Heartbeat Rolls Out Protected Event Links

Murtaza from Heartbeat has just launched protected event links, faster load times for large communities and more for the SaaS community platform. A course redesign was also announced.

Protected Event Links

Heartbeat now allows you to mask all your event links with a pre-generated link to authenticate users. This ensures that members who have left your community or cancelled their subscription will not be able to access your events – even if they still have the calendar invites!

Here’s how it works:

Any of your event links such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet will be replaced with a link that looks like heartbeat.chat/eventRedirect/{unique_token}.
When a user clicks on the link, Heartbeat checks to see if they have access to the event.
If they do, they will be redirected to the event.
If they don’t, it tells them that they need to be part of your community (or have a paid membership) to get access, and blocks them from joining the event.

And as an added benefit, even if you change the meeting link at the last minute, your members will still be redirected to the right place.

Courses Redesign

Courses are one of Heartbeat’s most popular features. In the upcoming design update, they’re aiming for some big improvements, including

A cleaner layout and less clutter,
Native video hosting for course videos,
External assignments,
Upsell courses,
Course sections and more.

They are about a month away from rolling this out. Stay tuned!

What’s More?

In other news, Heartbeat has optimized page load times for large communities with 1K+ members. The “Online Now” sidebar now shows all members. Users who are currently online are moved to the top of the list. Carousels have been added to the right sidebar so you can highlight events, trending posts, incomplete course lessons and more. Finally, they have improved the user interface for custom domain settings.