Freegle Tech Report 18-09-30

Freegle Tech Report September 2018
Messages 25979-26192
Members 114

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General

Yexit has finally happened, some groups left it until the last minute which means that they had to do without some of recommended number of Admins and processes to make sure their members are aware of what is going on. To date we have 18 groups which have not moved, 2 of which are Yahoo only 3 are Yahoo and Trash nothing and 13 which were using Direct but will now be disconnected. They have one month left to see if they change their minds after which new Native groups may be set up in their place.

Direct Code Changes

Here are the more important ones which would affect members:

• Explore page not showing Join button
  
• Change terms from saying 12+ to 13+ for GDPR compatibility
  
• Rip out Google maps from various places as they've started billing for it. We may be able to reintroduce them in some form later.
  
• Emojis broken in user profile text popup
  
• When you mouseover a notification and it marks it as read, the count doesn't change until you refresh the page
  
• Links to repost/withdraw etc go to a page which just shows "Continue to My Posts"
  
• People can try to turn suspended mail back on by deleting the date in Settings, but this doesn't work. Prevent them doing something which doesn't work.
  
• OFFER/WANTED info missing from user profiles
  

...and here are the ones which are minor, or only affect volunteers in ModTools, or are internal changes that you wouldn't notice:
Alerts to group volunteers not being tracked for all groups
Tweak to email mod fix
Automatically add a mod group chat when creating new Freegle groups
Moderate all posts by email by moderators to avoid accidents
More work on predictions
Need to return mod work to do for groups that you're a backup on so that we can (for example) show the count on the group dropdown
Groups that approve members can have a member pop up in pending repeatedly.
Improve mail you get warning about a spammer
On Freegle Direct, only show Freegle groups
Remove obsolete Facebook permissions
Can't view replies on My Posts
Reduce map usage further
Protect against community event dates which are in the past
Up arrow/down arrow confusion when expanding posts on My Posts.
Add extra keywords for newsfeed posts to switch to OFFER/WANTED posting.
Give visual feedback when you confirm that a volunteering opportunity is still active.
Increase frequency of Yahoo warning
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
In MT Group Settings, when switching groups, ensure the switch has completed before you do stuff by putting a wait modal up.
MULTIPOLYGONs can break the WKT map processing
Add toggles in ModTools Members->Approved for community event and volunteering mails
Adapt help page to includes some of the complaints procedure information.
Template error log in console for MT
UT fixes (2 days ago)
Speed-ups: reduce database operations for Group object, to help with many groups
Speed-ups: session API call
Coverage: improve User test kudos
Messages from TrashNothing which are crossposted to multiple groups may not get marked as TAKEN/RECEIVED correctly.
Reply count not showing correctly for messages
Location handling for point locations
Improvements to group merge script
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
Speed-up of Facebook linking broke things

Direct.

Ongoing discussion on how to sort out the bad members from the good. Some feel more help in guiding members by suggesting other info they can give when posting or requesting may be better than using clever techniques to determine how good a Freegler someone might be based on their replies and behaviour.
Others do not want to add stuff and complicate it for the majority who use the present system just fine and still others think we should have no interference at all in members transaction.
Sending posts in by email. A moderator new to Direct asked us about attaching photos when posting to Freegle Direct by email. It was tested and does appear to work.
Duplicate posts on My Posts. Doubling up of Posts once with of the ‘My Posts’ tab have been reported by three moderators. One copy is a draft version and does not have the Offer/Wanted in front or the postcode suffix. Edward believes this is fixed; let him know if not.

Emails
A discussion about the boxes to plot the availability of members format not working very well was had. Some moderators find the set times does not suit them exactly, but an explanation by one to think of it as an invitation to discuss times within your parameters not not a hard and fast rule changed perspectives somewhat.
Q. I understand ads are a necessary evil, but currently I'm getting really scammy looking PPI at the top of digests and get rich quick at the bottom of individual emails. Can we do anything.
We have some control over what appears send me any you don’t like to Geeks@ilovefreegle.org
Q. Several people have said they wish there was a single form for posting like the message maker .
There is. If you go to the Newsfeed and click the OFFER or WANTED tabs, you'll see it:
Q. A member complained that he has tried turning off all emails, but still receives chase ups for posts he has made. His complaint is that it says at the bottom of the chase up email that it can be turned off, but although there are settings for all other emails being on or off, there is nothing to stop chase up emails telling him he needs to post a taken or repost.
l think that people should have the right to not receive any emails if they wish (i.e be able to disable all emails). It states at the bottom of the "chase" email that I can change my preferences in my account settings and provides a link, but I cannot disable those emails.
A I’ll remove the text from the bottom of that mail. We offer a fair bit of control over what emails members can and can not receive, but there is no legal obligation to allow people not to receive any emails at all.
Q. I tried to go to https://freegle.in/??? to see what's actually there, and got a certificate error. I've added an exception to get past the certificate error, but I doubt this is something our members would want to do so I guess this needs fixing?
A It's on my list. If you're familiar with nginx config and letsencrypt, would you like to help? If you use http://freegle.in/group it will take you to the Explore page. Q. We used to have our Yahoo owner address set up to 'send as' from a gmail account. Is this do-able with our volunteers@ilovefreegle email address? It's not liking it. Wasn't sure if the password was the gmail password or I needed another one:
Doable but not like that.

