Progress not perfection
September 1 product update
Wow, it has been too long since I posted a little update for everyone to see and discuss if y'all want. Looks like I trailed off here after the first push on the follow feature (last updated more than a week ago), although I did manage to mention the email notification updates @ezraBC has been toiling away on and that should have started rolling out by now.
So there is a lot to catch up on. I'll do it somewhat chronological:
Following up on follow
Since the last post on this subject we shipped these improvements:
1. Gave guests the 7 cups feed on their feed page so they have something to start with.
2. Put the 7 Cups feed in a consistent place so anyone can go to it.
3. #hashtags ! but you knew about this
4. connect cards - so far it seems like most people love 'em (phew!)
5. repost with comments - improved reposts with the ability to see who reposted, and the ability to add a note when reposting, like a reply or comment or your own spin on the thing
Email only when you want it for things you missed
New email notification preferences and email templates (design still evolving)
All the other stuff
Besides the more visible feature or functionality updates, @cris & @ezraBC have been knocking out a bunch of things we've been wanting to do for some time:
1. Fix to listener signup email confirmation link (was failing for some logged-out users)
2. Setup of smarter email system much less likely to send unwanted email
3. Support Room Leader, Relationship Support, Disability Support, and Parenting Support badges now appear besides names in group support rooms
4. Better tracking of teen data to understand differences in needs and behaviors and to help @iara kick butt at her job.
5. Critical fixes to follow and reposting (too many to mention, most recently misattribution of reposted 7 cups posts and "de-duping" of duplicate repost reposts
6. Adjust process a bit to prevent troll reviews based on ghost chats
7. Enable guests to see that there are group support chat rooms for members they can access by signing up for a member account.
8. Improvements to our internal community admin tools for account management. This may seem incredibly ho-hum, but trust me when we finally get around to automating or improving admin tools, it has a way of unleashing energy that was trapped in cumbersome manual processes. We'll continue working on those less immediately visibleaspects of how this place works becasue we know you'll see the benefit when @laura and her team are better able to do their jobs and to route information or delegate processes to the right people.
OK. That pretty much catches us up to, like, today.
My next TL;DR: post will cover some of our upcoming priorities, including what I've been learning by asking for feedback on recent features and on core experiences, such as browsing for a listener or (listener's only) taking personal requests.
Stay with us. We're in for a heck of a trek.
Can't wait to see what else you guys have planned for us! Thanks for everything you've done for us so far. :)
You're welcome! It's a great pleasure to be of service to people embarked on such a powerfully good mission together.
The bottom #4 made me LOL.
always nice to see who's reading down to the laugh lines...
This is amazing. Thank you!
you're welcome.
thank you!
thanks for the update and psssst *whispers* you are amazing. :)
sorry. what was that? i couldn't hear you. :D
Thank you so much, @KrinkTheMellowUnicorn, for all these improvements!
It s a lot of work! Chapeau!
thank you and everyone here for making the site live and the whole community so compelling and inspiring. that's what drives me forward.
We tend to think of this website as a finished place which just appeared one day in the interweb. It is easy to forget that it is constantly formed by talented people, such as @KrinkTheMellowUnicorn, @cris, @ezraBC. Everything looks effortless to us, but in reality so much work is required for things to go smoothly.
Thank you for doing such an amazing job. I really appreciate that you make everything in your power to make this community the nicest corner. You're wonderful ^^
thanks! @cris and @ezra do most of the forming, and everyone back here is working hard on many things.
i've taken it upon myself to share these updates and give all this detail, but that does not mean I deserve more than my fair share of the credit!
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
This is beautiful, thanks for the round up, Xian :) I'm a big fan of the email updates, excellent change. One thing that did catch my eye on the list though was the tracking of teen data, would it be possible for you to explain how that works and how it's explained in the Terms of Service? Thanks
(By the way, ''unicorns with studios'' is the best hashtag ever #fact)
Thanks. I know we talk about major things and it sometimes seems like we're not fixing anything or improving anything important so I thought this roundup of just two weeks' work or so was valuable.
As for the data, it basically means being able to segment things like traffic or total number of chats by teen vs. adult. This is a segmentation that exists naturally in our site but was not necessarily captured as analytical data.
None of this is about individuals, btw., and it has nothing to do with content of messages, which are not stored in our database beyond the last ten in any chat.
We use this segmentation to avoid lumping everyone together, and just assuming what's good for most people is good for every important subgroup.
So an example might be (totally made up), let's say we notice that people who chat with Noni while waiting for a listener tend to on average to reach the same threshold (number of messages) as people who did not have Noni, and so we decide that Noni is OK but nothing special.
Now, imagine we sort out the data by teens vs. adults and discover that adults who sit with Noni actually reach the threshold somewhat less often, but teens do better with Noni than not. (Again, totally just made that up.)
In that case we might say, let's give Noni to teens and not give her to adults. But if we didn't track any distinctions around teen vs. adult this would be some texture in the data that we would not be able to see.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure what it is about the TOS you were concerned about, @Lyra, so please let me know if I totally missed your point!
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
Thank you for the clarification, Xian - the way things were worded made it seem as if personal data of minors would be tracked, but I'm glad to hear that that's my paranoia at play, not what will actually happen! I'm wholly in support of this, it sounds like having this information available to community managers will make a lot of difference.
Better safe than sorry!
I'm as sensitive as anyone to the idea of intrusions on privacy and misuse of data so I'm glad you asked.
@KinkTheMellowUnicorn Thank you for all the updates and your hard work😊
You're welcome, @bouncyShoe77!
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn I love the way you explain things and keep us on track. Its truly amazing the work you are doing here and I am glad you are letting our community know what you are planning to do in the near future. Thank you very much!
