Here's a summary of the major changes you might have noticed to Commonlounge over the past few days. Let us know what you think by leaving a reply below!

• Introducing Closed Communities: So far, every community on Commonlounge has been fully public - you can join and start a new discussion as well as participate in existing ones. While Public Communities remain the default, in addition, we are now beta testing communities where the moderators approve you as a member before you can start a new discussion or participate in existing ones! We are calling them Closed Communities and they appear like this:

They have a small lock icon along with the word Closed. The content that gets created in these communities is still public for everyone to view, and everyone can still Follow them. We built this out since they satisfy the quite common use cases where moderators want to approve the members before they can jump into the conversation - in the example above, the conference organizers might want to use Commonlounge for a better discussion experience, but wanted to limit the discussions only to conference's attendees. Hence something like a Closed Community is a perfect fit for them!

• User cards on hover: This was another highly requested feature. When you are reading a discussion or browsing the feed, a lot of times, you want to get a small preview of who the other person is. It looks like this:

Protip: Don't forget to update your bio from the profile page - it appears on these cards and is the primary way you can quickly let others know who you are. :)

• Better digests: Our digests got a design and algorithmic refresh and you might have noticed the change! Here's what my digest looked like after the change. They now have better previews, more number of discussions per email, and better metadata to make the email more useful for you.

Let us know what you think about these changes by leaving a reply below.