SMS Alerts

We used up our free quota and now we have to decide whether to continue them. We send at most one a day to members so we don’t pester them. The click rate is very high. That suggests that people who have this turned on are using it as their primary way of being notified of new messages. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't click.
10.5% of people provide one, which is 5349 since we started doing this. This proportion is pretty constant over time. We have a lot of people who have received more than 20 SMSs. That suggests that people don't get fed up with it; if they did they'd turn it off.
We're fairly steady at roughly 300 per day, with a slow upward trend these cost us $0.03 per SMS, so that's about $9/day, $279 per month, or £215 per month. I think that is a cost we can cope with, and those people who use it seem to find it useful but I'll take that to the Board to decide.
Edward Platform Hat

Facebook

Q. My dashboard is showing all my FB pages have unlinked again but, when I go to the pages the links are there. This is dev and normal. I have 2 publicity showing from 2 groups I am keeping an eye on so am active but the hide all from mods buttons are missing. . The buttons were there yesterday..
A I broke it now fixed.
Q. I am frequently reminded about the option of creating a Donate button on Facebook posts for the Milton Keynes group. I decided to try this out but Freegle is not one of the listed charities. Is it possible to get Freegle added? A No it isn’t possible I spent months trying We have charitable status with HMRC for Gift Aid, and get some other charitable benefits, but we cannot register with the Charity Commission so can’t be considered under Facebook rules.

Mobile App

The new push notification method being used by the ModTools and Freegle apps is giving an insight into how many active users we have, assuming that most if not all users, have push notifications on.
For ModTools, there are a steady 50+ Android and 50+ iOS users - or user subscription tokens to be precise.
The count of Freegle app user tokens has steadily been increasing since this new method was introduced at the end of August. Currently there are nearly 800 Android user tokens and nearly 700 iOS user tokens, currently both going up by about 100 per day. I thought that there might be significantly more Android users, but not so far.
Google keeps track of the number of active installs: currently 10,287 for Freegle and 112 for ModTools. So: a lot of people have installed the app previously but either haven't upgraded or haven't run it since the new version has been released.
The new method also removes the notification token when we cannot send to the user, ie if they've removed the app - though many brief users won't get any notifications (as it stands) so we won't know if they've uninstalled the app. We could send everyone a notification of say a newsletter - this would remove the tokens for everyone who had uninstalled the app.
As stated previously, we will have to turn off the old Android notification method at some point. That service is being stopped next year, but we should probably switch it off before then. We probably could send a notification to all the users on the old method to say "please upgrade the app".
I'll almost certainly be doing new releases shortly to reduce the calls to Google for maps which are now costing us. Usage of the website is far greater; so Ed has stopped/reduced map requests there already.

PS The new notification method is Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) which is free, currently at least:https://firebase.google.com/pricing/

Chris
Penrith

Notifications stopped working for some mods but has now been fixed.
Phone app suggestions I find these a complete pain... Every time I post using the app, I type out a subject line and several suggestions then cover the description box. I end up just touching one of the descriptions and my subject changes so I have to start over. One offer recently took four goes at a subject line. And am close to giving up using the app because it is such hard work just trying to get a correct subject line.
A. I have had a look and try and fix it.

Mod Tools

I have added a toggle in Members->Approved to allow mods to set these on behalf of members (as they can currently do for the What's New emails). Not live yet.

Mod Chats.

