January 6 - Making our community more inclusive - Monthly Animal Cohort Idea
Hello Community,
In the new year, we want to continue our focus on helping people and building community. Yay!
Specifically, when people come to 7 Cups we want them to feel included and to be able to find a group or multiple groups where they feel like they belong and have an identity. We are doing this with our subcommunities now and you all have done an amazing job supporting, welcoming and creating encouraging environments for our members to grow and thrive in these spaces.
Today, we are excited to share, and get your feedback on, another idea that would encourage this same sense of community building across our entire community.
One thing you all have taught us is that Cupversaries are an important milestone to celebrate. We havent done a great job up supporting your efforts and making sure everyone who has hit a Cupversary milestone is honored for their dedication and participation. So to better support our Cupversary efforts and make sure everyone feels like they are part of our global community with a team of people who have also joined around the same time as them, we will be launching a new cohort program.
Every member or listener who joins our site will receive a cohort animal badge. And these badges arent your average badge, they are real animal icons!! Your animal icon will travel with you around the site. Those who join around the same time will all have the same badge so they can easily recognize each other and connect on their journey. Every month of the year is assigned an animal (ex. January is a Deer). Everyone who joins our community in January will be assigned the Deer badge icon. When you hover over the animal icon it will provide the month and date that you joined 7 Cups. So if you joined this month, the hover text would read: January 2018.
This will make it very easy to find others who joined around the same time as you and easy to figure out when a Cupversary is on the horizon! We can use these cohort groups as a way to build community. There are many creative ways we can build community around these animal cohort groups! To start, we will create a forum area dedicated to your animal cohort group.
Here are the tentative animal assignments - **UPDATED**
Jan - Dolphin
Feb - Penguin
March - Horse
April - Camel
May - Elephant
June - Kangaroo
July - Star fish
August - fish
Sept - Bunny
Oct - Eagle
Nov - Butterfly
Dec - Turtle
Wed like to hear your thoughts and ideas for how to make this work with the ultimate goal of making 7 Cups a more welcoming place, especially for new folks, and a place where it is easy to find friends and support each other.
Here are a few specific things wed love your thoughts on, too:
-----> Where would you like your animal icon to show on the site? Forums? Feed? Youe Profiles? Connect Cards? Chatrooms?
-----> We will be auto-assigning these icon badges moving forward, but would old school 7 Cups people like us to retroactively assign them as well?
-----> Other ideas for how cohorts can connect and support each other?
Thank you all! We are excited to see some adorable animals around the community!
Big thank you to @krinkthemellowunicorn for helping with the creation of this post. :)
I would rather it be visible more about how long we have been here than month of joining.
I have had interactions with someone multiple times and every time they chatted like I was brand new to the site.
If the desire to recognize the cupversary month is the goal, can we have different colours for every year?
I also like the idea of being able to opt-out.
@AffyAvo Changing the animal based on how long it has been since sign-up sounds great, actually! That way we can have all the animals. 
And no maths to be done att the time. 
@AffyAvo
I really like the idea of having badges to show how long someone has been a member, maybe a badge for each year? Maybe more on listener profiles.
@Laura
@MythologicalMayhem I agree, perhaps the animals for the month, every year the same (because no matter what year someone signed up their cuppaversary is still in the same month) and then an extra one for how many years. Because personally I could not recognize 54 different animals for different months :')
@affyavo so would it be helpful for members to have that shown in chats maybe? Because lots of listeners might not look at profiles (because if they did they'd notice your join date).
But for listeners I'd think keeping it at profiles is pretty good or else like someone said above it might be distracting having all these gimmicks and colors and animals and badges displayed everywhere
I am really glad that i joined that community and it makes me always feel better and talk or to listen to people!
The icons should be on our profiles. They can connect us to our animal communities. Maybe, depending on how many years we've been online we can also have a number next to it.
@chefor
Or even an amount of said animal to represent years?
Two years, signed up in august, two cats
Three years, signed up in x, three x
And so on
@Joe2017 ooooh, I like that idea
@Laura and @krinkthemellowunicorn ... First thank you! I think this is a lovely idea - being an animal myself and all.
