Release Notes

Thank you so much for being a Tourplus user ! 👋🏽 

We’re working hard to ship updates and get the app ready for the world. Below is a list of what we shipped in each recent release.

Mon, Feb 8

Hi all—Hope your week is off to a good start! It has been unbelievable to meet so many amazing new people joining from China, Brazil, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, Hong Kong, and all over the world this past week!

As we mentioned at Town Hall we’ve been very focused on scaling lately, but we managed to sneak in a few features for you. Here is what’s new!

  • “Share” link in rooms. Ever find yourself in a great room and want to share it with your followers, send it to friends, or post it to a group? Now when you tap the ping [“+”] button at the bottom of a room, you’ll see an option to share a link. Tapping it will open the share sheet, so you can post a link to the room anywhere you like.

We’ve also fixed that deep linking bug we had, so when someone taps through, it will reliably take them straight to the room.

  • Accessibility improvements. Clubhouse now has improved VoiceOver support, so you can use the native iOS screen reader to navigate through the app. We’ve worked hard to support all of the core flows, but please send us a note if you have suggestions or notice anything we’ve missed!
  • Search for someone within a room. A while back we added a way for speakers to search for a specific person within a room, by tapping the “…” at the top right. Now audience members can do it too!
  • Report someone who left the room. Clubhouse has a zero tolerance policy for trolling, so if you ever see someone being disruptive, we want to make sure you can report them. To help with this, we’ve added a feature so that you can view (and report) someone who recently left the stage—even if you’re in the audience. Just tap the “…” in the upper right. If you’re a moderator, we’ve also added a button to the profile half-sheet so that you can quickly report them from there.
  • Bug fixes and performance improvements. We’ve fixed some crashes, worked to improve stability as we scale, and updated the UI to make it clearer that people you’ve blocked won’t see rooms where you’re speaking or be notified when you go live.
  • New app icon! After a legendary run, we’re saying a fond farewell to the great Bomani X, and welcoming in our next community member icon—the one and only Axel Mansoor! As many of you know, Axel is an incredible musician who has been nominated for an Emmy and hosted hologram concerts… but most importantly, he has been singing the world to sleep every night at 9pm PT on Clubhouse, as host of the Lullaby Club—all the way from Mauritius! Having grown up in four countries (Belgium, Zimbabwe, Mauritius and USA), Axel is a self-proclaimed 3rd culture kid and big advocate of self-love, mental wealth and Vietnamese noodle soups. We are so grateful to have him be part of the Clubhouse community, and so excited for him to grace all of our home screens until the next major release! 🙂

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Jan 21

Hi all—Hope your week is going well! It’s been amazing to see so many people join from all over the world this past week, in places like 🇳🇬 Nigeria, 🇩🇪 Germany, 🇮🇳 India, 🇦🇹 Austria, 🇨🇭 Switzerland and 🇦🇺Australia! We’ve also seen hundreds of new verticals taking off, including travel (shout-out to GLT!), hospitality, biotech, real estate, and so many others. 🙂

This week we’ve been mostly focused on improving our algorithms to make follow suggestions, club suggestions and feed ranking more relevant for you. You can expect to see the first wave of improvements over the coming days/weeks, and to notice your suggestions getting better and better over the coming months.

We also added a few user-facing features that we hope you’re like…

  • Hide rooms you don’t want to see! Ever see a room in your feed that you’re not interested in, and wish you could swipe it away? Now you can! Just swipe left-to-right to hide it. Over time, we’ll try to understand which types of rooms you tend to hide and use this to show your more relevant conversations.
  • Hand raise queue options. Sometimes when you’re taking questions you want it to be wide open, but other times you might want to prioritize questions from your community. Now if you want to do the latter, you can limit the hand raise queue to (i) members of your club or (ii) people that the speakers follow. Thanks Jenny (and others) for the suggestion!
  • Fewer toasts when people raise hands. As Clubhouse grows and rooms continue to get larger, it can be distracting to get a green toast every time someone raises their hand. Now if there are at least 3 people in the hand raise queue, you’ll only get a toast if someone you follow raises their hand. To see when new people have raised their hands, just check out the badge count on the hand raise queue.
  • Bug fixes. As usual, we also fixed some bugs and tightened up things a bit. 🙂

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Jan 14

Hi all—Hope your week is going well! Just a quick release today, as we’ve been focused on more scaling work under the hood, as well as some internal tools to make support more efficient! Here is what’s new…

  • Faster loading times ⚡️ We’ve been doing a lot of performance work under the hood to ensure the app continues to work as we scale. Hopefully you notice screens loading faster and things feeling a bit snappier overall.
  • Faster club setup. We did a lot of work this week to bulk up our support tooling and infrastructure. If you were waiting for your club to be approved, thank you for your patience! It should be set up now, and new club requests should get processed much faster going forward.
  • Remove your Creator Name (one-time). Last month we added the ability for public figures who are known by a creator alias to add that field to their profiles. If you did this and then changed your mind, you can now remove it. Please note that this is a one-time change, so if you go from “ThunderWarrior” back to “Steph,” you will forever be Steph!
  • Long press to remove a troll. Clubhouse has a zero-tolerance policy for trolling. If anyone intentionally disrupts your conversation, they are permanently removed from Clubhouse. In this release we made it easier for anyone to quickly report a troll by tapping and holding on their profile photo. Hopefully this is never needed, but if it is, we want you to know it’s there…
  • Bug fixes. We also fixed a lot of bugs and tightened up things overall.

