It’s release day again here at Daily Challenge and we’re happy to announce the arrival of Beta 1.4! Everyday we’re getting handfuls of valuable feedback from our community (that’s you guys) with ways to improve the experience around the site. If you’ve ever submitted a complaint or suggestion about an existing or new feature but haven’t gotten a response, rest assured that we’ve seen it and have incorporated it into our regular planning cycles. Stephanie (Daily Challenge’s lovely Community Director) already does an awesome job at keeping on top of what you’re saying and staying in touch with all of you, and she really makes a point to make sure you’re all heard!

Speaking of amazing people, our Chief Architect Luciano Sampaio continues to work his magic and develop new features for the DC community to enjoy and interact with. The entire team, in fact, has put a lot of sweat and strength (or as Stephanie calls it, Swength) into this new release, so we really hope you like it.

Check out what’s new after the jump!

More Privacy Options

At the top of our priority list has always been the mission to ensure everyone has the most enjoyable Daily Challenge experience as possible. A large part of accomplishing this is ensuring your privacy requests are addressed. In Beta 1.3, we introduced the option for you to opt-in and out of our daily challenge emails and choose whether you wanted to receive it in HTML or Plain Text (should you opt-in to receive them). We’ve now extended this capability across our other communication points so you’re now able to opt-in and out of receiving the Daily Challenge newsletter as well as alerts for friend requests.Additionally, you’re now able to activate or de-activate the ability for your friends to message you.

As always, you can access your Privacy controls by clicking Edit Profile at the top right of the site (you must be logged in first).

Delivery Method?

You might have noticed that within your Privacy tab, there is a dropdown for Delivery Method but with only one option (Email). No, we didn’t go dropdown crazy - we’re just laying down the foundation for new and exciting ways for you to receive updates from Daily Challenge! Stay tuned.

A More Robust and Scalable Email System

The aforementioned magician Luciano has done a brilliant job revamping our email system and we’re now running on a much more robust and scalable structure. Most of the magic happens behind the curtains but you will all surely enjoy the faster response times when sending challenges, messages, and invitations to friends.

So that wraps up the major new features included with Beta 1.4. With every release, we also do a bunch of minor tweaks around the site, so I invite you to just browse around and discover them on your own.

We also need your feedback to continue improving and we’d really like to hear your feedback on the new features listed above as well anything else you’d like to share with us.

Have a great Thursday!