To answer question two: YES!!!! Yes, make the icons/badges retroactive because that would just be awesome (aka I would love to have one :) ) and as someone mentioned my (L) account would have a different animal, which I think is cool too.
Animals = awesome all the time!
As far as where to put them - definitely on my profile, helpful in the forums perhaps, very helpful in the group chat - but maybe not unless there would be like a separate room for each month/animal. This is a tad bit like astronomy the "what is your sign?" thing (though that's centered around when you were born) - I'm not sure I like that so I'll just forget that part Lol.
Oh and huge big bigger thanks for allowing us to give feedback to this idea before it goes into effect. I also appreciate the idea of allowing (M) or (L) to turn this feature off. Personally I'd probably leave it on, but some people are a lot more private about personal info stuff here on 7cups - even though you can find this particular information within their profiles in other forms. Anyway, that was meant to all say: THANKS! <3 Platy
@cyanPlatypus6370
yay thank you for this platty!!! <3
our months already appear on our profile (and are not right for everyone, there is a lot of fake dates), so if you prefer an other animal you will be frustrated about this wrong date. i joined in january and my profile show october.
@vivelespatates
Not sure about "fake dates"? They're literally the dates you joined, you can't really fake it?
@MythologicalMayhem Some are inaccurate. There are glitches with the site where some joined a different date than what their profile said. I think Vive was just having trouble finding the correct English term to explain.
@MythologicalMayhem before 2016, when an account was deactivated (no matter if deactivated by the user or by admin) and reactivated. it did "reset" the join date. so if someone took a self care break, the date specified on their profile may be wrong. by example mine say october 2015 but i joined january 2015. my account was deactivated temporary and then reactivated in october.
@vivelespatates - I am sure we can fix these by hand when helpful & probably also fix or change the bugs or code that cause this problem in the future
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn it doesnt worth to change those dates, mainly just for this kind of update very stupid and useless
@vivelespatates At least the date problem would be solved and it would help the developers fix the bug. And the issue wouldn't exist anymore and we'd never have to complain about it again. -shrugs-
@AiluraBlaze the base of issue is already solved. it does the difference between activation and reactivation now. but for the fake dates, they just can change manuelly one by one, since its an old thing. the bug with the dates when there is a deactivation, its already solved for a very long time. when we deactivate and reactivate, our date doesnt change.
@vivelespatates thanks, Vive - you often remember the details better than I do :D
Why no aardwolf badge? :\
@LittleAardwolf Replicating your uniqueness with an animal badge would be a crime.
@AiluraBlaze
xD
@LittleAardwolf
:)
@Laura
I think they should be where all the badges are or somewhere on the profile, but not in chatrooms. It's hard enough to keep up with them, having little symbols everywhere would make it more difficult.
I am an old member but I would like to have one! I believe everyone should have one, whether they're new or not. It would not be very 'community' like to have all new members involved in one new thing, but 3/4 of your members are excluded from it because they were here first. If anything, your older members should be respected more!
@MythologicalMayhem
thank you for the feedback!
@Laura
YAY for the badges!!! Is a fox!!!!!!!!!!
@summertimeSamness
Jan - Dolphin
Feb - Penguin
March - Horse
April - Camel
May - Elephant
June - Kangaroo
July - Star fish
August - Fish
Sept - Bunny
Oct - Eagle
Nov - Butterfly
Dec - Turtle
** new badge assignments
@SpunkyMonkey100 0.0 I'm a monkey too!
@LunaHecate awww no fair *cries* i wanted a monkey. im stuck with sigh...a deer >_<
a deer is my 7 Cups spirit animal. i am Bambi
@SpunkyMonkey100 now nobody is a monkey :O congratulations my deer... Uh... Dolphin.
By the way, @rumplesteeleskin, I've got an elephant B|
@Liz1000 *cries*
@LunaHecate I'm a rhino. I'm a real unicorn. :3
For the badges, I hope it might be possible to use designs like the Noni teacup (by Teresa Levy at Hasbro). Here are her deer, penguins, elephant and cat—some of the others might have to be specially commissioned:
@RarelyCharlie - we are gathering fairly simple (cartoonish) icons from the Noun Project, mainly because they need to render legibly when small