Next up: a whole released focused on follow suggestions, feed relevance and discovery. We are excited for this one…

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Wed, Jan 6

Hi all—We hope your new year is off to a good start, and that things in the U.S. return to a better place soon. 🇺🇸 Just a quick release for you today, as we have continued to focus our efforts on optimizing performance as we scale. Here is what’s new…

  • “People interested in [X] follow…” Last week we launched the topic directory, which features a list of clubs you might want to follow if you are interested in a specific topic—like 🐣 Pregnancy, 🧲 Physics, 🙊 Comedy, 🏈 Football, 🌦 Climate, 📚 Books, 🤯 Burning Man, 🏡 Real Estate, 🇫🇷 French, 🧠 AI and more. Starting today, we’ll be adding people suggestions to the topic directory too.

We’re starting off with some very basic suggestions, based on the following format: “People who are interested in [🍣 Food & Drink] tend to follow [these people].” This doesn’t necessarily mean that the people suggested will be experts at that topic, or even interested in it… but directionally, we hope it’s helpful. Our goal it to continuously refine the algorithms and collect more of your input so that these suggestions get smarter and more personalized every day. Please note that the people suggestions should start rolling out later today.

As a reminder, the topic directory lives in the upper left of your home screen (where the “Find people to follow” button used to be). Just tap the “🔍” button.

  • Smarter prompts. Now when you plug in a mic / headphones, we won’t ask you if you want to switch to Music Mode unless you are a speaker. (Thanks Warren for suggesting) Also, we’ve tuned the new room toasts that show up when you’re a speaker, and we now give you a heads up before you hand over moderator powers to people you don’t follow.
  • Policy changes to improve feed quality. We’ve updated our Community Guidelines to prohibit (i) fake blue check marks and (ii) “follow for follow” rooms. The latter were taking over many people’s feeds and hurting the quality of people’s follow suggestions, so we decided to make this change to help protect the user experience. We’ll keep launching new features like the topic directory to ensure that great creators can grow their audience organically, and that Clubhouse remains an authentic space for meaningful connections and conversations.

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse. 🙏🏽

Thu, Dec 31

Hi all—🍾 Happy New Year! Here is what’s new in today’s release…

  • Topic directory! We are thrilled to introduce “topics” as a new way to discover people and clubs that you might want to follow on Clubhouse. We’re initially launching with around 150 topics, related to things like 🐣 Pregnancy, 🧲 Physics, 🙊 Comedy, 🏈 Football, 🌦 Climate, 📚 Books, 🤯 Burning Man, 🏡 Real Estate, 🇫🇷 French, 🧠 AI and more.

We know that the topics we are starting with are just a small sampling of what should be there—especially around things like Location and Identity—so please know that more are coming, and send us your suggestions for topics you’d like us to add!

The new topic directory lives in the upper left of your home screen (where the “Find people to follow” button used to be). Just tap the “🔍”, select a category and topic, and then explore clubs that you might want to follow.

Today, the recommendations will be fairly basic, but you can expect them to get much smarter and more personalized over time. Also, please note that you'll only see club recommendations to start, but we plan to add people recommendations for each topic shortly—hopefully sometime in the coming days!
  • Add your interests. In this release, we’ve also added a way for you to specify what topics you’re interested in. This is completely optional, but if you choose to add some, it will help us show you better suggestions over time. To add yours, just tap the notification in your activity feed, or go to your profile, tap the setting icon, and select “Interests.” You can add as many as you want and edit them anytime.

Note that your interests (i) are private to you and (ii) don’t affect whether you show up in follow suggestions.

  • Search for clubs. From the new “🔍” view, you can now search for clubs too! Just enter the name of the club and then toggle the results from “People” to “Clubs.”
  • Search for people within a room. Sometimes when there are a lot of people in your room it can be hard to a specific person in the audience that you’d like to invite up. Now if you’re a moderator, you can tap the “…” and search for someone in the audience.

We also continued to optimize performance and fixed a bunch of bugs, including the one that sometimes granted mod privileges to everyone in a Social Room. Thanks to everyone in the “Welcome Maddie” room for helping us figure this last one out. 🙂

That’s it for now. Happy New Year again, and as always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Tue, Dec 22

Hi all—Happy holidays! This release is focused on more moderation tools, a new topic graph, and a few other features we hope you’ll find helpful. Here are the details…

Moderation tools

We heard a couple reports of intentional trolling late last week, which has no place on Clubhouse, so we build some new tools over the weekend to help prevent that:

  • Quickly view someone’s profile before inviting them on stage. Oftentimes when you’re deciding whether to invite someone up on stage, it’s useful to view their profile first. It used to be that you had to tap directly on their photo to do this, which wasn’t very discoverable. Now you can get there by tapping anywhere on their photo, name or bio.
  • Report a speaker after they have left the room. If you’re a moderator in a room, you can now tap the “…” at the top of the screen to view a list of recent speakers. This will allow you to quickly report a disruptive speaker, even if they have already left the room.
  • Smarter blocking and reporting prompts. Now when you remove someone from the room, we’ll ask you if you also want to block and report them. We hope this will help keep the Clubhouse community safe, without slowing you down.
  • One strike policy for trolling. We’re explicitly making a “one strike” policy for intentional trolling, so anyone who comes to disrupt your talk will be removed from Clubhouse completely.
  • Automatic suspension of certain flagged accounts. If someone gets reported enough times for trolling within a given period, we’ll automatically suspend the account while we conduct the investigation. This should help prevent anyone who intends to disrupt from doing it repeatedly in multiple rooms. (Please note that filing false reports in order to get someone’s account flagged is also a violation of the Community Guidelines and will result in suspension.)

