Update 10/19 - New Admin Tool - Alerts Broadcasting
Hi All -
I am very excited to announce that we launched a new admin tool today! Please join me in saying goodbye to our old alert system. It did us well for many years, but it had very limited functionality.
The new broadcasting tool will allow us to send alerts out to very specific subgroups of people. We can customize them to ensure that you get the information most relevant to you!
We can customize them in the following ways:
- age groups!
- user type - listener, member, therapist
- badges - send out alerts to specific badge holders
- subcommunities leaders - send a notice out to an entire subcom leader team
- Subcom role titles - send a notice out to a specific role across all subcoms
Additionally, it allows us to present the exact date & time of events. So, we can do short 1 minute alerts or scheduled alerts that pop up at designated times.
We will be using this tool over the next few weeks and hope that it will bring more relevant content to you!
PLEASE NOTE: Leaders - the community management team will no longer be sending out emails to coordinate meetings. All meetings will be coordinated using these alerts. Please check your alerts for meeting info/ time/ agenda..etc
YAY!
Thank you!
@Laura Whew, exciting update! Thanks for the notice; look forward to this awesome development.
@Laura YAY! I'm excited!
@Kate who gets access to the new tool as in Admin tools i have access to opening/close rooms , approve answers now i see the alert feature
@Laura
I'm so excited! This will benefit teams so much, and benefit both adult and teen sides with keeping things directed to them personally when needed which will be helpful to new listeners not understanding why they can't join things!
@Laura
Wow this sounds great! . . . although doesn't that mean we have to sign into 7C to get the alert rather than just check our emails when out and about?
@MistyMagic Correct.
good bye old alert, i never knew you, (did i ?) 
@Laura So cool!
@Laura wohooooo!!!! I am so so excited about this new tool 
@Laura
Yay! Also, superficial question... are they going to be blue forever :(
@MonBon
I'd like to know the answer to this as well haha
Not entirely superficial. We have various kinds of information arriving in the same queue, and colour is the initial way we can distinguish between them before reading the words. There are a couple of issues, I would say.
First, using colour alone to convey meaning is poor design, as @john7ux will certainly know, because some people do not have the same colour vision that most of us have. To avoid disadvantaging people with such disabilities, it is normal to use icons in addition to colour for this kind of thing. Hundreds of icons are already loaded and available within the 7 Cups website, and it is a simple matter for a developer to attach icons to alerts.
Second, the alert delivery system doesn't scale. By that I mean, imagine in the future 7 Cups has 100 times the activity. Someone who logs in today to find 20 alerts might log in at a future time to find 2,000. A single alert list is no way to deal with this quantity of information. @Emily619 (below) is on to the same thing when asking for a notification history. People who previously relied on e-mail alerts could tag them as urgent, to-do-later, or whatever, and they have just lost that capability.
I understand that the latest update is intended to improve the sending end of the alert system, but it exposes the work that needs to be done on the receiving end.
@MonBon
@RarelyCharlie
I also noticed when they use the @ for us we aren't being told about every item on that forum page and have to scroll up and down a lot so we aren't missing folks so they don't think we are ignoring them. This is wasting a lot of time for me and others scrolling.
Yes, I have noticed that. I added an index to every forum page so I see links to all the latest posts, but when a thread has more than one page even that doesn't work.
Really, a "flat" forum is easier—where the posts are strictly in the order they were posted in, and the system can show you the latest unread post. Then no one misses anything.
@DanaMH
@RarelyCharlie
Yes a flat forum and a quote option so that it is easy to see which post is being replied to.
@RarelyCharlie
But since we know that will never work how is it going to be fixed to save us time?
Do we know it will never work? The database that stores forum posts has always stored them in sequence, so it would simply be a matter of displaying them in sequence, too.
The solution I use (a timeline down the side) is another possibility, but it's more complicated.
@DanaMH
@RarelyCharlie I think the point that resonates with me the most is that the alert disappears when we look at it. Could we make all alerts remain unless we X them out?
I imagine that would be quite simple to do.
@soulsings
@soulsings
some do disappear and some come back? There must be some organisation to them and also the colour coding may be linked?
@MistyMagic the ones in Black or Blue type stay. I have not yet found others that stay
On closer inspection, they don't seem to have have any specified colour at all. The blue we see is just the usual colour of links.
@MonBon
@Laura oh sweeeet update
@Laura
holy mac-a-ruuuunniiiiii
"Out with the old-In with the new"