WiserEarth Governance
Rights, Obligations, and Relationships of All WiserEarthlings
This group emerged out of the WiserEarth Partners meeting held on December 13. Our intention is to open this group up to all that join and participate in WiserEarth.
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Dec 17, 2007
Updated: Sep 17, 2009
Membership: Invitation Only
Semi-Private
December 16th, 2008
You may have noticed some new changes on WiserEarth Groups!
We have recently added new features to the WiserEarth group, meaning administrators can now:
1. Drag and drop directly onto their group homepage
2. Rename the titles of their sections directly on their group homepage
3. Find the menu items more easily by clicking a single button in the upper right corner
4. Easily add a new section by clicking "Add new module" link in the Admin tools
December 15th, 2008
WiserEarth has a page on Wikipedia, please visit and feel free to edit it.
November 25th, 2008
Together we are raising $5,000 to fuel WiserEarth into 2009. Join the dedicated community of financial supporters who together ensure that WiserEarth can serve the movement of movements for years to come. Learn more.
November 24th, 2008
You can now add WiserEarth search into the search bar of your Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 7.
November 21st, 2008
Announcing a new internship position with WiserEarth! Learn more about our general WiserEarth Internship.
November 2nd, 2008
You may have noticed something new at WiserEarth: Introducing WiserEarth 'Solutions'!
In our recent user survey, 85% of you asked for a way to share and search for best practices. So by popular demand we give you WiserEarth Solutions - a collaboration tool that allows people and organizations to describe and catalogue solutions to the environmental and social issues we face.
WiserEarth has always been a reflection of the ingenuity and innovation emerging from the environmental and social justice movement. WiserEarth Solutions is the next level of global knowledge-sharing. It is a way for you to share with others what is working in your field.So if you come across a well respected practice, whether it is in the form of a pdf, powerpoint, website etc., you can now document it for others to find and use.
What's different about WiserEarth Solutions is that you can catalogue not just the practice itself, but who consults on it, who practices it, and who funds it - a big plus for someone thinking of implementing a Solution. Other WiserEarthlings can also rate the quality of these solutions and make recommendations. Overtime, you can generate a feedback loop of improvements.
We encourage you to share Solutions that you have personally seen be successful. We want to help others implement these practices - so it is best to have them documented like recipes-- with clear step-by-step instructions. For an example of a solution, click here.
To get started, you can view the Tutorial, or read the FAQs.
Be a part of the Solution!
October 30, 2008
Thanks to your helpful suggestions, we have recently made a series of changes to WiserEarth Groups. Our hope is that these changes will make Groups more intuitive and easier to use. Here's what you might notice if you are an administrator of a group:
1. The layout of the admin tools and the group tabs are redesigned - you can view a short tutorial on these changes here.
2. Any group you now join will be automatically added to your Watchlist updates
3. You can now upload files directly to a sub-folder (if they exist)
4. Under 'Sent Invitations', both internal and external invites are now merged into one list. Sent invitations can now be sorted, and invitations can be canceled or edited. You also have the ability to invite a person multiple times to a group.
To share more ideas or ask for further help visit WiserEarth Group Support.
October 13th, 2008
WiserEarth will be at the following conferences, come and see us at our booth:
ConEx (Conservation Learning Exchange), Vancouver
"Blogs, Wikis & Virtual Realities: New Media Tools for Conservationists"
Tuesday, October 14 from 9:30-11am, PT and Wednesday, October 15 from 1:30-3pm, PT.
Bioneers, San Raphael: We will be located at the computer lab right by the bookstore.
October 2nd, 2008
Thanks to the community's suggestions, WiserEarth Ratings are here! You can now rate any organizations or other information on WiserEarth. This gives you the opportunity to identify content that you feel is particularly valuable to the greater community. Here's the scoop:
-Ratings are based on a 5-star rating system, which calculates the average number of stars. Simply click the rating box in the upper-right corner of the item you are rating. You will then be invited to select the stars and add your comment.
-You can rate anything on WiserEarth other than groups and people
-You can rate an item (organization, events, resources etc.) as often as you want, but it will only count as one rating
-You can change your rating whenever you like, but only your most recent rating counts.
To learn more about ratings, check out our FAQ section.
Have fun!
September 30th, 2008
Thanks to the Earth Portal, you can now find cutting-edge, reputable articles and resources from the scientific community on WiserEarth. Check out the Climate Change portal, the Water and Sustainable Development portal, and the Energy Policy portal. If you are interested in learning more, contact Maggie Surface.
September 1st, 2008
- WiserEarth is becoming increasingly international! The site generated visits in August from 180 countries/territories and 48% of all visitor visits were from outside the US.
- August saw 754 members join the community.
