Freegle Tech Report 19-07-31
Freegle Tech Report July 2019 Messages 27243-27379 Members 113
General
Edward arrived home early July and caught up on any outstanding queries, most of which had corrected themselves or could not be reproduced.
Still getting a lot of our mails going to spam so Edward is going to try to whitelist our domains (not just individuals). He was also going to send out instructions he has been given to stop Yahoo members getting our mails into their spam boxes. However it seems that doesn’t work. It also appears that BT have two types of email. BT Yahoo Mail and BT Mail
We would like to find out if those with the BT Mail, (It doesn't have the Yahoo! logon on the top left} still get our mails not arriving or going into spam.
Direct
Mail
Edward tried various things to improve deliverability with Yahoo UK and btinternet mails. He opened a support call. Which resulted in a mail with standard best practice advice.T ried to contact Yahoo Support via Twitter. Ditto.
We established that repeatedly marking items as Not Spam doesn't help.
We established that the Yahoo mail filters are not reliable, and can't be used to force mails into the inbox - so there is no point in mailing our members asking them to do this.
We experimented with varying the email contents, headers, and sender quite a lot, which didn't help.
We changed it to send directly out of a different one of our hosts (bulk3).
All that we can now do is to add something on the site which warns btinternet and yahoo members specifically about spam. We already have a general reminder about checking spam folders but I can beef it up for those domains.
Q&A
The description that appears on the group page is showing if you visit a group using explore but not from the My Groups link. Ours asks people not to sell items they receive without stating that's their intention.... and now have a fairly new member who is hoovering things up and selling them on the Facebook groups. She's also making up stories about why she would like things but it would be nice to have that back if possible please so everyone can see it.
A I have done a fix but it is not live as yet.
Q. If someone deletes their account with us, should their posts disappear from the group messages? I have an ex member who was happily posting to the group and the newsfeed about how wonderful everything was who’s then deleted her account. Presumably anyone trying to reply wouldn’t get through
A We keep the messages so as not to mess with the stats, but we ought to hide them. I'll fix that.
Q Had a Wanted reposted after 7 days - no problem except it has no Auto-repost # in red at the top - and I assume it must be because it has the same post number as before (#58699420). Also not showing up in our Group logs.
A, He has probably reposted manually. Your group settings allow this after 7days.
Q. Spread the word says
“You can help even more by letting us know where you put up posters. Once we know where it is, then we can encourage other freeglers to put one up there in future.” But the pink “I put up a poster” button doesn't lead to this. A box pops up saying please wait and the wheel goes round. Then the box disappears, but nothing else happens, no opportunity to give the location of the poster.
A I've seen that in the app when there is a dodgy network connection. Are you still seeing it? If so, on which device?
Q. I have a member who has tried to withdraw a Wanted post and says that the Button is not working. She has now sent me a Screenshot, and I see that actually she has not tried to Withdraw on the post in "My Posts" but on the Auto Repost Notice. She tried to click Withdraw on this but nothing happened. Not sure if this is something specific to her or there is a general problem. I've attached a screenshot of the Notice she was trying to click on.
A It's possible she's using an old email client, in which case it might not work (which is why we have that text there telling people to try the website if the buttons don't work).
Q. Does anyone know how I unban a member?
A You can’t, email Geeks@ilovefreegle.org to do it for you.
Q. On My Posts. Some members report that they find copies of their mails in Drafts.
A. They can just delete them if they went through okay. It happens if you multi list items, so that if keep inputting similar details, it remembers and you don’t have to do the lot each time..
Servers
Client code changes in the last Month Here are the more important ones which would affect members:
- Not showing replies on My Posts when there are < 5 posts and they show expanded
- Add ability to ask for Business Cards on the Spread page
- Can get duplicate "no longer promised" messages
- Add a link to report message posts more easily
- Group description missing from My Groups
- Make message to check spam folders more forceful
Here are the ones which are minor, or only affect volunteers in ModTools, or are internal changes that you wouldn't notice:
In MT, show last moderated time for mods in Find Group in Support Tools
Add link to council newsletter archive
In MT, don't allow standard messages to be sent with an empty body
Change council section on WDF
Add Oxfordshire Reuses to councils toolkit
In MT, a standard message which changes from all upper case loses spaces
Use Richmond example some more
Remove broken link on Councils bulky waste section
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
Merge pull request #16 from Lurux/patch-1
Always show the help text on the spammer admin pages.