Q. Is there an easier way to go from chat to a members info etc. So I can just get info from chat and then find the persons membership(s)
It was on my todo list and now live on dev..
Q. I just sent a test message to our new volunteers@ address. It hasn't come back to me, but I've just noticed a copy in chat on Modtools. Is it meant to be like that - and is there any way we can change it so that we get emails?
You should get all emails on Mod Chat sent to you.
Q. Why is chat on Modtools always in such a strange order, with messages from days ago all mixed up with messages from today?
Those not marked as seen are at the top. A reply which has been received to a post sent a while ago will take the whole conversation with that person back to the top.
Q. I think if you reply to the message by email then it should get marked as read too. If it doesn't, that's a bug.
Yes it should unless you reply direct to their email rather than hitting reply. then it won't because the message will never pass through the system.

Native.

Q I've just dealt with an email from a member who thought she unsubscribed when she moved abroad nine years ago and who has suddenly started to receive our digests (we went native yesterday). I checked her settings on Yahoo and she was set to receive special notices - which is likely to mean that she set herself to " Surely if someone asked not to receive mail from us then that setting should have carried over to FD?< I am a bit concerned about those unsolicited digests... we could find ourselves at the receiving end of spam complaints.I am surprised nobody else has flagged this up - unless it's a new bug?
A It is not a bug but it is known that when groups switch to Native, these things happen. For instance if they have just been joined to our database the default is daily digest. Any members which predate Direct and have not been active will now be transferred over. Even when you regularly synch your members data it only goes back so far.
Q. Is there a maximum length for the group description?
A Maximum length is 64K although any limits like that may result in truncation, so you can see if they have happened, but probably you won't get warned in MT.

Tech Chats

I recently deleted a message from a member, who asked for a service. Unfortunately it went out as he was not then on moderation (but he is now!!). Can anyone tell me what would happen to any replies sent to his message, sent after the message was removed? Will they still go through to him, or be bounced back, or returned with a message of some sort, or just vanish into the internet?
A. They may go thru if people on individual notifications see it before it was removed, or it was already queued for the digest before being deleted. If you have the members user ID we can check in support if he's had any replies to the original.
A. We could block such a thing but only if it was automatic, not if it required human review (legal issues). I don't think we could do that reliably enough to be safe. Replies will go through even after the post has been deleted.
That's a pity. It means that someone who sneaks something naughty through, like this member, may actually still benefit if the message goes out unmoderated. Q I Just had a member send me this - so I'm checking that the message actually came from us not phishing people? "Hi I have a text message with a link saying I have a message. Click the link, sign in but I can’t find messages. Could you explain to me how to find them. Thanks" (have told her where to find messages once signed in obviously
A I think that's the sms system kicking in. Is she signing in with the email addresses she used to post the messages with? That's usually why people can't find them, they log in with the wrong addy .
She might be -she's a lovely longstanding member and it's possible she's logging in with different means I've just dealt with an email from a member who thought she unsubscribed when she moved abroad nine years ago and who has suddenly started to receive our digests (we went native yesterday). I checked her settings on Yahoo and she was set to receive special notices - which is likely to mean that she set herself to " Surely if someone asked not to receive mail from us then that setting should have carried over to FD?< I am a bit concerned about those unsolicited digests... we could find ourselves at the receiving end of spam complaints.I am surprised nobody else has flagged this up - unless it's a new bug?
A It is not a bug but it is known that when groups switch to Native, these things happen. For instance if they have just been joined to our database the default is daily digest. Any members which predate Direct and have not been active will now be transferred over. Even when you regularly synch your members data it only goes back so far.
Q My promised items on ilovefreegle.org/myposts are not faded out and are showing as available still :( also other askers have not got the message about them being promised to someone else :(
A They don't show as faded on My Posts to you, they show as faded on the group pages. Some people will reply anyway despite being warned that it is promised, in case that falls through. Some people will reply from email and not know that it's promised. So you can always get some later replies.Which is useful if it falls through
Q On Dev all the comments in here are showing on the right hand side, usually mine are on the right and everyone else's are on the left. Plus new message not showing as bold when I first view it
A Thanks, now fixed.
Q A member can’t post a Received for her Wanted. I tried and couldn’t so clicked withdraw.
A I think David is probably right -you need to choose a person before you can click Submit for a Received. This used to default to something, but people didn't check it and let it go through with the wrong person, so now you have to choose.

Trash Nothing.

Trashnothing members used to get the admins we posted on Yahoo. They won't get those any more but will they get the ones we put on Freegle Direct?
They should go out as long as they aren’t specific to Freegle Direct.
Q. I have an old withdrawn offer and a current offer of my own. Someone has tried replying to the recent one but it’s coming to me as a reply to the old offer which shows as withdrawn on my posts on FD. I asked her to try again and same thing happened.
She is viewing and replying via Trash Nothing,

Jean
Freegle Tech Report
October 2018


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