- There are over 109,212 organizations, 4,282 community resources, 369 jobs, 274 events.
- There are 116 discussions on WiserEarth covering a total of 489 topics
- In August, 55 groups were added bringing the total to 784 groups.
August 21st, 2008
We are pleased to annouce two new team members on WiserEarth!
Bowo is now joining WiserEarth as Chief Editor, and one of his main responsibility will be to manage the community of WiserEarth Editors. Along with welcoming new editors and helping to get them familiarized with WiserEarth, Bowo will ensure editors understand their roles and feel empowered to make contributions across the site. Bowo has already been doing similar tasks in a previous volunteer capacity on WiserEarth, and we feel very lucky to have him onboard!
Shawn is our new user interface (UI) designer! Shawn has done some very fine work for Global Oneness Project, among others, and brings his talented expert eye in web, mobile and application design to WiserEarth. He will work directly with the development team, turning the great ideas and suggestions from the community into visual mockups that our developers can use right away.
Welcome to both Bowo and Shawn!
August 17th, 2008
We are excited to announce the expansion of the WiserEarth organization 's directory to include for-profit and government entities, a change we’ve made in response to the community’s requests.
You can now add the profiles of business or government that are creating lasting change in the environmental and social justice fields. Please review the WiserEarth principles and guidelines before entering a new organization's page
August 15th, 2008
The First WiserEarth widget was created a few days ago by bowo,
one of WiserEarth Active Editor: thank you Bowo. You can now display
the featured organizations, events, groups from the WiserEarth homepage
on other sites. For more details, click here.
August 1st, 2008
--> The position is closed. WiserEarth seeks an fulltime online community managerto join our WiserEarth team based in Sausalito, California. WiserEarth is a community networking forum for civil society, the private sector, and government to collaborate, define, address, and solve social and environmental problems.
July 25th, 2008
Network relationships started as a community suggestion by
Angus Parker, who noticed that the list of choices from the drop-down
menu weren't always fitting of relationships a person would have.
After taking a look at the complete list of relationships, we've since
gone in and cleaned out the ones that didn't make sense, and added in
more appropriate relationships. It's step 1 in a long-term effort to
improve out network connectivity features. Eventually, we plan on
allowing users to search the database based on relationship types, such
that you can find all those people tagged as mentors or organizations
flagged as funders. This should add a much more robust and rich
feature to the networks on WiserEarth.
Other changes we made
were to improve the welcome email to new users, by adding a more
personal touch to the emails. We also updated our forums feature by
providing the "Post a Reply" link at the bottom of the page. That way,
users who have sorted the forum replies from first to last, won't have
to scroll all the way back up the page to post a comment.
Next
up - for-profit and government agency inclusion into the WiserEarth
directory. For an ongoing discussion of the features we'll be adding,
and to jump in and offer your thoughts and suggestions, visit the suggestion page here.
July 19, 2008
Thanks to the requests from our community, we will be expanding the directory to include sustainable businesses and public agencies. This change will take place in the next month.
July 16th, 2008
Search Engine Optmization (SEO)
SEO has been a project
long overdue for WiserEarth. In short, it's about improving your
search engine rankings so that people using Google, Yahoo, etc will
more likely see your website appear at the top of the search results.
It becomes quite important, when you learn that the majority of any web
browsing starts with a search query, and that most people don't venture
past the first 10 search results.
For this project, we worked on
cleaning up some HTML coding that was hurting our search rankings. We
updated pages with more appropriate page titles, and we also made sure
that each page has a unique meta-description for the search crawler to
take a snapshot of. In the past, we had used a one-size-fits-all
description, which limited the amount of keyword matching. Kudos to
our developer Rehan for working on these tickets, and for also for
pointing out a lot of these issues that could be easily fixed.
The
last piece we tackled came with help from Gary at GetToTheTop.com, who
generously donated his company's services to help WiserEarth's search
rankings. Gary provided us with a sitemap that we could upload to
Google and Yahoo. The sitemap is effectively a table of contents, and
gives the search crawler a clear map on how to crawl your site. It
makes a tremendous difference, and we've already noticed some of the
benefits - our unique visitors to the site jumped 700 clicks in one
day, which is a great sign of the benefits of working on SEO.
Next up - network relationships, and how to clean up nonsensical entries and replace them with ones that are actually effective.
July 10th, 2008
Our latest set of changes - many of these were community
suggestions, so we're thrilled to see their ideas come to life on the
site!
1. Additional buttons on the editing toolbar (suggested by bowo)
- we've added some much needed and much requested buttons to our HTML
editor. Users can now choose Font Family and Font Color, as well as
insert in an Anchor and Indent text. We also included this nifty
"Paste from Word" feature, which will clean up weird formatting issues
when copying and pasting from a Word document. Try it out!
