As some of you know, we have had internal Community Leaderboards for a while now - we use it to announce "Member of the Month" in some of our biggest and most active communities. Today, we are making them public!

Leaderboards are a good way for a community's moderators to know who the most active members of a community are, as well as provide the community a small way to appreciate the efforts members put in their thoughtful replies. Leaderboards are calculated on a number of factors, and become active automatically once a community receives enough contributions. To see a few examples of how they look like, check out the new sidebar on the right in the HBO Westworld community or in the International Olympiad in Informatics community.

In addition to having the top 10 contributors in the Leaderboard section, we also have an Up And Coming section where you can see the top 100 contributors who are either your Facebook friends or someone you have interacted with on Commonlounge.

This is one of our highly experimental features - so...

Our most engaged communities are purpose-driven and lists are an effective tool to get things done — and though our users have been making lists for a while on Commonlounge, we felt we could do better and made native Lists into the product.

Lists are a way for you to make public collections so that you can track your progress over time, as well as subscribe and set email reminders to get you back to them at a frequency of your choice. Check out our first few Lists here:

• Hackers & Painters Book Playlist
• Competitive Programming Playlist
• Deep Learning Book Playlist
• High Resolution Design Series Playlist

A quick recap of some recent updates to Commonlounge:

Better desktop experience:

While Commonlounge was designed as a mobile-first product, we noticed majority of you spend a lot of time on it on a desktop. Hence we have been adding a bunch of niceties for our desktop users:

• Community Sidebar: We compressed the Community Info page into a sidebar on the right side of each community page so that all the information about a community you need (like info, associated topics, leaderboard, channels, related communities etc.) is always accessible quickly.
• Email Invite from community sidebar: Since we get more space to work with in the sidebar, we could made it easier for you to send an email invite to your friends right from the community's sidebar. Here's what it looks like:

Direct Messaging on Commonlounge has been one of the most requested features from the very start. We decided to build this after hearing from a lot of you who wanted to continue a discussion in private with someone, but were unable to do so without first adding them on other platforms.

We did not restrict the message composer in any way,...