Pugpig Bolt supports commenting with Viafoura in two ways, inline in the content view or, in an upcoming Bolt version, in a modal provided by the native Viafoura SDK which can be accessed from several places in the app. While inline comments offer a more traditional experience, presented at the bottom of the article, the SDK offers enhanced functionality. This includes:

1. A centralised, personalised location to view all of your active conversations
2. In-app badges (the bell) to alert you to replies or other notifications
3. A place to view your user profile and activity stream (first screenshot below)
4. Trending conversations highlighted in your feed, helping you discover engagement on content you haven't necessarily already viewed

This is in addition to the full commenting experience, including replies, reporting and upvoting/downvoting, as well as the highlighting of featured comments. 

Accessing the modal

Invoking the comments modal is possible in three different ways.

1. A floating icon in the article, which will take you specifically to the comments for that article as well as displaying the number of comments on that article (shown below). This icon will minimise on scroll so as not to interfere with the content view.
2. An optional notification bell icon in the app toolbar, which will take you to your feed. This bell supports badging to alert you to new notifications.
3. An optional settings item, which will also take you to your feed

Authentication

Viafoura requires a user to be signed into an account in order to interact with comments. If your app uses an authentication system, we're able to pass that through to Viafoura, ensuring users don't have to create a separate account or sign in twice. However, if you don't have an existing system, Viafoura offers an out-of-the-box authentication solution.

Advertising

Google Ads can also be served within the conversation, these are configured in Viafoura itself, but do require the Google Ads SDK to be included in the app, which is an out of the box Pugpig Bolt feature.

Reporting

Any reporting on interaction with comments is provided by the Viafoura dashboard, just as it is with the webview implementation. Viafoura is TCF-compliant, meaning users of Bolt apps using a CMP will have their privacy choices honoured by the service. 

Unsupported features 

Features that are not yet supported, but may be added in a future release, are:

1. Push notifications for comment replies or similar. This is currently in development with Viafoura and would involve Viafoura pushing notifications directly to your existing push service, rather than via Pugpig
2. Following article topics or authors. This requires setting up our CMS to ping the Viafoura server when content is published which is unrelated to SDK implementation. As this also overlaps with existing and upcoming Bolt functionality, we're looking to gather feedback from our customers on how, when they'd like to use this.

Accounts and set up

You'll need your own account with Viafoura, and you'll manage the relationship with them. Once you've decided you want to add the SDK to your app, we'll need to arrange an app update to include it, which our support team will handle. The implementation as described above is fully-productised, and thus won't require any custom work billable to you.