Avoided lockdown when there is one template that wants to bypass auto-filtering.

  • Fixed emoji encoding in cut-off Search / Format names (9391).

  • Avoid that status menu gets messed up when Push service is down.

  • Save output channel entry state when selecting project template.

  • "Remove #" does not work when used in a combined filter.

  • "Update" button stays disabled even when any of the available formatters are dragged.

  • Pressing "Update All" does not show the changed profile image.

  • Output channel list shows and additional Profile [Channel_].

  • Add separate dropdowns for Profile name and Channel name.

  • MSE node does not show in Destination tree if there is a timeout while fetching templates.

  • "Take" button is not disabled for a format which is in stopped state.

Instagram

  • Instagram @mention uses an old token.

  • Add Instagram counts again.

  • Missing thumbnails for Instagram videos.

Polls

  • Fixed errors in string matching with special characters for Poll alternatives have been fixed.

  • Fixed disappearance of Crowdsignal Poll Question and Images.

  • Handled deprecation of ES timestamp causing slowdown of Poll aggregation.

Publish

  • Delete from Gather does not Unpublish first.

  • (Un)publish selected button name.

  • Fixed wrong ordering for manual posts in Published after hitting Publish All.

  • Disallow drag and drop to Unpublished.

Twitter

  • Removed ancient rule that #hashtags cannot contain a digit for one of Twitter’s APIs.

  • Allow Update All function without selecting a Twitter account.

  • Fix issues with Twitter and Google login.

  • For a retweet, combined filters do not appear in the context menu.

  • When a Twitter message with single video is published, multiple copies of video downloaded to disk with different names.

Viz Trio

  • Cleanup button deactivated pagelist in Viz Trio.

  • Playout of published feed from Viz Social NEXT stops working if Viz Trio profile is renamed.

  • Unpublish All operation changes local Trio page preview by removing some of the image thumbnails.

YouTube

  • Registration of YouTube accounts now permitted for local / social admin roles.

Deprecated Features

  • The collection of Twitter Moments has been deprecated.

Viz Social 1.0.0

Release Date: 2020-05-29

Viz Social is a new solution from Vizrt Group providing search, moderation and publication of social media content to On Air graphics. It is a collaboration with Never.no, where they deliver the search and moderation service. Viz Social replaces the previous social solutions, while also providing much more functionality and an up-to-date user interface.

As this is a new product offering the release notes do not contain references to new features, upgrades or changes, however a feature list has been added below.

System Requirements

Viz Social is a web application that runs as a cloud service in AWS. It feeds curated social content to the Vizrt broadcast environment, for instance Viz Trio or Viz Pilot Edge. The service connects to the broadcaster network through the application known as DCS (Dynamic Content Scheduler) which is typically installed locally on the broadcasters network with connectivity to the internet.

For details and a better understanding of the different options available please refer to the Viz Social Installation Guide.

Feature List

Viz Social powered by Never.no

•100 simultaneous users (depending on capacity)
•10 Stories (can be increased)

Gather
 Searches (100 simultaneous):

  • Twitter both restricted and unlimited search

  • Facebook

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • Other standard formats such as RSS/SMS/ATOM feeds

Build Formats

  • Unlimited Carousels

  • Nested Carousels

  • Polls

  • Competitions

  • Including posting/replying/commenting/sharing/liking within Story

Publish

  • Vizrt outputs - Viz Trio, Viz Pilot Edge, MSE, Datahub

  • Standard outputs such as XML, JSON, HTML5

  • Customized outputs (separately quoted)

Chrome plug-in extension

Analysis and reports

iPad Prompter

Known Issues and Limitations

See also chapters Chrome Extension > Constraints and Volume and Performance Limits in the User Guide for further information.

  • Viz Engine/Viz Artist

    • Viz Social 1.0.0 has been tested with Viz Engine and Viz Artist 3.14.92401. Full support for Viz Engine and Viz Artist 4.x will be made available in a later release.

    • Plug-ins (BEEON-82)

      • Viz Social includes access to a set of Viz Engine plug-ins. The current set of plug-ins are supported by Viz Engine 3.14.x. Plug-ins with full support for Viz Engine 4.x will be released shortly. This includes a full set of 3247 emojis. Emoticons are supported in the scene STV_TextHighlight_Emoji, but only a set of 874 emojis are currently included. Full Unicode support will be available with Viz Engine 4.x.

  • Preview server is not fully integrated with the current Viz Social solution (BEEON-116).

  • YouTube

    • Search option requiring login to Google account is not available, specifically the ability to monitor a chat under a live YouTube stream. Other YouTube search options are available as they do not require login (BEEON-105).

    • Current quota limits to maximum two simultaneous YouTube searches (one element in Gather is one search) per day.

    • When hovering mouse over error icon in YouTube source the text "quota" is not visible in error message (BEEON-123).

  • Chrome Extension

    • When adding content from the Chrome Extension it may take up to 60 seconds before the content is visible in Viz Social (BEEON-108).

