Freegle Tech Report 2013-04-30

Freegle Tech Report April 2013
Messages 11718-11939
Members 96

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 come along.

General

AOL

Edward and Chris have managed to get a block on Freegle emails to AOL lifted.
Please ask your AOL members not to send our posts to ‘spam’ and to mark any there as ‘not spam’? It does take a long time to get a ban lifted.
Anyone on AOL marking them as spam is at present being sent a mail to ask them to desist. From now the app will be setting these members to no mail. A message will be sent to the group mods when this is done.

SMS alerts.

We and members were asked if we would like SMS alerts from Freegle. Two conclusions:
Almost nobody cares.
Those people who do care, mostly don't want them.
So this is not going to happen.

Server

• A bit poorly a couple of times, in the end requiring intervention from VPS. Hopefully it is now fixed.
• There is now a monthly figure on the Freegle website of the monthly total we save from landfill.

Direct and Facebook

• The digests stopped going out until it was pointed out, when it was quickly restored.
• The post alerts for members also broke, when the clocks changed and has only just been detected and fixed.
• Some reports of being unable to post are being received by members who on checking were unsubscribed mid October.

    If you get reports and could check your logs, you may find they were part of a mass unsubscribe around that time and need to be deleted so that they can rejoin,

    or you can mail support @ ilovefreegle.org.

• Profile pics, photos and maps now have curved corners - you might not consciously notice but it looks softer.

    The name of the poster has been moved below the profile pic, which means that the subject lines always start at the same point on the screen, to neaten it.
    A new share icon has been done by graphics to replace the rather intrusive "Send to a friend" button.
    We got our first spammer on Direct. They will be taken care of if you report them to the spammer group.

Events.

These were cocked up because of the clocks going forward. There may still be some issues with this - if you see a difference in event times between different places (e.g. emails/web/twitter) then forward specific details to Edward.

Points raised and sorted.

• Inviting FB Members 

   Some groups weren’t getting new FB members on their Yahoo groups once again, so an automatic system of sending out members to be invited has been implemented.
   This works by topping up each night the spare members held on the app to 10.
   If you approve members and had some waiting at the time, then you can ignore them and just approve the members.It is probably better to keep this going as Yahoo can be very

   iffy in its acceptance of members to the list. It can be hard to spot that they are not going on and result in a massive loss of potential members. .

 Questions raised and answered.

Q. How easy would it be to write a bulk task to put any Yahoo/Hotmail addys onto moderation ?
A. Reasonably! But taking them off would then be a pain....
Q.Members are getting emails after leaving
A. When you remove a member set your plug in to synch to 1 hour and reload. You can also check here http://wiki.ilovefreegle.org/List_of_Links#Leaving_groups. to ensure they have gone from DIrect. .
Q. Is it possible to see which members have joined using a named view?
A.You can now go here and send out an email you will get a copy to the mod address for each member. https://direct.ilovefreegle.org/main.php?&action=postsn Not recommended if you have lots of members.
Q.Can a named view be changed?
A. Yes
Q. I seem to be getting requests to map every post?
A. Have you set the parameter in the settings too low? The default is normally about 30 so it just flags up those which are out of our normal catchment area and those where the app can’t find a location in the subject line.
Q. I am getting some strange text displayed on a message in Freegle Direct.
A. FD tries to find the plain text of the message - looks like it has failed on this one. Edward is looking into this.
Q. I am getting an alert for this object which is not an animal.
A. It is picking up cat from the middle of another word. You can prevent this and have it only check on complete words if you format your search term like this (^dog$^)|(^cat$)|(^rabbit$)|(^hamster$|(^bird$)|(^puppy$)|(^kitten$)|(^kittens$)  etc.
Q.’Thanks for using our community events feature.’I just noticed this gets sent every time a mod OK’s a community event
Is there a way of restricting to once as we tend to approve as they come in and sometimes two of us approve?
A. On the todo list to fix.

Jean

Tech Group

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