As our Unqork Community grows, we are always working to improve your experience with new ways to connect to the people and resources you need as a Creator. Later this month, we are excited to take the first step towards a more open Community Hub experience.
Note: You can stay up-to-date on these improvements via our Latest Updates blog where you can filter by Community and also subscribe to email updates.
What’s Changing?
We are softening the login experience when you first visit the Community Hub.
You’re likely familiar with the initial login screen, asking you to enter an Unqork environment. It looks like this:
In the future, you will be able to visit a more open Community Hub platform and access the navigation menu without logging-in. When logged-out, your view of the home page will look more like this:
It’s still the same Community Hub, but you can access the navigation menu and see other features available to you. The new Login button will then take you through the same login experience you’re familiar with today. Overall, it should be similar to your experiences with Unqork Academy and Marketplace.
Additionally, some features will now be accessible from a logged-out state. At the outset, this will just be Events, the Latest Updates blog, Points Leaderboard, Badge Updates, and user profile pages.
What’s Staying the Same?
Login credentials for Community Hub access: You will still need to use your Creator credentials for an Unqork environment in order to login.
Q&A, Ideas, and other forums remain private: Your questions, replies, ideas, and other posts will only be visible to Creators who are logged-in on the Community Hub.
Your User Profile contains mostly private information. Fields for your name, job title, company, and location are only for administrative use. They are not visible to other community members. Only your username, join date, badges, and certification status are visible to other users. When logged-in, other users can also view your recent activity, but this is not visible to logged-out users.
Posts, replies, and activities are not accessible.
How Does This Impact You?
The impact for existing Creators should be minimal and positive. The main change is that you now can access the navigation menu without logging-in. If you’ve been using Community Hub as your one-stop shop to access Creator resources like Academy or Documentation Hub, it should save you time.
For Creators new to our Community, this change should make for a more welcoming experience. Rather than seeing a mostly static login page, they will be able to see some of the elements available to them when they join. Additionally, they’ll be able to see information on our events and updates.
In the future, we will consider opening up other elements of our community as well. This would be done to unlock new benefits like Q&A access via any search engine or allowing non-Creators to login and leverage some resources. We will let you know before making any of those changes. If you have questions, ideas or feedback, please let us know.
Option to Update Your Username
The one primary consideration, however, is whether you wish to update your username. As mentioned above, user profiles, the points leaderboard, and recently earned badges will be visible even when logged-out.
When we launched our Community Hub, we followed the First & Last Name format of our previous platform. There are benefits to using full names: your certification status, badges, and points are attributed to you, showcasing your expertise and reputation within the Community. It also helps for promoting Creator-to-Creator connections by making it easier to find someone to connect with on Linkedin or other platforms.
That said, as we make some elements of our community to be more public, we recognize that not everyone will wish to display their full name. If at any time you wish to change your username to something more anonymous, please email our team at community@unqork.com.
We are targeting the week of April 18-22 for when we transition to this more open state. If you wish to update your username before then, please let us know by Monday, April 18. However, you can request to update your username at any time.
Note: Updating your username applies only to the Community Hub. It does not impact your login credentials for Unqork environments or other Creator resources like Unqork Academy or Marketplace.
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As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to me directly or contact us at community@unqork.com
