Release Date : July 17, 2020

Major Feature Updates

Gamification

With the latest release, Pathable has enabled the gamification feature for our events, a much-loved feature that was previously only available in our "classic" version. 

Pathable's gamification feature can help you create engagement around your event and your trade show. As the event administrator, you can assign points to attendees for performing activities such as visiting an exhibitor's booth or watching a presentation. Pathable will display a scoreboard for all your attendees so they can track their progress.

A full description of the feature can be found in our Gamification KB article.

Dress Rehearsal

The "dress rehearsal" feature allows you to add a webinar or other meeting to your event's agenda without revealing it to the general attendee population. Sessions that are marked with the dress rehearsal setting will only be displayed on the agenda for people who are speakers on at least one session in your event, as well as site administrators. 

To enable the dress rehearsal feature on a session, open that session in the Agenda tab in your administrative dashboard, click "Advanced" and tick the box labeled "This is a dress rehearsal; it will only appear on the calendar of event speakers".

Zoom Updates

Pathable has updated our embedded Zoom webinar and meetings control to Zoom's 1.7.10 version (see Zoom release notes). This affords a number of improvements, including:

• Adds back Safari and Firefox support for VOIP
• Improves audio quality overall (fewer echo, crisper sound)
• Fixes "black screen" issue, where some users would see a black screen instead of the screencast or webcam video of the presenter.

New Security Settings

Many of our clients have asked that we take steps to restrict "account sharing" and limit the possibility of accidentally sharing access to one's account. To accommodate this need, Pathable has added two new settings, available under Settings > Security. 

• Invalidate magic sign-in links after use: When enabled, magic sign-in links provided to users will only work twice before being invalidated.
• Don't allow attendees to be logged into more than one device at a time: When enabled, whenever an attendee logs-in, he/she will be automatically logged-out from all other devices.

Note that the latter, while it prevents multiple people from sharing an account to watch live presentations, will not prevent users from signing in at different times to the same account. It will, however, prevent a single user from signing in from multiple devices (e.g., desktop and phone) at the same time to the same account.

Performance Improvements

This release includes a host of changes and updates to our architecture to improve the initial load time of Pathable pages, improve the page-to-page transition times and to increase the capacity of our servers to handle large volume of simultaneous users. 

Performance is an important and ongoing initiative at Pathable, and you will continue to see additional improvements over the coming weeks and months.

Additional Updates 

• The footer of email templates is now customizable via Settings > Communications. Note that US CAN-SPAM laws require a physical mailing address to be included in this footer.
• While "Birds of a Feather" meetings are not automatically recorded to the cloud, they may be set to automatically publish if the speaker / host uses the Zoom controls to "Record to the Cloud". 
• New meetings will default to the start date of the event rather than today's date.
• The administrative area for controlling the attributes (e.g., labels, profiles questions, tracks, keywords, etc.) for People, Agenda and Organizations was renamed from "Questions" to "Attributes"
• Fixes made to address difficult to read text on dark themed sites. 
• Attendee-facing instructions for downloading notes taken on sessions was corrected.
• The advanced permissions editor was updated to allow for a clearer view of what is and is not being allowed, including grouping multiple related permissions together, renaming some items and adding tooltips to explain their meaning.
• Several updates were made to the default configuration for new events, including re-arranging the order of menu items and pre-provisioning a "Links" field for organizations. These will not apply retroactively, only to newly provisioned events. 
• Pathable's help system was switched from Freshdesk to Zendesk.