Remove sponsored walk donation appeal
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
Fix message report
Add link to tell story to Spread page
In MT, collapse previous ADMINs by default to reduce page length
This is an automated list of the changes to the server code in the last Month Here are the more important ones which would affect members:
- Sending availability email notifications when no availability specified
- Don't send "Could you help" messages for deleted users
- Other people's thumbs up/down ought to expire after six months
Here are the ones which are minor, or only affect volunteers in ModTools, or are internal changes that you wouldn't notice:
Still sending empty schedule summaries
Change backup script to try to improve reliability of our test restore
A couple of bad invented emails
Ask users who received things to give a thumbs up
Return last moderated time for mods, for use in Support Tools
Improve stripping of reply text
Improve Newsfeed email digests, and fix bug where stories can show as a blank entry
Script to detect bad email addresses
Story count wrong for groups you're a backup on
Record why we have forgotten a user - request or inactive
Stroll sponsorship has finished
Filter out mail to volunteers from known spammers
Add extra OOF message
Some googlemail/gmail accounts not combined correctly.
Don't ask for donations from people who have received items if the item was marked as taken a long time it was offered,.
Need to forget Yahoo ID when deleting users
Can't handle user names with a dash in them
UT fixes
Remove stroll donation appeal from chat notifications
Fix up group settings for allow edits
purge logs for old mail bounces to save space
Auto-confirm Twitter requests when querying blocked account
Ensure TN picks up message edits
In MT, creation of chats to members not working correctly
Strip trailing underscores and dashes when extracting message.
Group images not shown correctly in chat summary
Not all images returned correctly in chat summary
UT fixes
Minor changes to aid Nuxt client
Back out previous bad fix
Improve script for triggering user digest.
Allow JSON-encoded POST data
Unsubscribe headers are wrong for Events and Volunteering digest mails
Not tweeting all messages
Script to help debug a problem Sheila is seeing with being set to backup
Modtools
In the Admin section you put the box to create a new admin at the top but, when you select a group the ‘previously sent’ Admins show up the bottom of the Nationally suggested ones, That may be fine for people that may only have one or two suggested admins but if you have loads, like I do it’s a long scroll to see what admins have gone out on a group.
Q Could you put the info under the create new Admin box and put the suggested Admins at the very bottom pretty please?
A The Pending Admins shouldn't stay there for long, for most people - they should be approved or deleted. So that shouldn't be a long list. Is it because you're on lots of groups?
Q Couldn’t you collapse the previous admins list as a default setting if you think people won't bother scrolling to get to the pending national ones? You may think we should not sit on the national ones but some are out far to early.
Q. I have an invisible story. Count shows 2 at the moment, but there is only one story waiting. It's been showing an extra story for a couple of weeks now.
A Thanks it was showing them if on groups you were a backup on . Fixed now.
Q.I can't see an auto refresh in modtools but if there is one in doesn't appear to be frequent enough. For improved moderator synchronisation it would be better if the modtools screen would auto refresh at something of the order of 1 minute. Possible, or not?
A You're right that there are some problems with the autorefresh. This will be fixed by work I plan to do later in the year.
Q. I know there had been a problem before where chat boxes were vanishing as you were typing in them. I think you found a fix for that but I’ve found another place where it is happening. In Edit on MT’s I was trying to let someone know how to promise as they’d just used the original message and edited it to say it was now promised. The chat box let me get about 4 words in then vanished. Not sure it’s the same problem as before.
A The Chat button in the Edits page doesn't do the right thing. Fix made
Mobile app
Our app has been rejected in review, we think probably because it doesn't have a clear way of reporting inappropriate content in the OFFER/WANTED posts.