In an upcoming release, we’ll also be adding more metadata to the hand raise queue to help you decide who to call up — including how long each person has been a member/follower of your club and more. Special thanks to Jenny for suggesting this!

We hope that you find these changes helpful!

Topics

In addition to the moderation features, this release introduces Topics! Topics are going to be a new way to discover people and clubs that you might want to follow—related to things like 🎧 Music, 🏀 Basketball, 🍣 Food & Drink, 🌏 Geopolitics, 🏛 Stocks, 🧬 Biology, 🐇 Crypto, 🇧🇷 Portuguese and more!

We’re rolling this out slowly, and in today’s release topics will only be visible to club founders, so that we can start to categorize them for our Topic Directory. If you are a club founder, you can go to your club page, tap “Add Club Topics…” , and select up to 3 topics that describe your club. Then in the next release, we plan to roll out a basic Topic Directory so that others can discover personalized suggestions for people and clubs to follow, based in part on this data.

Given the huge variety of conversations that take place in Clubhouse, there are definitely going to be topics that we are missing! This is especially true for things like Places, Languages, and Identity, where we’ve started with just a handful of the more commons ones we see on Clubhouse. If you have a topic that you’d like to add, please email us to suggest a new one! Like all things on Clubhouse, topics will evolve a lot based on your feedback. 🙂

Finally, we’ve added a few other features that we hope you’ll like:

  • Choose your skin tone in the “✌️ Leave Quietly” button. In the early days of Clubhouse we added the ability to customize your skin tone when you raised your hand (by tapping and holding on the hand raise button). In this release, we’ve made a fix so that the “✌️” in the “Leave Quietly” button will also remember your personalized setting.
  • See your pending invites. Previously it was hard to see who you had already invited to Clubhouse or resend them the link if they were having trouble finding it. Now there is a dedicated link to this in your invite screen, so it’s easy for you to do this.

Next up: The Topic Directory, club search, and the beginnings of some new tools to help Clubhouse creators host great shows and grow their audiences over time. A huge thanks to the members of our early creator pilot program for their feedback on this!

That’s it for now. We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season! As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Dec 17

Hi all—Hope you are having a good week! Here is what’s new in today’s release:

  • More performance improvements. We’ve continued to invest heavily in performance improvements this past week. Most of this is under the hood and hopefully invisible to you, as the rooms will continue to just work as they get bigger.
  • 🎶 Music Mode! There are so many amazing people on Clubhouse who are signing, playing guitar and hosting performances these days, so we added a new mode to better support them. Now when you plug in a mic you’ll see an option to switch to “Music Mode,” where the audio is optimized specifically for musical performances. Once you unplug, it will automatically switch back to Talking Mode so that others can hear you talk about the great performance you just gave. 🙂
  • **Newline support

in bios**.

Previously if you wanted to add newlines

in your bio

you would have to cut and paste from a text editor.

Now you can do it directly in the app.

  • Heads up about screen recording. Clubhouse is designed to be a place where you can have meaningful conversations, just with the people in the room. Because of this, recording or sharing conversations without the speakers’ explicit permission is against the Community Guidelines, and can lead to your account being suspended or removed. To help ensure that everyone knows this we added a warning toast that shows up to people if they ever try to screen record a conversation.
  • Shared block list improvements. A couple months we introduced shared block lists to let you know when multiple people you follow have blocked someone, in case that information helps you decide whether to follow them or bring them up on stage. In this release we tuned the feature so that we don’t show it to you people you have already followed. Thanks Mike for suggesting!

(Note that if you ever unfollow someone and then re-follow them, they won’t get notified.)

  • ✨ Cleaner names. In order to help with search and tighten the design up a bit, we removed support for certain special ©ℌ⍲®⍲©⍑🅴℞🅢. We will introduce more fun ways to be creative in the future, so apologies if this affects you!
  • Bug fixes. We fixed the issue that was causing certain photos to upload upside down, as well as a number of crashes. We also disabled the “shake to report” feature for now, so if you see a bug or an incident to report, please report it from your profile→settings, or by tapping the three dots on the speaker’s profile from within the room, respectively. 🙂

The next couple releases will focus on ways to help you find clubs and people by topic…

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Wed, Dec 9

Hi all—Happy Wednesday! Here is what’s new in today’s release:

  • Lots of performance improvements. This has been our main focus this past week, so we can make sure you don’t see error messages as the user base continues to grow. We rewrote the room view, optimized a bunch of things, and added a new notification type to let you know if we are ever doing scheduled maintenance or upgrades.
  • Quickly view your club followers. If you are the founder of a club, you can now quickly view your followers (and if you like, invite them to become members so they can join any members-only discussions you host).
  • Charters limit to room and event names. Before we didn’t have a character limit on room or event names. This meant that you could write really long names, which looked really funny in the feed. Like one time Minh wrote a super long room title. And then the Game Room club wrote an even longer one that was the Charles Dickens quote from the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, which was actually really funny. But then people said it was making it hard to see other rooms in their home feed and also in their activity feed. And then it kind of escalated and more people started writing really long room titles, which makes sense, because it’s pretty funny when you think about it. I think Ivy even wrote one that was over 1,000 characters! But then more people said they didn’t like the long titles. Because of that we decided to limit event titles to 60 characters. Let us know if this is too short but hopefully it will be fine.
  • New app icon! We would like to say a massive thank you to the great Espree Devora (@espree) for being an amazing Clubhouse icon these past few weeks, and for all she continues to do for the community. 🙂

With today’s release, we are celebrating the one and only Bomani X (@iambomanix)! No stranger to Clubhouse, Bomani has used his creative ingenuity to build community on Clubhouse from the moment he arrived. A source of light to many, you can often find him in a room practicing his guitar (waiting for any joiners to jam), keeping a tight door at the Cotton Club (the hottest ticket on Clubhouse) or co-conspiring to create another “Clubhouse first” — a full length musical extravaganza coming your way later in December.

