Aha! Roadmaps | Submit-only ideas portal

Submit-only ideas portals are perfect for situations where you want to collect feedback but do not need to respond to the feedback or interact with your ideas portal users.

You can use a submit-only ideas portals as a public channel to collect new ideas for your product, campaign, or service and still maintain privacy around the pool of existing ideas. Anyone who knows the URL can submit new ideas, but they cannot view ideas that have been submitted by others. Only Aha! Roadmaps users can see the ideas.

If you want to dive deeper into how to build, manage, and launch an ideas portal for your customers, check out this tutorial recording.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• When to use submit-only ideas portals

• Managing submit-only portals

• Create a submit-only portal

• Customize your ideas submission form

• Copy your portal

When to use submit-only ideas portals

A submit-only ideas portal is a great choice if you want:

• To collect bug reports for triage.

• To collect private feedback from a focus group.

• To collect private feedback on an invitation-only group of power-users.

• To embed a feedback form in their application.

• Submissions to remain private to the original submitter.

And like any ideas portal, you can use CSS, JavaScript, and custom fields to make your submit-only ideas portal look and feel just like your website. See Advanced custom portal design for details.

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Managing submit-only portals

When managing a submit-only portal, here are a few things to consider:

• Submit-only portals may require more time to manage because users can submit duplicate ideas and Aha! Roadmaps does not filter those out. This typically requires merging as ideas are triaged, which could take more time.

• Users also cannot vote on ideas, which may make it difficult to prioritize or know which ideas are most important to them.

• Even if a user already has an Aha! Roadmaps account, an idea portal user record will be created for them the first time they submit an idea. This will mean that ideas submitted via this portal type will not be attributed to the Aha! Roadmaps user even though the email address is the same.

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Create a submit-only portal

To create a new ideas portal, navigate to Settings ⚙️ Account Ideas portals, or Ideas Overview. From either page, click Add ideas portal to open the portal builder.

The ideas portal builder is a three-step process. To create a submit-only portal, we will add a few extra steps.

• Select a Title for your portal. Click Next to continue.

• Select a theme Color. Your theme color affects links and buttons in your ideas portal. Click the color icon to select a color, or enter your own custom color using a hex code. Click Edit to edit your choice or Next to continue.

• Select your portal's Access level. Portals can have Public or Private access, corresponding to the public and private types of portals. Choose one — we will change this setting in a minute.

Click Create portal to create your portal!

Now that we have created an ideas portal, we need to convert it to a submit-only portal.

• After you create your portal, the portal will open in a new browser tab. Click the ⚙️Settings tab in the upper right corner.

• You will start on the Overview tab of your settings. Click the Type section.

• Change the Submission to Idea submission only.

Your changes will save automatically.

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Customize your ideas submission form

When you collect feedback from your customers, you want to make sure you capture key information. You also want to make sure the process is seamless for users to submit their ideas — so your community keeps coming back to share more.

Your customers submit ideas in your ideas portals using the Ideas portal — Ideas layout. You can customize this layout for each of your portals to gather relevant information from your different audiences. By default, the ideas submission form is a single step. If you are an Ideas Advanced customer, you can create multi-step dynamic forms with conditional rules, such as showing or skipping specific steps during the idea submission process.

Portal users will fill out all required steps to submit an idea. If their idea requires visual context, they can add an attachment.

Attached files must be less than 20mb. The following file types are supported: csv, doc, docx, eml, gif, jpeg, jpg, mov, mp4, msg, pdf, png, ppt, pptx, tiff, txt, vsd, vsdx, xls, xlsx. Aha! Ideas uses file type detection to avoid simple renaming of a file to a different extension to bypass it.

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Copy your portal

Make an exact copy of your ideas portal so you can save time configuring a new portal. Then customize the new portal to suit your product, brand, and community.

Navigate to Settings Account Ideas portals. Find the portal you want to copy and click its More options menu. Then and select Copy. Doing so will duplicate the portal's settings and create a new portal configured nearly identically. Only the following portal configurations will not be duplicated:

• Title: The portal's title will be [Copy] $portal name.

• URL: The portal will be given a new random URL.

• CNAME: If you have configured a CNAME for your ideas portal, it will not (and cannot) be shared with the new portal.

• Users: No portal users will be copied.

• Widget: Any widgets you have enabled will not be copied.

If you are using the Aha! Ideas Advanced plan and have enabled single sign-on (SSO) for your portal, the SSO configuration will be copied and shared with the new portal.

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