Correction: there’s no delay issue. I’d forgotten that the group is now MF. Also missed Mark’s note that he changed the tag to “bug”. 

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 11:26 AM, J_Catlady wrote:

That message took roughly 10 minutes to appear either online or in email.

Not that bad considering that all new topics are now moderated per https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/23814

Duane

That message took roughly 10 minutes to appear either online or in email. Maybe the message delay problem is back.

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Mark,

This morning I sent an email to the support address, about a logged-in location in the Subscription Approval Notice not matching the member's location as stated in her questionnaire response. (I wanted to know what was going on, it was possibly not a bug, and it was inappropriate to post here as a bug since I had to send you the member's detailed information.) I was pleasantly surprised to see that the auto-acknowledgement is back. However, the acknowledgement didn't contain the text of the originally sent message, as it used to. That could make it difficult to locate these emails later, since now there is only the title to search on. Calling this "misc" since it's either a bug (if unintentional) or a suggestion (if intentional).

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

[Mod Note: Changed hashtag to #bug]

I'm still a newbie on groups.io but I have already found the need to scroll the 'Your Grouops' drop-down mildly irritating. Not that it's a serious problem, there are far too many seriously good features to be put off by a little scrolling :-)

My thought, but it may not help others with this concern, is that it might be useful to have (or to have an option to have) only groups listed in the drop-down and to have subgroups on a side menu from the group name. I only have a small number of groups, I appreciate that many others would see little benefit from such a change.

Malcolm.

Mark

 

Last week I changed how we fetched messages from the database, to make it more efficient. This changed how the Message # function worked. Previously, if you typed in a message number, that message would be positioned at the top of the returned page. After the change, it is not guaranteed to appear at the top of the page and most likely will appear in the middle of the page instead. I have set it so that it is now highlighted, with the blue vertical bar, so you should be able to locate it on the page.

 

I know this is not an ideal change. I made this change because the previous way of getting data from the database was becoming very inefficient, leading to slow page loading times. I had to fix it before it got worse and started affecting other aspects of the site.

Thanks. Yes, that works. Not ideal, as you say, because how is anyone to know to scroll down unless they're told to do so, but once one knows, it's fine. I note # of messages to reply to at my convenience, so use this function a lot. I'm sure others do too.

Again, we really appreciate all the hard work behind the scenes. So grateful for this service! We've just had the 20th anniversary of our very active group and the switch over to io went really smoothly.

Sarah

 

That makes sense. But how will you deal with the message list?

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Replying to wasn't the focus, but of course, options could be "to sender"  or "no replies" or to the "sent-to group" only.
subgroups seem too clunky/restrictive to simply send msgs to admins or the like.

For example, for whatever reason say a group has 4 lists (sometimes members changing), admins, renters, buyers, tire-kickers. 
A SG for each is not useful because it involved subscribing/unsubscribing, and there could be cross-listing (there could be two (but not the same) admins on each list, or there could be plain old members on 2 out of the 4 lists, and 2 on another list, and so on.

thx
K

Not clear how this would work. What would happen when one of those people replies to the message?
Suggest using a subgroup instead.
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Suggest a function, such that adding a #TAG such as #admin_only;  or #Alist_only -- that would limit/control to whom the message would be turned around (posting on the website is not addressed here.)  The msg would be turned around to only mods/owners or a wider use, those on a pre-defined member "list A", in this example.)

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 05:42 PM, Duane wrote:

I'm talking about the notice I get when someone joins a group that's not restricted.

Oh, gotcha. I misunderstood because you mentioned that you were not using the Pending Notice until recently. Since the Pending Notice only exists in a restricted group, I figured you had a restricted group but were not using the notice.
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 05:51 PM, J_Catlady wrote:

The information is included in the "Subscription Approval Notice" that you receive, regardless of whether or not you have an active "Pending Subscription Notice."

I'm not talking about the "Subscription Approval Notice" for restricted groups, I'm talking about the notice I get when someone joins a group that's not restricted.

Duane

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 01:46 PM, Duane wrote:

I just realized this morning (yeah, I'm slow sometimes) that it would be useful to include this information in the subscription application when a person joins via web.  I wasn't using the Pending Notice until yesterday, so hadn't really seen it before.

 The information is included in the "Subscription Approval Notice" that you receive, regardless of whether or not you have an active "Pending Subscription Notice." 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Mark et al,

Sorry, late to the huddle here, but I wanted to hopefully contribute something as well, as I really like this live experiment we are participating in.

Regarding unnecessary time spent on beta, I agree with others who suggested delegation; delegate the really unnecessary (for you) stuff to one or two folks, like the moderating pending suggestions part, so you can concentrate on the approving pending suggestions part.  Someone to do level-1 stuff, either 1-2 trustworthy volunteers if you found them, or paid, depending on how involved the assistance duties will be.  I don't know how much time you spend moderating & approving topics on beta, but if quite some, maybe at the minimum, delegate the weeding out/editing/merging/searching/etc stuff, leaving you a more or less clean pending queue for you to go through and approve stuff.  MF was a good step towards the setup but it still requires human QA-like intervention.  Maybe get the helpers to also tidy-up and moderate the group as well, whatever it may be that will free up your time from stuff that someone else can do.