When he’s not on Clubhouse, Bomani can be found working on Lit.Spins, hosting invite-only house concerts, providing natal chart readings, or just taking care of his grandma with soothing music. On behalf of the whole community, we would like to say a huge thank you to Bomani for all that he does, and we look forward to having him grace all of our home screens for the holiday season!

Also, credit to Clubhouse community member Dayo K. (@thearthype) for the great photo! :)

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Dec 3

Hi all—Just a quick release today to introduce some improvements to performance and reliability. There is still more to do here, but hopefully you will begin seeing fewer error messages when traffic is heavy. Thanks for your patience on this, and hope you are having a good week!

Tue, Dec 1

Hi all—We hope that those of you in the U.S. had a great Thanksgiving weekend! Here is what’s new:

  • Change your @username (one-time feature). We get a lot of requests from people who would like to change their username so we built the ability to do that in the app. To do this, just go to your profile and tap your existing username. Please note that you can only do this once, as we want to make sure that people on Clubhouse always know who they are talking with.
  • Correct your full name (one-time feature). Clubhouse is a real name service, but occasionally people enter their names incorrectly on sign up. To help with this, we’ve added the ability to make a one-time correction to your Full Name in the app. In addition, if you are an artist who is publicly known by your creator name, you can now add your Creator Name in the app so that people in rooms with you know what to call you. To make a one-time correction your Full Name (or if you are a public figure, to make a one-time addition of your Creator Name), just tap your name on your user profile and select the appropriate option.
  • Open up welcome rooms to introduce your friends to others. When you’re in a room welcoming a friend to Clubhouse, you can now “open it up” more easily so that others on Clubhouse can join in and meet your friend! You choose whether to open it to everyone or make it a social room, where only the people you follow can join.
  • Improvements to follower notifications for clubs. If you’re the founder of a club, you get an activity feed item every time a new person follows it, which can be a little overwhelming if you have a popular club. To help with that, we’ve started bundling the follower notifications in your activity feed.
  • Log in via phone (if text verification doesn’t work). Occasionally when new users attempt to sign up, they don’t receive the verification code from their carrier. To help with these situations, we’ve added an option where you can call us to get the code.
  • Bug fixes. We fixed a bunch of bugs, including the one that was affecting the back button on iOS 14 (thanks for reporting, Jane!).

Next up: Some fun new features, as well as some stability improvements for when 5k people unexpectedly join a room. 😅

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being a part of Clubhouse!

Wed, Nov 18

Hi all—We hope your week is going well! Here is what’s new in today’s release…

  • More rooms to explore! 🌏 We heard feedback from a number of you that you wanted the feed ranking algorithms to show you more rooms outside of your network, so we made some changes to the algorithms to help you see more. We know how important it is to be able to discover new people and conversations, and our goals is make the ranking algorithms better every day, so please let us know what you think about the latest!
  • More flexible language filters. We mentioned at Town Hall on Sunday that the “sensitive content” filters seemed too restrictive, so we tuned them this week to allow you to be more expressive. The dictionaries should be a bit more permissive now, and if people follow you will soon be able to see your room titles in the feed, even if the language is sensitive. We hope you like these changes, damn it!
  • See which rooms your friends are in, and tap to join them. Now in the sidebar, you’ll be able to see the titles of the rooms your friends are in. If you tap on a friend, you’ll also now see a button to join them in the room where they are listening or speaking.
  • Clearer language in the sidebar. When you tap “+Room” in the sidebar to start a room with a friend, the room is Closed by default—so you can choose to keep it intimate or open it up. People didn’t always know that though, so we added a padlock to the button and tweaked the language to make that clearer.
  • Newbie badges in the hand raise queue. Now when you’re viewing the hand raise queue people’s newbie badges will show up, so you can choose to take questions from them first and welcome them to Clubhouse!
  • Ability to resend invite links. Sometimes when you invite a friend and they don’t get the invite right away, it’s hard for them to find it again. Now if you’re on the invite screen and you tap the check mark next to the name of someone you’ve invited, it will pop open a text message so you can easily send them a reminder message, along with the link.
  • Bundled follow notifications. If you are popular like Bomani and get a lot of followers, your Activity feed (which is the list of items you see when you tap on the bell icon) is probably pretty noisy. To help with this, we’ve started bundling follow notifications. When you tap on the bundle, you’ll see everyone’s bios and can quickly choose who to follow back.
  • Ability to report profiles from outside a room. Historically you could only report a profile from within a room, or from your app settings. Now you can also do it from any user’s profile.
  • Standing club meetings. When you’re the Founder of a club, it’s nice if you put some time in the calendar for your members to get together and talk. If you haven’t done this yet, we’ll be adding an activity item later this week that you can tap on to more easily schedule club conversations.
  • New User Guide. New to Clubhouse? First off, welcome! Second, we now have a nice New User Guide to help you get started. You can find it at welcome.joinclubhouse.com. It’s pretty simple right now, but we’ll be updating it constantly over time. Please let us know if there is anything you think we should add to it!
  • Follow us on Twitter. Did you know we have a Twitter account at @joinclubhouse? In case you don’t, we’re planning to add an activity feed item later this week so you can choose to follow us and see when we post stuff. 🙂
  • Bug fixes. We fixed a bunch of small bugs, as well as a couple crashes that a few users were experiencing. Sorry about those. 😬
  • New app icon! It’s that time again! We would like to say a HUGE thank you to the wonderful Erika Batista (@erika) for being an amazing Clubhouse icon this past month or so—not to mention an amazing member of so many Clubhouse communities. 🙂