    • In Chrome, if a user click on the Viz Social icon and select the This can read and change site data > When you click the extension option the extension no longer functions as intended. To indicate this the Viz Social Chrome extension logo is grayed out. The option must be set to On Facebook.com/twitter.com (BEEON-111, BEEON-113).

    • There are some constraints to the correct functioning of the extension:

      • Depending on the policies of a social network, different considerations apply. These restrictions are imposed by the social networks and therefore are the same as for Viz Social itself:

        • Twitter: public Tweets and Tweets readable by the selected Twitter account can be retrieved. Private Tweets cannot be retrieved.

        • Facebook: Posts / Comments on Facebook Pages you own can be retrieved. Status updates and Posts in Groups / Events cannot be retrieved.

        • Instagram: public Instagram Posts can be retrieved. Private Instagram Post cannot be retrieved.

        • YouTube: public YouTube videos can be retrieved. Private YouTube videos cannot be retrieved.

  • Scenes

    • A Scene Archive is made available as examples for designers to create their own branded scenes. The corresponding Viz University training should be referenced for information about the scenes. If for some reason Z:\ drive connectivity is lost in the DCS machine, the generated pages point to the local C:\ drive which causes errors (BEEON-122).

    • In some cases, a unicode linebreak may cause unwanted behavior in playout even while looking correct in preview (BEEON-147).

  • Polls

    • User can successfully publish poll feed using poll scene to Viz Trio, however it is not possible to unpublish the generated Viz Trio page from Viz Social. A user can only manually delete the Viz Trio page from within Viz Trio (BEEON-126).

    • There is no Next button to playout poll feed with associated poll scene to playout server configured in Viz Trio profile (BEEON-127).

    • The bars in payload scene do not animate in local Viz Trio preview, the animation is shown only when played out (BEEON-129).

    • The poll workflow only works with the Options source selection under Project template, not the Social message source template. Polls has a different mapping and field layout in the exported messages. (BEEON-132).

  • Viz Trio related issues requiring updates

    • Local Viz Trio page preview error when unpublishing from Viz Social (BEEON-83, TRIO-4732).

    • image_prefix not included (BEEON-86)

      • The Viz Trio client does not include the image_prefix when importing the Multiple_Message scene, causing the initialization to be incomplete (TRIO-4730).

    • Error message when initializing Trio page

      • "Parameter is invalid" error appears when initializing Viz Trio page generated using video_toggle_scene_3_modified.via. Likely related to TRIO-4730 (TRIO-4735).

    • Profile names (BEEON-121)

      • If Viz Trio profile name is updated in Viz Trio, it is not updated in Viz Social and playout is not possible.

    • Concept and variants (BEEON-103)

      • Pagelist: The model XML made by VizTrio import must be updated to work with the REST interface, it should support proper model XML with regards to alternative_concept and alternative_variant (TRIO-4714).

      • Inline element in playlist: If the concept is set on an inline element in the VizTrio playlist, Viz Trio does not display it correctly or play it out correctly (TRIO-4715). Variant can be set in Trio per element, but needs update of model XML (TRIO-4714).

  • Preview of YouTube videos in Viz Trio

    • When previewing a scene which has YouTube video in it in Viz Trio, the Play and Stop buttons do not point directly to the video as may be expected. The Play and Stop button send commands to Viz Engine to start and stop the animations in the scene (BEEON-119).

  • MediaSequencer related issues requiring updates

    • Concept and variants (BEEON-103)

      • <ref> element in playlist: If a user alters the variant on such an element in Viz Trio, then Viz Trio sets the attribute alternative_variant on the <ref> node. MediaSequencer does not yet support this in the REST interface. (MSE-7640)

  • System status and error messages. Viz Social is not able to monitor the status of other components and as such can not provide sufficiently user friendly error messages in all instances (BEEON-89).

    • No informative message to user when Viz Engine in connected output channel is down/off air (BEEON-61).

    • {"error":"Failed to update format.. appears after updating a destination with deleted Viz Trio template (BEEON-71).

    • {"error":"Failed to update format: ... error shown when updating destination using MSE destination when MSE is turned off (BEEON-76).

    • Status of MSE can not be seen in the Viz Social status panel (BEEON-77).

    • Status of DataHub can not be seen in the Viz Social status panel (BEEON-78).

    • DataHub appears in the destination list even when DataHub service is turned off (BEEON-79).

    • Pressing Refresh destinations does not disable the MSE destinations list when MSE is off (BEEON-80).

  • Update button is enabled even when user selects the same mapping tag from the dropdown in Build panel (BEEON-65).

  • The maximum 'Number of items' in playout settings should depend on type of template used in destination, number cannot be less than 0 (BEEON-67).

  • "Cannot find a page with name 00000028-132289251248699406" error in Viz Trio when unpublishing using the 4Messages_Tutorial template configured to use four items (BEEON-70).

  • Analyse function:

    • User can enter invalid color combination in set color section, no warning message shown to user after pressing Apply button (BEEON-141).

Documentation

Documentation for Viz Social is available at the Vizrt Documentation Center:

Support

Support is available at the Vizrt Support Portal.