Work as always

[Papa Bear]

We have added a NEW function that shows where a user is physically located and you can access it on the Main Menu under member Map...This is som,ething we have been working on anjd finally have benn able to make it happen...

Cheers Folks

Papa Bear

[sandyc]

Re: Work as always

Hi Steve,
just checked and I only see 1 person as being in Scotland, what are you using for the 'locator'?
Sandy

[Ranald]

Re: Work as always

Sandy, you and I do not exist.... !!

I do not lke the number of obvious spammers, given locations.

I really do not see the purpose as, if genuine people, their location is given in their profile.

Ranald

[FriedaKateM]

Re: Work as always

I have no intention of "being rude", but it seems to me that all of the "blips" I saw on the map, were "people" who had NEVER posted anything. I am in agreement with the two posters above, that why don't we post the folks who actually ARE PART of the COMMUNITY? Just voicing my own concerns. There's a shared belief that most of the "blips" are actually spammers! Just my own opinion.

[Ranald]

Re: Work as always

Like you Joan, I hope my post was not taken as 'rude'.

There is no doubt that Steve and Alastair have spent, and are still spending, a lot of time to give 'us' a community. That I appreciate, so thank you to them both.

I notice that looking at some of the profiles, 'they' have only appeard on the board once and that was today. Yet their 'Joining' date year is shown as 2010 or 2012 or even earlier?

Example by one who is almost always 'on line', and has never posted !
<quote starts>
General Information
Last Activity: 13th December 2012 20:21.Join Date: 20th June 2012
<quote ends>

I presume that if going to 'games', that would be recorded ?

Ranald

[Alastair]

Re: Work as always

I've been told there are a couple of bugs in the Google Map system and an update is also due. We just wanted to see what it looked like. One of the ideas is that if you can see where people are then if they are near you it might be possible to get in touch. Of course it also offers a full Google map so you can use it just like Google maps to look for a location and see how to get there.

I might add when I checked it out I wasn't listed on the map so we'll see if I eventually appear. It's a menu option so there is no requirement to use it so it's just one more facility that could provide a useful service. Like us they also need feedback as to what they could do to improve their offerings.

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday with Steve and returned on Sunday. I had two main objectives the first being to enhance the security system to make it much harder for spammers to get in although they can never be eliminated. I also wanted to look at the arcade system as we are still get scoring issues and so we made a change which might solve that problem.

We were also talking about the way ahead for the site and we came up with four things we are going to pursue although they won't happen for quite a while as a lot of work needs to be done to make it all happen.

And I was also there to get a mirror of our server so I can send it to Simon Fraser University.

We really needed time to look at options for the site and the community and so this was a really helpful visit.

We discussed the community in some depth as there are only a small number of members actually posting messages so we were trying to figure out how to encourage more posters and get some decent new members. One possibility is to offer a private group for some people that might be interested in adopting us as their home away from Facebook. One group we're talking to could bring in some 500 new members all of which are techies. While we won't benefit directly from this group we hope they'll be open to how we might improve the community and we also hope that while they are here they might also participate in our public forums.

Should this work there may well be other groups who would also like to adopt us their home. But we need one very active group to test all this out on to see what could come from it. The group we're talking to post thousands of messages!

Then as you know our community software is on v4. but the new v5 is due out in the next month or so. We decided to have a very in depth look at it as our own main site is now quite old. We want to explore the possibilities of bringing in the content management part of the software which we currently have disabled. The thought is that if it is robust enough it might pay us to transfer all our data from the es.com site to this community under the content management system. This will take a few months to properly evaluate but it would bring much better flexibility for publishing. In v5.0 they seem to have made a major upgrade to the content management system and part of that is for you to design your own home page for the community. So we'd offer lots of options and you pick what you like to design your own home page.

Then as the community grows we would be looking for regulars that would be willing to help moderate the community so when appointed they would be able to remove spammers and spam messages. The idea is to find people in different time zones so that we'd have 24 hour coverage.

When someone becomes a member they are not obligated to post messages so one of the things we're looking at is to create a better welcome letter in which we'd specifically ask them to give something back to the community like at least post the odd message. I'm not at all sure if that would work mind you but we do have to try. The other option we thought of was to make some facilities available just to contributing members. So once you've posted say 20 messages you would get to see some extra facilities. We might somehow tie this into our rewards program.

Then we discussed bringing on a radio station. Over the years Steve has gained permission from a whole bunch of artists to use their music in our radio station royalty free. We have the software but it will take time to build it.

Then we discussed how to get some direct advertisers on the site. One of the problems is that companies have tried us out over the years but they don't get any decent results and so they eventually cancel. So we discussed alternative ways of doing this.

At the end of the day we do need to bring in an income to run everything and we could also do with some help but if you can't get in enough money then you just have to do what you can yourself. So we think we've figured a better way to deal with advertising and I'll be working on this over the next few weeks.

At the end of the day this is your community so you also need to tell us what you like and don't like and also tell us of anything you'd like to see which would improve your experience. That doesn't mean we can magically change things but if you don't ask you won't get.

And of course you might also be pro active and invite some of your own friends to come in and give us a try?

So that's a wee update on things we're looking at.

Alastair

[Hugh]

Re: Work as always

I noticed that I was not on the map either. It may assume that you know where you are and therefore not neccessary to show you. It was not too accurate either. I noticed that "Swiftest" was shown to be in Ottawa which is incorrect. Is this the fault of Google maps?

Cheers,

Hugh

[Alastair]

Re: Work as always

I'm giving it to the next update but if it doesn't improve will remove it. I certainly don't mind giving new things a go but if they don't work out they need to go.

Alastair