How you can help
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Hello and thanks for helping us assess this latest feature on folkjam.org, groups. You've joined our beta testing group - thanks! We would like suggestions from you on how we can improve this feature, what you like about it, what you don't like and of course bug reports. If something looks wrong, please report it here. Open up a new thread for each issue. We still have some work we know we need to do, such as writing up help screens on how to use groups. :) Submitted by scott.mclewin on Sat, 2007/03/10 - 5:04pm
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Canada
January 9, 2007
Whenever and whatever I can and will ask the other members of Westman Jams to post as well. Only 2 so far have signed up, I think but I'll light a fire under them LOL
United States
March 23, 2006
What we are hoping to see are people starting to use groups to coordinate their existing jams, among other things. One feature we will add to groups is the ability to 'import' or associate the jams on the public side of the site with one or more groups.
If anybody in your area would find these tools valuable in building up a community around a jam they are starting/running having them open a group would be great. Something that this beta group does not demonstrate is how groups show up on the public jam maps, making it easy to find local area groups. This beta group is not pinned to a location.
United States
November 22, 2006
Thanks guys for building this. I can see it being real useful. Some quick comments in no particular order.
Adding the jam was a little awkward because of the very long pulldown list. It was a long way down to Illinois. At some point it would be nice to have that pulldown connected to the country. Perhaps that is already done if the group has a location?
I would like to be able to see private jams which are associated with groups to which I am subscribed when I view public jams also (and I am logged in).
Is it possible to do email to group members? My experience is that forums are not good ways of doing announcements. They are good for long-term discussion, and in this case for publishing things like playlists. But, perhaps you don't want to get into building email distribution lists.
Edit: I see after I have made my own group that "email" is an option already. I'll test it out.
...Well I wandered off to get more coffee, and got asked a few computer questions so I've lost my train of thought. It seems to me that I had more to say, but I'll just post this.
Erich
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http://vrteach.freepgs.com/banjo/
United States
March 23, 2006
We hope you and others will find it compelling. Looking for other pickers in forums hard, since posts in forums are organized by post time, not by location.
I agree that the province/region pulldown is far to long now. When we had two country coverage it was small. As we receive jams in new countries we enable provinces for those countries - and you can see where that leaves that particular form. I've posted an issue to our tracking queue to fix this and found a solution. It may take two or three weeks before you see a change, but this one will be fixed.
I would like to be able to see private jams which are associated with groups to which I am subscribed when I view public jams also (and I am logged in).
I presume you mean on the local jam map. That's an interesting one because of our caching strategies. Once we include per-user details on the local or national maps the effectiveness of our caches become far less.
Here is our plan on that though - let me know how this sits with you. Our longer term plan is to allow users to indicate which public events they participate in. Combining this information with the events from private groups, we will be adding a "My Jams" menu section for registered users that shows your map and your calendar based on your subscriptions. We are not even close to ready with this yet.
is it possible to do email to group members?
You discovered on your own that the answer is yes. Here is a follow-on question. We considered integrating groups with eazylm too, allowing people to respond to posts by emailing back. We decided it was going to be less work to do what we've done - where you receive updates via mail but must return to the site to respond. I think we are likely to stay with this route, but I thought I'd ask, what would vrteach do?
United States
November 22, 2006
Vrteach would probably look for easy ways out.
Perhaps a simple solution to the long province list is to have the country choice first, and then build the main form based on that. That first choice could be by a pull-down, or image map. Or maybe a two-tier pulldown by continent then country.
Vrteach:I would like to be able to see private jams which are associated with groups to which I am subscribed when I view public jams also (and I am logged in).
Scott:I presume you mean on the local jam map. That's an interesting one because of our caching strategies. Once we include per-user details on the local or national maps the effectiveness of our caches become far less.
It was just my initial assumption that the Local Jams map, which is my first view when I go to folkjam, would have the "private" jam I had added in my private group I set up in addition to the public one show up (if I was logged in). I think that this sort of personalization would increase the draw of this feature.