2. Forums (suggested by johncoate)
- replies can now be sorted ascending or descending. Since we started
WiserEarth, our comments have always been sorted where the newest post
rose to the top. That follows conventional commenting that you'll see
on blogs and websites, but it doesn't work quite so well for a
discussion forum. Forum topics usually have it sorted by oldest to
newest, such that the first opening post is at the top. It allows
users to scroll down and follow the discussion accordingly. We've now
offered the option to sort a discussion thread in either direction, so
that our users can choose to view it however which way they choose.
3. Watchlist clustering (suggested by angusparker)
- We noticed that times, the sheer number of edits to a page can
quickly overwhelm a watchlist email report. To help address this
issue, if you have set your watchlist to daily or weekly batches, we'll
consolidate consecutive edits by someone. So, if a person has edited
an article 5 times, it'll no longer send out 5 sentences all saying the
same thing. Instead, it'll group all those changes together into one
sentence and put a number at the end to indicate the number of edits.
4.
Forums (general community suggestion) - a few community members pointed
out that when a discussion topic spills over two pages or more, the
breadcrumb links to return back to the original topic gets lost. We've
since made sure those links stay persistent regardless of which page
you're on. It should allow our users to jump back to other topics in
the forum.
5. Geographic entries - For a number of our entries
in the database, they curiously had a longitude/latitude of (0,0),
which meant that it show them having a location off the coast of
Africa. Likely, these entries didn't get "geo-coded" correctly when we
entered them into our database. We've gone ahead and reset the
geographic information for these entries, so they should now show the
proper coordinates on a map.
6. Watchlist alerts (suggested by jonramer)
- We wanted to make sure that the default view for seeing your
watchlist activity report was the new improved version. Jon found a
few inconsistencies across the site, where we were still sending people
to the old version. We've cleaned it up, and all users should view the
new and improved view by default.
Beyond that, we had some
general site improvements to slip into this release cycle. We
significantly optimized the query it runs when pulling information
about the 100,000+ organizations in our database, so that should speed
browsing and searching significantly. We also fixed a few typos around
the site, and made some formatting changes to our welcome email. Next
up - we'll be working on including For-profit organizations and
business on WiserEarth!
July 2nd, 2008
TinyMCE updated!
TinyMCE refers to the WYSIWYG (What You See Is
What You Get) toolbar that we use across the site. It's the toolbar
that allows you to bold fonts, insert youtube videos, upload pictures,
create tables, etc. However, some of these features would not work
right with the new Firefox 3.0 browser, so we quickly downloaded the
latest update of TinyMCE that addressed these issues. With over 8
million downloads of Firefox 3 in the first day alone, we felt it was
important to make sure the new browser was supported fully throughout
WiserEarth.
July 1st, 2008
No-reply@wiserearth.org
We noticed that on occasion, some of our
users reply to the message alerts that come into their email, thinking
they can reach their fellow contact on WiserEarth in that manner. The
reply-to emails for message alerts is no-reply@wiserearth.org, and
we've updated it so that it'll send an automatic reply back to the user
if they've mistakenly replied to it. That way, they will know they
need to come to the site and hit the "Send a Message" tool if they wish
to contact the person instead.
Inbox Redesign
We've added
some slight amendments to the inbox feature for WiserEarth users.
We've bolded certain sections, expanded the number of messages shown to
10 messages, and provided "jump" links to allow a user to quickly
scroll to other messages in the past. These small but useful details
should hopefully provide a better user experience.
June 26th, 2008
New User Registration process updated!
We reworked the new user
sign-up process around the end of May to make it easier for visitors to
get a WiserEarth account. Since then, we've gone back and tweaked the
process a bit, by allowing new users to choose their Areas of Focus
selections during the sign-up process. After filling out their
username and password information, the second page will allow a user to
choose both their profile picture and their Areas of Focus selections.
As before, this step is optional, so users can always just click on the
"Finish" button and head on into the rest of the site.
June 18th, 2008
Our watchlist has been significantly upgraded to include much more informative updates, and to better point our users to where the change has happened. In our previous version of the watchlist, the email notification was pretty bare-bones - it didn't really tell our users what had changed and who had made the change. With our latest boost to the watchlist, you'll see full sentences that describe what's changed on the pages and groups you've watchlisted. Example:
Articles:
jonramer posted a comment for article: Including For-Profit and Public Agencies on WE +2.
peggy posted a comment for article: Including For-Profit and Public Agencies on WE +2.
