Freegle Tech Report 2013-10-31

Freegle Tech Report October 2013
Posts 12914-12976
Members 99

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, test any tweaks done, or just comment - please come along.

General

General maintenance, and answering queries is all that is being done at present.
Work started on moving to the new servers, but will take a while to complete.
We were informed of a new Crowdsourcing Platform to Match Nonprofits with Tech Experts expected to be fully active in 2014.
The MakeaDiff.org platform, which is currently live but being tested, is a free service that allows not-for profit organisations to coordinate with technical experts who want to volunteer their skills .
Although of interest similar avenues have been explored in the past to no avail, although it anyone has the time and is willing to investigate further please do.

Servers

Been fairly stable, requiring only occasional intervention.
Paul has been busier than expected at work but has started on moving our data to the new free servers He has been...
Familiarising myself with the new hosting provider and how server setup works with the provider.
Setting up a "hub" virtual machine from which I could then setup additional VMs.
Setting up virtual machines for web1, mail1 and fd1.
Updatiing all four virtual machines to the current version of the operating system.
And finally, organising the effort at hand.
And has spent one day of the time allocated so far. He is hoping he will get the bulk of the work finished in November.

Freegle Direct

We have not seen any increase in queries from members or moderators although more groups are recommending it, as an alternative to struggling with the Yahoo updates.
It has been suggested it may be a good idea to have a simple sheet for new members as a few have problems finding how to post or change email addresses. You can find it here

Put comments in the margin if you find mistakes or think something should be clarified. It will go for proof reading before being sent to members.
There was a problem reported of FD not saving changes to members settings for the digests. If you get any reports then please notify support @ ilovefreegle.org

Yahoo

a. Emails going missing for days seems to have tapered off now but still delays of a hour or two sometimes.
b. More functions are being made available weekly on Yahoo and moderators should check their page and links regularly, so they are able to respond to members queries.
c. .A moderator commented that a long missive copied to the owner address was marked as spam by Yahoo and lost and asked what others do. The consensus was that spam filtering should be turned off. However in Neo it is not yet apparent how to do this.
ModTools will eventually be coded to expose Yahoo's Spam folder, and if anyone has genuine spam in there is asked to leave it in for testing.
d. Links on the home page now work again, but not those in IFrames they need to be re-coded so that they are a linked to a page instead.

Questions raised and answered.

Q.How has a post come on Direct with nothing in the location, I thought they all had to use a message maker, and Yahoo members posts could not go on.
A. All posts on Yahoo go on the Direct member feed. Direct members are members of the Yahoo group, this is why we have the system of FB memberships.. They can't be shown to non members which is why the mails go out asking if we can republish, when they post for the first time. If they answer no then these posts don’t go on the preview page or on Twitter.
Q If a member opts to hide their name in FD will their email address still be visible, and if so how do they hide it?
A.Not in their posts. If someone replies to a post and then the member replies to
that, it will be visible.
Q. Members has chosen to hide his name in posts but they are still showing.
A. He has two memberships and only changed it on one of them
Q. I wondered if it would be possible for members of Central to view Central Messages with ModTools.
A. No we can’t support Members through ModTools.
Q. How do I find the yearly posting stats that used to be at the bottom of the Yahoo page.
A. Click on ‘Topics’ and then ‘View’ pull-down -> top one -> message history
Jean
Freegle Tech
01/11/13