…And we would like to welcome the next icon, Espree Devora (@espree)! Espree is known to some as “the Girl who Gets it Done” and she certainly has done that on Clubhouse—creating several clubs right off the bat to help aspiring podcasters on Clubhouse learn the art of producing and marketing audio content. A skater girl at heart and a self-proclaimed sneakerhead, Espree has already been an amazing addition to the Clubhouse community, and we’re thrilled to have her be out next app icon (with credit to Dan Taylor with Heisenberg Media for her photo http://www.dantaylorphotography.com/ :). If you see Espree around, please say hello!

We mentioned a few other features at Town Hall that we were planning to launch today (e.g., pinging mutuals into the room, editing your name/username)… We haven’t forgotten about those! Our release plans just evolved a bit, so they should be in next week’s release. 🙂

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Sat, Nov 14

Hi all—Happy Saturday! Just a quick release to fix an issue that was causing some people’s invites to not go though. We’ll be sending them through iMessage now, so that should fix it. 🙂

As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Nov 12

Hi all—Hope you are having a good week!

A lot of the work we’ve been doing these past few days has been under the hood, ensuring that we find the best content for you as the number of rooms continues to grow. Here is what’s new in this release:

  • Better feed ranking. We did a bunch of work this past week on the feed algorithms to help you find great content, based on who you follow. At a high level, the main feed is focused on rooms where the people you follow are talking, and the Explore feed is now focused on follows-of-follows. We hope you like the more personalized feel, but we know this is a change from the “firehose” model, so please let us know what you think! And if you want to see more rooms, you can always do that by following more people. 🙂
  • Updated home feed design. Until now the room “cards” in the home feed showed you every speaker in the room, which meant rooms with a lot of speakers often looked like huge word walls, filled with names of people you didn’t know. We’ve updated the design to focus just on the names of the people we think you’ll find most interesting—based on who you follow. We’ve also tweaked the design of the room titles and added counts for (i) how many people are in the room and (ii) how many people are speaking, to give you a sense for what type of room it is. Based on the testing we’ve done, we’ve think this will make the feed easier to scan, and save your thumbs a bit of scrolling.

We know that this will also be an adjustment and that some people might miss seeing the tall room cards (at least at first)… So if you don’t like it after a few days, please let us know! Like all things on Clubhouse, this will evolve based on your feedback. 🙂

  • Updated speaking indicator (Part 1 🙂. We made some changes to the speaking indicator to (i) darken the color a bit and (ii) add some spacing between the profile photo and the indicator so that it’s more visible. Next up: We’re working on updating the animation so it’s even more visible and adding a persistent indicator for speakers who are not currently in view. We know this has been a highly requested feature, so we wanted to ship the first part as soon as it was ready. 🙂 Stay tuned for Part 2!
  • Special settings for sensitive content. We generally try to keep the public hallways “PG-13” in Clubhouse, without unnecessarily limiting people’s expression or ability to reach their audience. To help with this, we added some tools to hide potentially offensive room titles from the public home feed (without hiding the room itself), and to let you know when you enter a room title that would violate the Community Guidelines. We’re planning to tune this going forward to help you choose what level of filtering you want and make sure we are striking the right balance here!
  • Open up to a Social Room. Closed rooms are great for chatting privately with a few friends, but sometimes you want to open them up to a broader audience. Until now, the only way to do this was to make the room wide open to everyone. In this release, we added the ability to open it up just a little bit—into a Social Room. This will allow just the people you (or the other moderators) follow to join the room—which keeps the vibe a bit more intimate.
  • 🎉 Onboarding for everyone! Every Wednesday at 6pm PT we host a “Welcome to Clubhouse” session for all the newbies who joined in the past week. Going forward we’re going to open these sessions to everyone, in case you didn’t get to attend the session the week you joined and still want to learn the ropes. Please note that we’ll be prioritizing new users when we take questions, so don’t be offended if you are a long-time user and we don’t get a chance to call on you. 🙂 If that happens, please get in touch by tapping the “FAQ / Contact Us” button on your Profile → Settings. We are always here to help!
  • Bug fixes. Finally, we fixed the counts for # of people online in clubs, make it so you could add a topic on smaller devices, and tuned a bunch of other things.

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Nov 5

Hi all—Hope you are having a good week! It’s been amazing to see the huge range of U.S. election conversations that have been happening these past few days and carrying on late into the morning. Here are a few new features to help you find great conversations from the people you follow as we all await the results!

  • New “Who’s Online?” screen. As the number of rooms in Clubhouse continues to grow, it can sometimes be hard to find the people you follow! Today we’ve added a whole new screen to show you which of your mutual follows are online and join them in their rooms—or quickly invite them to start a new room together.

