Champ Forum App for Shopify

Guide

Installation & Troubleshooting

Installing Champ

There are two (2) ways to install Champ:

(1) The easiest way to install Champ as you read this is to click on this link below. It will take you directly to the application’s installation page.

Install Champ

(2) Head over to Champ’s Shopify app page. Once there, click on the big green Get button.

During the installation process, you’ll see the following screen asking for permission to install in your Shopify store:

Click on Install app.

Once installed, you’ll be redirected to the application’s dashboard page where you can create forums, moderate posts, and modify other settings related to Champ.

Your forums can be seen at https://yourdomain.myshopify.com/community/champ. You will need to replace yourdomain with your Shopify domain.

If you’re using a custom domain, you can replace the entire yourdomain.myshopify.com with your custom domain.

Common problems

Sometimes the installation may get stuck or return an error page. If this happens, please try the following:

In rare instances, some browsers have compatibility issues with Shopify’s admin dashboard. Try using the Google Chrome in these cases.

Trial period

Champ comes with a risk-free 14 day trial period which begins when you install the application.

After 14 days has passed, you’ll need to subscribe to Champ in order for the app to continue to be available to your users.

Uninstalling Champ

If for whatever reason you need to uninstall Champ, there are a few things you need to know:

  • Your monthly subscription is prepaid and is not prorated.
  • You may choose to unsubscribe from the app instead of uninstalling. To unsubscribe, go to the Billing section within the app’s dashboard.
  • If you’re testing something and need to uninstall the app, but don’t want to unsubscribe, please contact us for assistance first. When you uninstall, Shopify’s billing functionality will unsubscribe you at the same time. You’ll lose any prepaid part of your subscription immediately.

Exporting your data

You can export your data from Champ. The data that’s exportable include:

  • Forums
  • Topics
  • Posts
  • Users

Because the data includes various levels of cross references (eg. a post belongs to a specific user, a post belongs within a specific topic, a topic is from a specific forum), referencing IDs are available in the export to allow you to reconstruct the data that’s present in Champ.

Due to technical limits, the following data is not exported:

  • Custom avatars uploaded by users
  • Upvote information from users

However, upvote counts in posts are exported in each “post” record.

The format of the export is in standard JSON format, and is easily usable from various programming languages.

To download your data, go to Data from within Champ’s dashboard:

Click on Request Export. Champ will generate your data in the background. Refresh the page in a minute or so and you should see a link to your JSON export.

In order to ensure a secure system, the generated data automatically deletes itself after 30 minutes from the initial request, so be sure to download it right away.

In order to limit system resources, you can only make a single data export request per 60 minutes as this functionality is database resource intensive.

Note: We do not provide assistance in importing the data into another software or provide a paid service for this. If you’re not familiar with programming, you may need to hire a developer to help you with this.

General Data Protection Regulation

You can search your customers’ post history right in Champ and remove (by the customers’ request) all data associated with it. 

Champ does not support exporting data created by a specific customer, but you can easily print out the entire page worth of post and provide that to the customer.

To access the GDPR area, click on Data and enter the customer’s Shopify ID.

A customer’s Shopify ID can be found in your Shopify dashboard, in your browser’s URL. It consists of a number.

Note: Deleting posts in the GDPR section is permanent.

Reporting bugs

To file an application bug, please go to our support forum here: https://getchamp.myshopify.com/community/champ/forums/1021-bug-reports.

Feature requests

As developers of the app, our goal is that Champ maintains its position as Shopify’s best and most integrated forum software. If there is a feature you’re looking for, let us know. 

In our support forum, we post a monthly thread talking about what we’re currently working on to improve the app. It’s an open thread where you can post suggestions and feature requests.

Although we can’t promise we’ll add every feature, please feel free to share your thoughts there for further discourse.

While we’re on this topic, here are some reasons we sometimes don’t add a feature:

  • Technical limitations
  • Deviate too far from our app’s main purpose
  • Feature is beyond what we are currently able to support

Champ uses Shopify’s existing customer login system for the user registration and login. The benefit of this design is that your users won’t have to create a separate login if they want to be signed in when in the Champ application.

This also means that your user data is stored in one place: in Shopify.

In order for the login system to work, you’ll need to enable customer accounts in your Shopify store. If you don’t have customer accounts enabled, any attempts to go to the /accounts/login or the /accounts will be redirected to your shop’s main page.

To modify this setting, perform the following steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Checkout.
  2. In the Customer accounts section, choose a customer account option: “Accounts are optional” or “Accounts are required”

Note: Customer accounts is a feature of Shopify and not Champ. For more information on customer accounts, please refer to https://help.shopify.com/manual/customers/customer-accounts.

We recommend that you use the “Accounts are optional” setting, as “Accounts are required” will force your users to create an account when they proceed to the checkout.

Once you do this, login will be enabled and your users will be able to create and login to their customer accounts.

If you share your forum on Facebook, Facebook will fetch a preview of your site. You can see how your site will look by entering the forum URL here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/.

You can customize the preview link for your site by going to Champ’s dashboard and the Settings section.

When you submit a URL for a topic, by default the topic’s title, first post, and first post’s image will be used for the Facebook preview.

If you’re a moderator, you can customize it by overriding the first post’s preview description and preview thumbnail. To edit this, you’ll need to be logged in as a moderator and click on Edit for the specific topic.

When you’re on the Edit page for the forum, near the bottom you’ll see the following:

Enter the description and thumbnail in order to override the default.

Turbo Theme Issues

Turbo is a theme by Out of the Sandbox for the Shopify Platform.

It comes with a feature called “Ludicrous Speed”, which essentially overrides all the links on your site’s page and disables a full page refresh.

Any apps that depend on a full page reload, or in Champ’s case where the page is completely separate from your main store, will be affected.

There are 2 ways to fix this issue:

(1) Switch from Ludicrous Speed setting to Sport speed – Recommended

Many apps recommend switching off Ludicrous Speed simply because it’s the most prudent way to prevent issues like this in the future.

(2) Add the following Javascript code to the end of your theme’s layout file:

<script>
$(document).off('click', 'a[href="https://yourdomain/community/champ"]');
$(document).on('click', 'a[href="https://yourdomain/community/champ"]', function(e) {
   e.preventDefault(); 
   window.location.href = "https://yourdomain/community/champ";
});
</script>

This little piece of JavaScript will effectively cause your forum page to reload fully. 

My Store Is Not Working!

If you have installed Champ and have noticed issues with your store, please note that the scope of Champ’s installation is very limited and is designed to NOT affect your Shopify store whatsoever. Please double check your Shopify store settings and verify any changes you have made to your Theme settings.

How Champ Works

To understand this, Champ only mounts to the /community/champ (or whichever proxy path you changed to) and nothing more. 

Champ does not make any modifications to:

  • Your theme
  • Your Shopify settings
  • Your customer account pages, login pages, etc.

Moreover, Shopify does not allow apps to make these changes. As a result, Champ cannot affect your store in any adverse way.

If You’re Using Cloudflare…

There have been reports that certain settings in Cloudflare can mess up your Shopify store, such as the logging in and logging out functions for your customers. If you’re using Cloudflare, please check your settings there.

If you’re having trouble with your Shopify store, please contact help@shopify.com for assistance.

Want to see Champ in action? Check out our demo.

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