Tech Group Report 2012-12-31

Freegle Tech Report December 2012
Messages 10845-10993
Members 94

If anyone is interested in this stuff you are welcome to join us, even if you only want to dip in and out. Mods who are willing to try out new stuff and make comments are always welcome, as are those who look at stuff purely from an end user angle.

General

Not much has happened this month, as we have had elections and holidays.

Edward continues to add function and tweak settings on Freegle Direct.

Google Communities

If anyone uses these or would like to have a play with them, and let us know if they think they may be useful for Freegle we would be grateful for their input and ideas.
For example, would it be possible for us to automatically publish onto them as we
do for Facebook pages.

Server

We have had few problems as Edward has done some fixes and a monitoring script which restarts the web server when it notices a problem. We still could do with help on improving it, but it is no longer as urgent.

New widget for groups on Freegle Direct.

More tweaks have been made and it is now configurable for a members individual requirements. Just give them the link to the page to do their own. http://direct.ilovefreegle.org/plugins/plugins.php

Chris added an entry for our widget page here:
http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/freegle-group-preview-plugin/ You can rate and review.

Direct and Facebook

Categories can be set so that you only see a subset of the group posts, this has now been tweaked so it prompts you to expand your category selection to include the new one, when you search for an item outside of your settings. Hopefully this will draw people in who initially choose a specialist category.

Direct Group Tabs

When you go into your FD/FB page you can see a number in red of how many posts have come on since you last looked. If you leave the tab open you can see the total number of unread posts on it. If you are in more than one group it can only show the total unred.
The idea is to encourage people to keep an eye on the group a bit more, in the same way that people do on their Facebook.
Please let us know of any other problems with this.
The organisation of posts on the members ‘ My Posts’ tab has now been simplified.
You should now be able to see them all at a glance and see how to reply, repost and cancel posts much easier.
What's New mails
These have been tweaked to show a couple of messages and make them more interesting.

Group settings

• For groups on Facebook, there is now a way to access their group settings without going through Facebook. Just go via Freegle Direct signing in via the Facebook button and you will find a small cog icon, next to the group name.

(If you only have Freegle Direct then you have to use the existing method, because at the moment there's no other way to know who is and isn't allowed to
change the settings.)

• "Preview" function buttons have been added for the HTML bits of your pages configuration. This should make it easier to spot when your HTML is messed up.
• Members are informed about relevant messages on their groups which they might not have noticed when they are posting. . It is also possible for it to look for other groups within a certain radius which the person is not a member of, but which have relevant messages.

Because of the way different groups operate there are arguments on whether or not to have this function. Your opinion would be appreciated.

Points raised and sorted.

• A bug was found and fixed, which caused posts not moderated the same day as posting to be omitted from members ‘My posts’ tabs.
• Admins going out to members via both FD and Yahoo were not clickable on the FD Digests, so members getting them this way for be unable to read them.
• Some members reposts were not carrying their photo links.
• Sometimes moderators don’t realise its function and remove or ban the republisher app. Groups will now get a mail if no posts have come through in the last 14 days, so that they will check it is still working. Just ignore if it is just that you have not had any posts.

 Yahoo

They have worked on their spam filters to try and exclude a lot of our stuff from being caught. This seems to have been fairly successful.

 Moderator Plugin.

You should have had a reminder to update the plugin this month. Anyone using Direct or Facebook who wishes to use it in conjunction, please, do it now if you haven’t already. Is has not been synchronising your membership lists for a few months. This results in members still gettings emails after leaving.

Member Plug in.

Edward has now withdrawn his support for this app. Please remove it if you still have any references on your group.

 Questions raised and answered.

• A member wanted to put an RSS feed on his website instead of the new plug in.

He was told he could use http://republisher.freegle.in/rss.php?group=Group Name

• A member posted duplicate events and was getting reminders for each.

If you get more than one check the ID numbers and if different delete all but one.

• Do all members get the weekly event summaries or just those who opt for the new digests?

All the ones that FD knows about unless they have turned them off.

• I have blocked @freecycle.org will this work and will it apply to just to my group?

Yes domains will work on a per-group basis. There is  an item to integrate it in the spammer list but there's nothing global at the moment.

• Is bouncing member maintenance being done on direct members.

Not yet..

Jean
01.01.13
Freegle Tech

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