To get there, tap the new “Online” button on the lower right of your home screen (or just swipe right-to-left). Tap on a friend to join them in their current room, or tap “+ Room” to invite a friend (or group of club members) to start a new room with you. When you start a new room, it will default to a “closed” room—so you can choose to keep it private, manually ping in more friends, or open it up to everyone. We hope you find this helpful!

  • Improved ping interface. We’re streamlined the interface for pinging people into your room, swapping the list view with a more visual grid interface where you can see more online friends without having to scroll. We also took out the custom text field for now, since not many people were using it. 🙂 Let us know what you think, as we can always add this back if enough people miss it!
- **Bug fixes**. We fixed the regression where you could no longer tap on an event host to see their profile (thanks Ed for catching this!), the issue where not all followers were getting pinged for single-host events, and a bunch of other things.

Next up, we're working on some improvements to your home feed to help everyone find and discover great conversations. 

That's it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

# Tue, Nov 3

🇺🇸 Hi all—Just a quick update for Election Day for all our U.S. based users...

- **Show you voted!** Add the hashtag #ivoted to your bio to celebrate Election Day. When you do this, an "I voted" sticker will appear on your profile for others in the room to see.

More updates coming soon... If you haven't already done it, please go vote!

# Wed, Oct 28

Hi all—Hope you are having a good week! Here's what's new in today's release:

- **Connect your Instagram.** If you like, you can now include a link to your Instagram on your profile! If you choose to do so, this will allow others on Clubhouse to view your public Instagram photos, follow you, and—if your Instagram settings allow for it—send you a message.
- **Toggle who can start club rooms: "Club Founders Only" or "Any Member."** If you're the Founder of a club, you can now decide whether other members should be able to start club rooms. Just got to your club page and then tap on the ellipsis to toggle this. If you do allow members to start rooms, they'll also be able to add private club events to the Upcoming calendar. This should allow event hosts to have more control over their brand, and allow community clubs (where anyone is encouraged to start a room) to be more active and participatory.
  • Closed rooms. In additional to “Open” rooms (where anyone can join) and “Social” rooms (where people you follow can join), this release introduces “Closed” rooms—where only people you specifically add to the room can join. We hope that Closed rooms will be helpful when you are looking to have more private conversations, or want to talk with a smaller group but haven’t yet set up a club for it.

When you start a Closed room, you can always ping in more people or open it up to the public, so it’s also a good way to start impromptu conversations with specific people, and then let an audience in.

  • View events you are co-hosting. Now when you’re viewing the Upcoming calendar, you can tap the header to toggle it to show just the events where you are a co-host, so you can quickly edit them and access the share links.
  • Cleaned-up navigation. The buttons that scrolled along the bottom were getting a bit busy, so we cleaned up the navigation in this release. Now there is just a single “Start a room” button on the home screen. When you tap it, you can start a room that’s open to everyone, just the people you follow, just the people you pick, or just the people in one of your clubs.
  • Improved club member nominations. While only club Founders can add new Members, anyone in a club can nominate someone they think would be a great addition. Until now, however, this interface for doing this was pretty bare bones, which made it hard for Founders to manage the process. In this release, we’ve added a few features to make it easier:
    • See why someone was nominated. When Members nominate someone, they can now add a note explaining why they think that person would be a great addition to the club.
    • Remove nominations. If you aren’t quite ready to add someone to your club, you can now remove them from your nomination queue.
    • Clarified help text. Clubs will occasionally receive invites so they can invite people from outside of Clubhouse into their club. These club invites are separate from any personal invites the Founders might have, but we realized this wasn’t very clear in the interface before, so we added some language to clear that up.
    • More automatic invites for active clubs. We’ve tuned our algorithms to automatically give more invites to the clubs that are meeting often and hosting great conversations. These conversations are what Clubhouse was made for, and we want these active clubs to have all the tools they need to grow and thrive. 🙂
  • Knowledge Center. We get a lot of questions about Clubhouse, so we put together a basic Knowledge Center with answers to the most common ones! This will be a living resource that we add to continuously. If you can’t find answers there, please let us know and we’ll add them. 🙂 And of course, if you ever need help with anything you can always still shoot us an email.

That’s it for now. We hope you like the new features, and as always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Wed, Oct 21

Hi all—Hope you are having a good week! Just a quick release today featuring a few things we hope you’ll like:

  • Hand raise queue. As Clubhouse is growing and large room are more common, it’s getting harder to see who as their hand raised and keep track of who to call on next. To help with that, we’ve added a hand raise queue! If you’re a moderator, you’ll see a button on the bottom bar that shows you how many people have their hand raised. You can tap on it to see the queue, sorted with the people who raised their hands first on top.

We plan to add more functionality to this over time, but we hope that even this simple version will help quite a bit. We’re also excited to see how people might use it to conduct polls and do other creative things. 🙂

  • Ability for moderators to turn hand raising on or off. As part of the hand raise queue, we’ve also added a toggle to turn hand raising on or off, in case there are times when you’d like to stay focused on the conversation, or would just prefer not to take questions. If you turn hand raising off it will make everyone’s hands go down, so they’ll need to raise them again if you decide to take questions later.
  • Better support for events with a single host. Typically on Clubhouse if there is only one person on the stage, the next person to enter the room becomes a speaker, and the conversation starts. This works well in most cases, but it can be awkward if it’s an event with a single host… because it means the host must awkwardly move every accidental co-host down to the audience! 😬 We fixed that in this release, so when there is a scheduled event, only people who are co-hosts will automatically become speakers.
  • “Social Mode” (beta). It’s nice to have an audience, but sometimes you might prefer to have more intimate conversations with just the people you know and trust. We’re testing a new mode called “Social mode” that’s somewhere between Public and Private. With Social Mode, only the people you follow will be allowed in the room. If you want to open the room up to more people, you can add other people as moderators, and the people they follow will be allowed to join too. It’s kind of like a real-world party, where you can catch up with people you know, and get to meet new friends through them.

