What's New in OnCue.

Connections tell you they work, approvals happen right in the feed, and keeping a message off the liveblog is easier to type.

• Know it's connected. Save a connection and OnCue tries it on the spot, then says what it reached — the Slack workspace, the Bluesky account, the AI model — or the service's own reason for refusing. A connection that stops working later reads "Needs attention" instead of "Connected." Teams and Google Chat get a one-line test message, since a webhook can't be checked any other way.
• Confirmation where you're looking. Every connect, sign-in, and save shows its result inside the card or prompt you used. Steps that finish outside WordPress, like inviting the bot to a private Slack channel or tapping Start in the Telegram app, update the page on their own.
• Approvals in the feed. With the approval gate on, posts from anyone other than an Editor, an Administrator, or the event's creator wait in the live console, whichever app they came from, marked "Awaiting approval" with Approve and Reject right on the post. An approved post keeps the time it was written, so the timeline stays in order, and readers already on the page still get it. A rejected post stays visible to its author, marked "Rejected," until they dismiss it. In Slack, the ⏳ on a held message turns to ✅ or ❌ once someone decides.
• Skip a message with %%. Start a chat message with %% to talk without publishing. Slack, Teams, and Telegram open a command menu when a message starts with a slash, which made the old // awkward to type.
• A tag picker that finds every tag. More Coverage's tag field is now searchable and reaches every tag on your site. The old list stopped at 200, and re-saving an event could quietly drop a tag past that point. It warns the moment you pick a broad tag, and tells you if a saved tag was deleted.
• Fixes. A link on the first line of a console post now becomes a preview card like any other. Connecting your Slack account from event setup or the live console no longer fails with "the link you followed has expired," and coming back from Slack while signed out of WordPress now asks you to sign in and finishes the link.

OnCue is now in the WordPress plugin directory, listed as OnCue Liveblogging.

• Install and update from your dashboard. Search for "OnCue Liveblogging" under Plugins → Add New, click Install, and activate. No zip to download, no access code, and updates show up on your Plugins screen like any other plugin. The direct download is retired — everyone installs the same way now.
• Security hardening from the directory review. Every value that arrives from a request is cleaned where it's read, and everything printed to a page is escaped on the line that prints it. Telegram sign-ins are checked field by field and rejected outright if the verified account ID isn't a real one. Event setup, and the credentials for Slack, Telegram, Google Analytics, and the AI providers, are cleaned as they come in. Analytics validates a visitor's IP address before hashing it for the country lookup — it's still never stored.
• Free and open source. OnCue ships under GPLv2 or later, and the reader credit is off unless you turn it on.

Readers can react to individual updates, and Bluesky threads carry your event hashtag.

• Reader reactions. Turn on Reactions for an event and every update gets a thumbs-up button readers can tap without signing in. Tapping again takes it back. Counts refresh on their own while the page is open, so a busy update visibly gathers response during the event. Off by default, per event.
• An official hashtag for Bluesky. Set one in Event Setup and every update shared to Bluesky ends with it, so the whole thread is findable under a single tag. An update that already uses the tag doesn't get a second one, and an update too long to fit posts whole without it — the text is never shortened to make room.

Brand each liveblog to your site, turn any link into a card, and do more with Bluesky.

• Per-event colors and width. A new Appearance tab recolors each liveblog — accent, card background, borders, and muted text — with a color picker and a gentle readability check, and sets a contained or full-width layout. The font always follows your site theme.
• Links become preview cards. Paste a link in the console, or share one from Slack or Telegram, and it renders as a card with the headline, description, image, and source — no separate step.
• More from Bluesky. Give each liveblog its own Bluesky card image, push any published update to your Bluesky thread after the fact, and see who sent it. Each update posts once. Search now signs in with your connected account, which Bluesky recently began requiring.
• Reader fixes. The avatar, the "Powered by" mark, and a stray top line now hold up on themes that restyle images and links, and the "Readers over time" chart no longer crowds its dates on short ranges.

Per-event Stats now works out of the box — no Google account required.

• Built-in analytics, on by default. OnCue now measures each event on your own server: reader numbers, unique readers, shares, interactions, sources, devices, and countries, with a live "reading right now" count. No Google Cloud, no service-account key, nothing to set up.
• Private by design. Collection is cookieless and stores no personal data — visitor counts use a daily-rotating fingerprint, and IP addresses are used only to derive an approximate country, never saved. Everything stays in your own database.
• Google Analytics is now optional. Prefer GA4's richer attribution? Point Stats at your own property under Connections — the same screen, your choice of source.

The first public release of the OnCue beta. What's in the box:

• Events, the OnCue block, the live console, and the real-time reader — plus inline polls, per-entry share cards and embeds, More Coverage, moderation, and encrypted credentials.
• Post from Slack, Telegram, SMS, and Messenger; share to Slack, Signal, Teams, and Google Chat; thread chosen updates onto Bluesky.
• AI Key Highlights — grounded, cited, and editable — with four provider options: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible server you host yourself.
• Curation from the composer: search public Bluesky posts and YouTube videos and embed picks without leaving the editor.
• Sponsor slots, reader analytics through your own GA4 tag with a per-event Stats screen, and a full-stream embed for Ghost, static sites, and everything else beyond WordPress.
• Ships under GPLv2 or later, with the license file included in the zip.