Freegle Tech Report 15-06-30

Freegle Tech Report June 2015
Posts 15409-15576
Members 104

General.

• You may have noticed an influx of FB memberships this is to fix a problem caused by Yahoo no longer accepting posts sent from our message makers by AOL.com and Yahoo.com email address members. The Yahoo.co.uk domain does still work. Members will not have to do anything differently, as any who use those domains on a message maker will just be checked across the databases and the FBuser membership substituted.
• A Geek applied for and got a free Microsoft BizSpark membership for Freegle http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ This programme is for tech startups (which Freegle Ltd is) and lasts 3 years. It includes 1 year of free membership of the Windows Phone Store will be used in due course for a Windows Phone version of the mobile app. Four more members can be added for anyone helping long term. We don't use Microsoft technology on our servers etc but Visual Studio does have nice JavaScript editors etc.

    We have US$150 monthly of Azure hosting - which could possibly be used to deliver mails.
    Does anyone have any experience of this as it could help with pushing mails out through Microsoft?

Direct V2

• New stuff

The donation request has been removed from the top of the FD pages to a request when a member posts a Taken, Received. We have also discussed having a Paypal link and it is being trialled as a test to see which results in more donations.

• My Posts Tab

You can now choose to see older closed posts on it
A button to show/hide replies, to simplify the page was added.

• Scammers.

A fix to stop scammers using multiple versions of the same email address, just by adding a period in different places has been made, and these are now being detected and removed from all FD groups automatically. However a few genuine members may also be detected. If you get a report of this please contact Geeks@ilovefreegle.org with their email address.
A scam button was requested for ModTools so that scammers could be reported before they post when using variations of a known offender.

• Facebook

Reported that on a FB page it doesn't show photographs. It says 'Timeline photos' in a white box they don't show up or when saved.
This is a Facebook bug but when clicked on, the Photos do show, and they are uploaded okay.

• Give it for Good.

http://directdev.ilovefreegle.org/reuse
Give It For Good - was an attempt to have a list of reuse options. It hasn’t really take off in isolation, so it will be wound down and function added into FD to do similar stuff. It fits more nicely in there, and may get some use. There will be a donation from G4G to Freegle to cover ongoing maintenance of this.
A first draft is available , so you can list, add and edit reuse options - find this from the menu. It will show you the reuse locations in the rough area of groups of which you are a member.
If people would like to test this before it goes live, that would be nice. Bear in mind that you can't delete entries at the moment, so please use real data. It's not obvious how to handle deletes - perhaps send an email to the owner address for the nearest group to confirm?
Edit changes are tracked, so it would be possible to backtrack after vandalism.

Mobile app for phone/tablet

Current versions are
iOS Version 0.67
Android and Kindle Fire 0.68
Questions Answered.
Q Will members automatically be informed of the updates or do we need to tell them?
A In general, for Android and iOS, the apps should either update automatically or tell you that an update is available - though it may depend on the user's settings . I do have a facility within the app to tell people when a new release is available, ie if you are running 0.65 and 0.67 is the latest then I say when it starts that a new version is available..Currently I am only doing that for the Kindle version which I don't think does automatic updates.
Q I might have missed the post on this, but I assume we can let members know that the app is available?
A You are welcome to tell your group. The main link to give out is this: https://www.ilovefreegle.org/mobile/
There is an ADMIN you can reuse on here: http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Freegle_Mobile_app
An FAQ to the main mobile app page.will be done shortly.
Q Could someone give me a list of all the ways to get the mobile app for all the different phones it can be used for?
A.The first method to get the app is to view this page in your device http://www.ilovefreegle.org/mobile/
Click on one of the three links depending on which sort of device you have, alternatively you can search for "Freegle" in the Play Store, App Store or on Amazon UK.