Social mode appears as an option when you tap the big green “+Start a room” button, but we’ll be rolling it out slowly this week, so you might not see it right away. We’re excited to hear what you think!

  • Bug fixes (including the audio/volume issues). Apologies to all of you who were experiencing issues with audio/volume this past week. We think we have fixed that in this release, along with a bunch of other bugs. Special thanks to Vinayak for helping us fix the issue where sometimes you couldn’t accept a speaker invitation to a room.

Next up: We’ll be working on some new features to help private communities thrive on Clubhouse!

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of this! 🙏🏽

Wed, Oct 14

Hi all—We hope you are having a good week! Today’s release is focused on additional trust and safety updates, as well as a host of new features to help you get the word out about your events.

Here is what’s new in safety:

  • Improved blocking for speakers. Previously if you were a speaker in a room (but not the room creator), we would warn you when someone you had blocked joined the room. We’ve changed how this works, so now if you’re a speaker, people you’ve blocked won’t be able to join the room at all. This slightly reduces who can join each room, but it better protects the other speakers from having a bad experience. We think it’s the right tradeoff. (Note: This change won’t go into effect until tomorrow, when we finish up the back-end code.)
  • Remove someone from a room. Previously if you were a moderator you could remove someone from the stage. Now if someone is being disruptive you can remove them from the room entirely. This will also prevent them from being able to view or reenter the room.
  • Shared block lists. If there is someone who many people in your network have blocked, we now show a small “!” icon to let you know this when you are viewing their profile. This is personalized to you, and will hopefully help you make decisions about when to follow someone or bring them up on stage.
  • New refinements to ranking algorithms. We have further refined our home feed, notification and follow suggestion algorithms, so if someone is heavily blocked within your network (and you don’t already follow them), you are less likely to see their content. You can expect these ranking systems to get more and more refined over time as we work to increase safety, personalization and discovery for you on Clubhouse.

For the creators out there, we’re also add a host of new features to help you get the word out about your events and grow your audience over time:

  • “New event” notifications. When you add a show to the Upcoming calendar, your club members and followers will now get an activity item letting them know about your event.
  • Event pages. When you tap on one of the above activity items (or tap on an event in the Upcoming calendar), it will now show you a dedicated event half-sheet, where you can see the details and take one of several actions on it (detailed below).
  • Add event to your calendar (Google or Apple) Calendar. From the event screen, people can now add your event to their actual calendar—initially with support for Apple Calendar and Google Calendar. This way they can block out time in their days if there is a show they really don’t want to miss.
  • Share/Tweet a link to your event. From the event sheet, there is also a link you can use to share the event to Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger, or anywhere else you like—to let people know about the event in advance. If you and your co-hosts have authorized Twitter, we’ll prefill the message with your Twitter usernames so that they can easily retweet it. If someone who isn’t on Clubhouse sees your post, they can tap to join the waitlist and hopefully we can get at least some of them in before your show starts. 🙂
  • Your day on Clubhouse. If there are events from your clubs in the next 24 hours, you’ll now see a little schedule at the top of your home feed reminding you that they’re coming up. You can tap any event to see the details or add it to your calendar.
  • Event reminders for hosts. If you’re the host, we’ll now remind you a few minutes before your show is scheduled to start. (Note: This won’t be live till later this week.)
  • Easier event creation from the Home screen. Previously when you wanted to start a scheduled event, you had to reenter the details in manually (or navigate to the Upcoming screen to start it.) Now if it’s within ~15 minutes of your event start time, you can start the event just by tapping the green button, and then selecting your event. All of the show metadata will carry over—including club name, event title, co-hosts, and privacy settings.
  • Co-hosts automatically join as speakers. If you’re listed as a co-host of the event, you’ll now join the stage automatically (on mute) when you enter the room.
  • Better event notifications. We tidied these up so it’s easier to tell when you’re being notified about one of your formal club events, rather than a more common speaker notification.
  • Links from Upcoming to already-in-progress events. When you are viewing the Upcoming calendar and event is already in progress, you can now join it directly from that screen. Just tap the event, and then tap “Join event already in progress.”

We also polished the design of the moderator badges, fixed a bunch of bugs, and updated the app so it will only work for iOS 13+… so if you’re on a really old version of iOS, please update! 🙂

Finally, a quick note on our Town Hall meetings, which take place Sundays at 9am PT… We mentioned at the last one that we were going to try to take questions in advance, because the meetings are getting too big for us to call on everyone, and we want to make sure we’re covering the most important topics on people’s minds. If you ever have topics you’d like us to cover at Town Hall, please email [email protected] with “Town Hall question” as the subject! We read all of them, will try hard to cover the top ones, and will always be available through other channels if the meeting doesn’t address your question.

