SEO

Muut now includes Search Engine Optimization. This means the content in your embedded Muut forums and commenting will get indexed by search engines, and thus allow users to search and find your site via content in your comments sections using Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

The embed code has been modified as follows to point to a HTML version of the discussion:

<a class="muut"
   href="https://muut.com/i/goma/classic-art:the-venetian-painters">
   Comments for venetian painters</a>

This page is a static version of the discussion with no dynamic features. It simply carries the discussion content, which is not present on any other page on the internet, as far as search engines are concerned. The HTML formatting is also specifically designed with search engines in mind, and the content is updated hourly. Search engines absolutely love these kinds of pages!

This static page is also what the users will see when they click on search results from Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go etc. For humans (or non-robots) there is a highly prominent button on the top/right, which takes you to the dynamic version of the discussion on your own site. This button stays in place even when you scroll down, as the main purpose of this static page is to push users to your site.

The same discussions can be embedded into multiple domains, so you need to tell us the main site where the users should be forwarded from the search results. This can be done directly from your forum by clicking “SEO settings” link from the right (only visible for administrators). It will open a dialog asking for a domain name.

Language versions

Muut now supports these 14 languages:

• Arabic (including RTL support)
• Brazil Portuguese
• Chinese
• Chinese (Taiwan)
• English
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Japanese
• Spanish
• Tamil
• Turkish

For Arabic languages we also have support for right to left direction.

Click the image to see a demo. To use a language (other than the default English) for Muut on your own site, check the documentation.

More languages are on the way! If you want to help us with translations, check the README.md at GitHub.

A big thank you to everyone who provided us localizations in your own language. You rock!

Smart image linking

Here is the official way of displaying images on Muut.

Links to image format files are converted into nicer links, which upon clicking display all the pictures in the same post in a nice gallery overlay, so users won’t have to leave your site to see them.

This feature is now part of the core and image embedding plugin introduced in v1.1 should be removed since it does not play well with v1.2.

We had a big internal debate of how images should be displayed in Muut and this is what we are all happy with. The camera icon, file name and file name suffix offer more information than a thumbnail without stealing the focus from the text. Additionally this text based approach does not introduce extra downloadable bytes.

Watch shortcut

You can now choose to watch for new replies when you post

Mobile UI improvements

Muut is now better optimized for mobile in the default CSS. To make up for the smaller screens the text in the posts now spans from side to side, and icons are easier to tap.

The complete list of changes in v1.2 can be found on the Muut updates page.

Thank you.

The Muut Team