Intercom

You may notice some subtle changes and improvements in the Intercom website today, and we want to let you know about some additional changes coming soon.

The response to the updated look and features of Intercom since our launch last week has been very positive, and we're grateful for all the helpful feedback we received from different users. With our latest update, we improved the display of Top Stories so they're easier to read on all screen sizes. We also fixed some missing navigation elements and search functions, and upgraded permissions on the backend to ensure users can see all of their published and unpublished posts, and that the right users have the access they need to post to certain topics.

But we still have a number of other bugs and feature enhancements in our backlog we're working on. Now that Intercom is managed in the same platform as the rest of the college website, it significantly easier to test and deploy new features and bug fixes than before, and we are committed to make using and contributing to Intercom an even better experience over the months ahead.

One of the long-standing drawbacks of the old Intercom architecture has been the multiple post problem. Because a post could only belong to one category, many users got in the habit of duplicating the same post in multiple categories to spread the message to different audiences. Not only does this create more work for the person creating Intercom posts, but it also clogs up the system with duplicate information unnecessarily, often making it difficult for other messages to gain visibility.

In one of our next updates, we are planning improve how Intercom Topics work, and allow you to select up to three different categories for your post to appear in at the same time. This means you will only have to create a post once, and it will show up in multiple Topic views simultaneously. This is similar to how we already categorize IC News stories on our site, and we hope it will significantly improve the user experience.