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Clubhouse! 🙏🏽

Thu, Oct 1

Hi all—We hope you are doing well. Before we go into the release notes, we just wanted to say that we know this past week was an intense one, with comments from a number of rooms generating incident reports and justifiably strong responses from the community. We also wanted to share some thoughts about this to help you understand what we value here at Clubhouse, how we respond to abuse, and what kinds of tools we’re building to better empower moderators and club founders as Clubhouse grows. We posted these thoughts to our website here. If you have time, we’d love for you to give it a read. 🙏🏽

This past week we’ve been hard at work wrapping up a wave of new features for you focused specifically on Trust & Safety. Some of these have been in motion for a while, and others we added in response to the events of the past few days. Here’s what’s new:

  • Write your own club rules. Now club founders can write rules that are specific to their clubs, to share their community values, communicate their norms, and define the dos and don’ts for speaking. When people join the club they’ll be asked to agree to the rules. And when you host a public conversation, non-members will be asked to agree to the rules before coming up. Note that these are in addition to the Community Guidelines, which still apply to everyone.
  • Topics (and club names) in rooms. Now when you’re in the room, you can see what the topic is! Soon you’ll be able to edit the topic, so if the conversation shifts or the title is causing problems, a moderator can change it.
  • More granular incident reporting. If an incident happens on Clubhouse, it tends to only apply to a specific comment or speaker, rather than to a whole room. To reflect this, we’ve moved incident reporting to the speaker level. To report someone, just tap their profile, tap the ellipsis on the half-sheet, and the select “Report an incident.”
  • Moderator badges. We added a badge to indicate who the moderators are, so you’ll always know who is in control of a room.
  • Better notifications when an incident occurs. This will allow us to hide or end rooms when necessary, and possibly notify the moderators when appropriate.
  • Shake to report. We had to take this out temporarily a few weeks ago because it was causing a bug. Now we’ve fixed it and it’s back.
  • Community Guidelines accessible from every room. We heard that some people didn’t know where to find the Community Guidelines, so we added a link to them in the top of every room. You can also find them in the settings on your profile, as well as at https://community.joinclubhouse.com.
  • Rate limits to prevent spam. This will prevent people from pinging others too often with follows, club invitations, and invitations to speak. We’re still fine-tuning what those limits should be, so you can expect those to get better over time.
  • Encrypted audio buffers. If someone reports a serious safety violation, we need a way to investigate it, but we don’t want to store any of your data unnecessarily. To strike this balance, we implemented a system that holds a temporary buffer of encrypted audio, to be used solely for incident investigations and discarded when the room ends otherwise. We’d love to hear feedback on this approach and are open to other ideas that better balance privacy with safety, but this is what we’ve implemented for now. We have updated our ToS, Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines to reflect the change and will be proactively notifying all users.
  • Moderator training. A great moderator makes all the difference in a room, but moderation is an acquired skills! To help out, we are going to start holding regular moderator training sessions in the app for all who are interested. We’re still figuring out the cadence and curriculum, but our goal is to start this later this month!

In addition, this latest release has a host of other features to help you share and connect with others. Here are a few of the notable ones:

  • Release notes in the app. Now that we’re off TestFlight, the app will update automatically for most of you (making it easier to miss the release notes), so we added this new notification to let you know what’s new!
  • Instagram links on profiles. We are still waiting for API approval from Facebook, but once we get that and flip the switch, you’ll be able to add an Instagram link to your profile. This is entirely optional, and we hope it will give you a fun new way to share who you are, send and receive DMs, and connect with Clubhouse friends offline.
  • Follow suggestions inline… and everywhere! Now whenever you follow someone (or tap the “sparkle” icon next to their follow button) we’ll try to suggest other people inline who you might want to follow. We’ve also improved the suggestions on the “Find people to follow” screen (and started refreshing them more often), and introduced special prompts to follow your friends when they join the app—from both the activity feed and their welcome rooms.
  • Let more friends in. Sometimes people join the waitlist have a whole lot of friends already on Clubhouse. When this happens, we’re going to try to detect it and send you a special notification to see if you’d like to invite them to the beta. We’ll also be handing out more invites in general to make it easier for people to bring in friends.
  • Edit your club description. Club founders can now edit their club descriptions directly in the app.
  • Start your room from the Upcoming feed. Have an event in the Upcoming feed? Now when you want to start it you can pull up the description and tap “Start.” This will carry over the event metadata so you don’t have to type it in.
  • Room/club names in the ping. Tired of telling friends that someone is “talking about their favorite topic,” but don’t feel like typing? Pings now include club titles and room names to give them a bit more context.
  • Bug fixes. We fixed a ton of bugs. Please shake to report if you find more!

This coming week, we’ll be focused on a new set of features to help room hosts gather an audience—and if it’s a public event, grow it over time.

Because this is a major release, we also have a new app icon. This time we’re thrilled to showcase the amazing Erika Batista! Erika (@ericka) is a self-described “Proud Latinx 🇩🇴 Living in Paris 🇫🇷,” which feels appropriate since we are now available (invite-only) in App Stores worldwide. As an early member of Clubhouse, she has done a huge amount for this community. Along with Andrea Hernández (@andreahernandez), Erika co-authored the first unofficial Clubhouse Onboarding guide and co-leads Casa Club (Sundays at 1pm PT), as well as Maison Club (Wednesday at 12pm PT), bringing together Spanish-speakers, French-speakers, and anyone interested in learning the language and culture. We will miss Julie, but are so grateful to have Erika take the torch until the next major release.

Finally, we wanted to give you a heads up that we heard your feedback on the Town Hall timing being difficult for non-U.S. users, so we are going to be changing it to Sundays at 9am PT starting this week so that more of you can attend. We look forward to seeing many of you there!

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for being part of Tourplus !