Message Maker Problem

As stated above about the Fbuser e mail addressess being issued to work around the problem of Yahoo.com and AOL.com domains no longer allowed mail to be sent by a third party. There may be other ramifications as well, so please report it if you suspect anything.
We do not know if members sending email from a client account like Outlook but from their Yahoo.com email address will be similarly affected.
Groups not on Direct or Facebook using the message maker
Any of your members using the message maker to post from a Yahoo.com or AOL.com mail address will no longer be able to use the group message makers. Their posts will be blocked and they will be told to send a mail using the group post link.

Problems Sorted.

• Unsubscribe Links in the ‘Events and What’s new’ emails are now working. This was a problem for those Yahoo members who got the emails but had never logged into Direct.
• Links in the More info about a group page didn’t work, but they now do.
• Links to post your own event from a round up is now working.
• Problem with links in reminders to post a taken email, was coded wrong. This has now been sorted.
• Repost reminder emails losing photos was found to be a bug introduced by Yahoo, and fixed once reported.
• An FBUser reported that her attempts to mark an item as taken were not working. This was our bug and promptly fixed.
• It was noticed that the widgets page was no longer available. A new page had been done but a Category not attached, which has now happened.
• Using the logo spot on Direct settings was no longer being picked up by Direct. It can now be coded on the Group Description but instead.

Outstanding Problems

• It was discovered that if a photo was deleted on modtools, although it removes it on Yahoo and does not go out in the emails from Direct it does still show on DIrect. This is now on the list of stuff to be done.
• A couple of reports that the sign in with Freegle button would not accept their password or allow them to sign in because “they usually sign in a different way” Please let us know if you come across this?
• In a group's FD setting page, putting a link to a group logo is not working correctly mail sueandjean@gmail.com if you need help.
• If an event is retweeted by Freegle the link goes to a sign in screen or My Groups page. It would be better if it went to an Events digest or the event.
• Wiki pages affected by FD2 are now out of date and need redoing for putting on, coding and understanding Facebook, and Direct. If you need to use them and you get stuck or have questions please email sueandjean@gmail.com. They will be undated eventually.

Questions answered

Q. There used to be an e-mail address that people could e-mail to change their delivery settings on Yahoo, does anyone know the format for them?
A http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/Too_many_emails or https://uk.help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/activities-email-yahoo-groups-sln2455.html
Q. I did a search for Harrow http://ilovefreegle.org/groups/#harrow and it came up with Harrogate as second result. That’s not right!
A It's probably because "Harrowgate" has been included as one of Harrogate's localities - and the search must be looking for partial matches in the localities. I guess "Harrowgate" has been put there because people must spell it wrongly. Our options must be to remove that locality or leave it as is (which isn't too awful).
Q. A member asked why when he clicked on withdraw, he gets an email that says taken.
A It is what we have to do to let Yahoo members know it has gone. Direct members only see it if they are looking at All Posts instead of just the Active tab.
Q Is there a problem with events being sent through to group? Two that were recently posted, I had to ask about when they didn't come through for moderation to get them on others have been days arriving.
A There are often delays or missing mails to owner addresses. The events are resent by FD at 2am if there have been no clicks in case Yahoo has kindly thrown them away.
Q. How long does it take for a message deleted on Mod tools to vanish from FD please ?
A Almost immediately. You may need to refresh the page though.
Q There's someone local to us who we are probably going to ban. I know we can on Yahoo is there a way to do it on Direct?
A Setting>Advanced Options>Blocked emails
Q. Am I correct that categories can not be changed by member or mods?
A Yes this function is on the to do list.
Q. A member could not see any posts on her group apart from her own, until she unticked the Domestic Appliance option.
A If they are all unticked it defaults to ticking them all again. If she only selected one and there were no posts for that category she wouldn’t see any.
Q. We have a member who cannot post to the group using the Message Maker. I have tested this with him over the past two days and there is no user-error.
A This led to the discovery that Yahoo was ignoring all messages sent from our message makers by Yahoo.com members and further testing revealed that AOL members emails were also being dropped.

Help for Moderators about members or moderator issues with using Freegle Direct is also available from
support@ilovefreegle.org

Freegle Tech Report
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