I'm adding a link to allow this. You'll get a popup to explain why: This will open a chat to the mods (which will go out by email if needed),
The Google login on the Freegle app stopped working at the last release. I've fixed that now and just done a new release.
There's also an option for users on the main posts to "Report this post" so you might possibly see chat messages to mods like this. This functionality is also present on v1.4.16 which is already available for iOS (where the Google login still works).
I now need to fix up the Google login on the ModTools Android app.
Trash Nothing
We seem to have a problem with some of the TrashNothing Taken posts. The Taken appears on ModTools but is not referenced to the Offer. the Offer is removed from TrashNothing website and our App - but not removed from Freegle website. One member concerned with the Folding Bicycle posts confirmed that he posted these via the App (presume the TN one).
They have posted the taken from a different TN address than the offers so we are not be able to tie them together.
Tech Chat
This just in 'Hello, I’ve had a message from a freegler and by accident I’ve pressed the downward thumb on the message. Sorry bad eyes and on mobile! Can you take that off? Feel very guilty. She’d done nothing wrong!
Maggie S Yes, if you click the thumbs up button, it will cancel the thumbs down to a thumbs up, you know what thumbs up/down you give by the button turning blue
I'm getting a load of 'online mattress ' junk mail on modtools , how do i deal with it please anyone
Wanda They have been added to the spammer list. Sadly when they spam the Owner ady's we only catch them after the event as the owner addy has to be public and that lets the spambots in to spam us :( They've probably moved on elsewhere now.... we're always catching these after the event. Not sure there is any way to catch them before... pretty sure ~Ed would ave found a way by now if there was. My chat bubble on MT's showed 408. .altho that also counts images as one message too. .but my email has a load to delete now. . one wonders why Yahoo doesn't pick these ones out as spam and not bother sending them to me yet perfectly legit mail is sent to spam
Wanda added to list. .nothing we can do about these except block after the fact.
Peter Hi I was going through some old emails. I notice the spam member conversations (online mattresses) were being sent to Barnet Freegle. This group only has 330 members. I was thinking there might be a reasonable chance of finding the spammer. Any suggestion welcome. Didn't Nigel Munday have a program in days of freecycle to run to find a hidden spammer on a group?
Peter The ones Wanda listed in confirmed spammers I believed are spoofed emails. I think she mentioned this herself. If I remember correctly there was discussion about it being a botnet. If a members computer gets infected compromised then it can start sending out hundreds of emails.Looking at the domain names WHOIS I have good reason to believe the image links are spammers.#Peter
Wanda @Peter. They weren't spoofed member emails as non of the addresses belonged to any groups so more likely a spambot . all Owner addy's are public on the site and all got affected. I think that is usually a sign of a program running around the net. Ed would know more about how these things work.
Liz It used to be that when a member created a post and it came for moderation the subject line was set something like Offered Item (Enfield EN1) now members seem to be able to change or add anything they like I have always had the format as above but now I get them with things like (N9, Waltham Forest, Essex) this is made up but it means I have to edit them and ask the member to resend using their full postcode and the system will automatically give the correct format but one or two have told me that that's what they did - I'm confused has something changed? Liz
- Liz Ive not had it happen with any FD members, just TN - and I assumed it was because they tend to put in all kinds of stuff, anyhow, anywhere.
Liz New topic I can't remember how to add a mod Peter Morris has kindly offered to help with an admin and I need to add him temporarily? Thanks Liz Enfield
Wanda @Liz Find him in the group member list [do a search on his email] and you can change him to Mod from there.
Maggie S I'm not getting notifications on freegle chat on my mobile, I had a message waiting an hour before I checked to see if I had any messages,
Wanda Not sure Chris checks the MT's tools chat, probably best to get him in Tech or MT's Yahoo groups Mags
Elaine He doesn't, wanda, Maggie S, But I do, and I ensure he knows anything relevant!! In case you haven't contacted him yet, I mailed him directly., he tells me he had this report before from someone, and is dealing on Central, but as yet, no success. He'll be reporting back on there. xx
Jean
Freegle Tech
July 2019
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