On the email thing, I think I would avoid trying to add full email support. You have plenty of other features to work with.
Do you think that having a place in a group profile for an announcement email address would be of use? As an example, it's pretty easy to set up google or yahoo email groups. If a jam or group organizer has one of these set up, then they could put the address for an announcement email list in the profile for the group, subscribe the necessary folkjam user to the group, and then folkjam could be configured to send out announcements (perhaps automatically?) based on upcoming events for the group. Too complicated? Maybe.
Erich
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http://vrteach.freepgs.com/banjo/
United States
March 23, 2006
You are right, that would make the feature even more compelling. Our thought was that the 'my jams' map (non-existant today) would cover for that. You appear to be telling me that the 'My jams' path is not quite going to cover here.
I gave this some thought last night and hit upon an idea, whereby I change the caching strategy to hold one cache for anonymous users and a unique cache for each user. I believe the cache is predominantly used when the same visitor repeatedly goes back to the front page, but I need to run stats before changing.
With that change blending the private jams into the front page map is not difficult. I'll need to change the group single session jam pin color to differentiate them.
Blending them into the list of upcoming events poses more of a challenge. I think I'd actually add a user's private jams (across all subscribed groups) as a small section above the public jams to account for that. The challenge has to do with keeping the queries efficient. I've just spent weeks building a custom index of the public events to speed up our maps and lists - between all the joins and the geospacial queries it was getting too expensive to build our displays.
United States
November 22, 2006
Our thought was that the 'my jams' map (non-existant today) would cover for that. You appear to be telling me that the 'My jams' path is not quite going to cover here.
A "my jams" map, might very well cover what I had in mind. Particularly if it is a "My Jams that I follow", not just "My Jams that I submitted". A sort of thing where a user can subscribe to public jams (not associated with a group..zzzt..overload).
I think I'll go play "I'll fly away".
Erich
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http://vrteach.freepgs.com/banjo/
United States
March 23, 2006
That's the plan. We need to get subscriptions to public jams in place first, which is something we'll do over the summer. Then "my jams" will be a map of every jam you have expressed interest in. It will have nothing to do with the jams you post (unless you then indicate that one is a favorite)
Go play.
United States
March 23, 2006
I agree. Putting the country first and then driving the population of the region/province from it is exactly where I want to go with this.
I need longer weekends.
United States
March 23, 2006
vrteach:/Do you think that having a place in a group profile for an announcement email address would be of use? As an example, it's pretty easy to set up google or yahoo email groups. If a jam or group organizer has one of these set up, then they could put the address for an announcement email list in the profile for the group, subscribe the necessary folkjam user to the group, and then folkjam could be configured to send out announcements (perhaps automatically?) based on upcoming events for the group. Too complicated? Maybe.
We discussed announcements in the planning and thought that we would use the forum and existing email subscriptions within the groups. I think I see that we missed a detail - where somebody might want announcements from the group admin but not the daily messages from the group. I'll think about how to pull that off.
As with many of these changes, progress on our end will be slow. Don't take that as ignoring you - I really appreciate the feedback. We only get a few hours a week to work the site, and as it grows more of that time is taken up with the administrative details that come with having more visibility.
United States
January 3, 2007
I just started a group for the TOTMC, and after making the first forum post (a welcomeing message), I have noticed that the line and paragraph breaks didn't work. I used no HTML coding, just periods, and enters. The message is one long paragraph, making it difficult to read. Is this something you are working on? The instructions say that returns and paragraphs are automatic.
Banjo Brad
www.PricklyPearMusic.net
United States
March 23, 2006
I am now. I've joined your group to see the problem and reproduced it in my development environment. Clearly a silly oversight on our part.
I'll have a fix up as soon as I can, today if my daughters keep napping, tomorrow if they wake up too soon. :)
Scott
United States
March 23, 2006
This here is why we run in beta for a while. That was such a silly problem for me to have missed in all these months of playing at this feature set too. Ah well.
Let me know what else you find.