I like the concept behind your idea of the two hashtag-step process, but maybe go at it a bit differently, using already mentioned ideas as inspiration; leave #suggestion as it is now as the first step hashtag, it's easily recognizable, well-known, and already has baggage, so just let it be what it is.  Then create additional official "bucket" (stage) mod hashtags, one of them to serve as the second hashtag in your idea, maybe #acknowledged, #received, or whatever; you already have two of those bucket hashtags already, #fixed and #done, and are using them as a notification/tracking tool already, so take that a little further, add strategically-named #bucket/stage hashtags and append-use them on the #suggestion thread.  This should greatly extend beta's notification/tracking capabilities.

Anyway, continuing, when some suggestion merits going to your second hashtag step, which I presume means no more talk-talk as it's now in my court, lock the thread and add the bucket hashtag for it; it's still a #suggestion, but now it's officially #acknowledged and awaiting its fate.  And if you were to add a few strategic #process hashtags, depending on how much info you want to provide, you can create quite good tracking capability and let users know of the status of a suggestion during its entire lifetime:  it goes from #suggestion #<1ststage> to #suggestion #<next_stage> (and/or) #<whatever-process>, ..., all the way to #suggestion #done.

Finally, regarding subgroups, in this case they may be better for using them as announcement lists, but also in the occasion if it is something beta-related but you'd like to group-discuss somewhere else besides beta.  I also agree that normal suggestion discussion stay on beta.

Cheers,
Christos

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 03:41 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

Well, that was dumb.

Whew, glad to finally see something to prove that you're only human! ;>)  I still have a lot of admiration for you, and probably always will.

Duane

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 11:42 PM, Chris Jones wrote:

I know that this isn't quite what you were saying but there is a catch if an owner uses a temporary change in their Display Name for something like this. Samuel; in your case if you changed your D/N on one of your groups to Group Owner prior to uploading a File or Photo (or posting a message) then indeed whatever you do will be attributed to Group Owner. However, if you then change your D/N back to Samuel Murray then the attribution applied to whatever you just did will promptly change from Group Owner back to Samuel Murray.

Yes, I believe I said so in my post.  This is consistent with how many online forums work -- for example, on forums where my picture is displayed next to my post, on most forums it always shows my most recent picture (i.e. a post made 20 years ago will display my current face, not my face from 20 years ago), which is quite unfortunate.  So, similarly, I can understand that it is at least not *inconsistent* with global online forum usage that if someone were to change their display name from Miss Robinson to Mrs Robinson, then all files that they uploaded when they were still a Miss are then shown to have been uploaded by the Mrs.

Samuel

On Jan 26, 2020, at 9:01 PM, JohnF via Groups.Io <johnf1686=yahoo.com@groups.io> wrote:

This is a bit jarring for me the way I use Message # also.

When there are a lot of messages to read in a single group online, I like to switch to Expanded mode in Date Ascending order, so I can just leisurely scroll through them with the Page Down key. Whenever I hit the bottom of the page, then I go to the next page of messages.

The way I accomplish this is:
1. Find the message number i want to start with. As an example, I tried message number 23876 in the beta group.
2. Click on "Date" to switch to Date Ascending order. This brings up message 1.
3. Switch on Expanded mode, which shows full messages.
4. Type the message number in the Message # field, 23876 in my example case.

It used to bring up 23876 as the top message. Now it brings up 23865 as the top message. The actual message 23876 is on the page, but it is not highlighted in any way, because I'm in Expanded mode.

Still inconvenient, but rather than scrolling, try:
5. Use your browser's Find function (Command / Control and F keys) to again search for the the message number, i.e. 23876

Samuel,

What Chris said, create two separate email accounts, one of the Group Owner the other for the Group Moderator, join them to your group, elevate them to owner and mod (or both owners), which can also serve as your backup accounts to the group just in case, then use whichever account for the specific task, so it will show what name you want.  And use those accounts through a different web browser, so this way you can always stay logged in with your personal owner account in your current browser, it makes admin work like this easier that way instead of logging in and out in the same browser.

Cheers,
Christos

This is a bit jarring for me the way I use Message # also.

When there are a lot of messages to read in a single group online, I like to switch to Expanded mode in Date Ascending order, so I can just leisurely scroll through them with the Page Down key. Whenever I hit the bottom of the page, then I go to the next page of messages.

The way I accomplish this is:
1. Find the message number i want to start with. As an example, I tried message number 23876 in the beta group.
2. Click on "Date" to switch to Date Ascending order. This brings up message 1.
3. Switch on Expanded mode, which shows full messages.
4. Type the message number in the Message # field, 23876 in my example case.

It used to bring up 23876 as the top message. Now it brings up 23865 as the top message. The actual message 23876 is on the page, but it is not highlighted in any way, because I'm in Expanded mode.

If it has to show 23865 at the top for the sake of the database, what I would suggest in my case is to automatically scroll down so that 23876 is shown on my screen, so I don't have to work to find it. Then I can Page Down as normal, and I could even Page Up if my message isn't the one at the top. I'll still get to the bottom and go to the next page of messages, which is what I'm used to already.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks,
JohnF

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 09:46 PM, Samuel Murray wrote:

I understand that some group owners register a temporary group owner profile specifically to avoid this sort of thing from happening when they prepare their groups.

I know that this isn't quite what you were saying but there is a catch if an owner uses a temporary change in their Display Name for something like this. Samuel; in your case if you changed your D/N on one of your groups to Group Owner prior to uploading a File or Photo (or posting a message) then indeed whatever you do will be attributed to Group Owner. However, if you then change your D/N back to Samuel Murray then the attribution applied to whatever you just did will promptly change from Group Owner back to Samuel Murray.

The only way around this (currently) is to have a permanent alter ego with a different email address (and thus by definition a different account) with the Display Name of Group Owner.

Chris