Group: WiserEarth Suggestions
peggy posted a comment for article: Option to reveal and see other's online status +5
bowo posted a comment for article: Option to reveal and see other's online status +5
Group: Suggestions
bowo posted a new reply in discussion topic: Networking the networks
bowo posted a new reply in discussion topic: See name when rolling over photo
We hope this will do a much better job of keeping users informed of changes across the site.
May 29th, 2008
We just released a new set of improvements across the site. Pulling in suggestions from the community, as well as adhering to our technical roadmap, here's an overview of what's changed across the site:
- We noticed that there was some odd spacing when sending out messages, especially to group members. We've fixed it so that messages will be spaced out exactly as you typed it.
- We also added in a full toolbar for messages, allowing users and group members to insert images, hyperlinks, and font formatting to liven up their messages. (Unfortunately, youtube videos won't play properly in messages)
- For groups, the main logo is now linked, so that if a user clicks on it, it will take them back to the homepage
- When editing a a comment, we've renamed the "Edit comment" to "Save changes" - suggested by Angus Parker
- We added "Manage" to the "Related Groups" section, allowing admins to remove groups from the list, and to also set a group as a "sticky" - suggested by Bowo
- We added a few new relationship types to the Network, including "client", "consultant", and "funder" - suggested by Angus Parker
- Areas of Focus Portal Pages - we re-orderd the sidebar so that the progression is consistent across the site (organizations, people, groups, etc)
- We added more options in selecting the type of Events, allowing users to choose "Award" and "Other" - requested posted in Suggestions forum
May 21st, 2008
For our latest release, we focused on improving and simplifying the new user sign-up process. We've shortened it to a 2-part process - fill out your username details and select an image, and that's it. We do encourage users to fill out their Areas of Focus selections as well as provide more information in their about section once they are complete, but we also wanted to make sure users could browse and use the site right away.
So, a quick list of the changes:
- Shortened new user sign-up process
- Groups - easier joining process after a new account has been created
- Groups - the titles for Events were being cut-off prematurely, so we've lengthened their width
- Bugs - the "Save" button would freeze in Internet Explorer 6/7 at times, so that's been resolved
May 15th, 2008
We've just released a new batch of features around the site! Many of these ideas came from our Suggestions
group, so I highly encourage users to post to that group if they have
ideas they'd like to see implemented on WiserEarth. We can't get
around to all of them, but we do try to include at least one with every
update to the site. Many thanks to Bowo and Angus for their work in
developing these suggestions!
1. Comments can now be edited
within 30 minutes of posting - as requested by the community, we are
now allowing our users the ability to make changes or corrections to a
comment within 30 minutes. This should allow for some quick fixes
without the risk of people removing comments that might affect the
structure of a discussion.
2. Send a friend request (suggested by Sheri Herndon)
- A suggestion brought up in our WiserEarth Suggestion group, we are
now providing a dialog box for users to type in a message when asking
someone to become part of their network.
3. Groups (initiated by Tori Jacobs)
- bulletin boards each have their own revision history. What does this
feature does is it saves a copy of each change to a bulletin board. If
a group administrator makes a mistake, they can always click on "Show
History" and choose to return to a earlier revision.
4.
Groups - Admins can choose to be notified anytime a new member joins.
Previously, admins were only notified if a visitor applied or was
referred to the group. Now, we'll allow admins to choose to be
notified anytime someone has joined their group.
5. Groups (suggested by Tori Jacobs)-
"Join Group" buttons moved to the "home" tab. By popular request,
we've moved the links to join a group to the "home" tab, and also made
that the default page that a user will see when clicking on a group.
6. Network (suggested by Angus Parker)
- Anything created by a user becomes part of their network. So if a
user has posted a job, created an event listing, or added a new entry
for an organization, that will now automatically go into their network.
7.
Bugs - we also fixed a few mishaps around the site. Users who've
filled out their about section will no longer get a reminder message.
We've also fixed some image uploading issues, as well as some search
results appearing multiple times.
April 28th, 2008
Some cool new features and a few changes on WiserEarth:
1.
Multiple Bulletin Boards - Group administrators can now drag and drop
as many bulletin boards as needed into their group. Bulletin boards
are really just blank html canvases, and can be used in any way
possible. You could potentially cover your entire group page with
bulletin boards, and customize each one to showcase different kinds of
content. See the tutorial if you'd like to learn more.
2.
Stickies - the ability to keep things at the top of a list. Stickies
is a term used in a lot of forums, but basically it means that you can
set something to always be at the top of the list. This allows group
admins to keep important things, like an interesting discussion topic
or an Frequently Asked Questions page to always stay visible. Any item
that has been set as a "sticky" will have a yellow thumbtack icon.
Check out our tutorial to see how this works.
3.
Group membership roles - we've simplified group roles to just two types
- administrators and members. Members will now have access to edit the
bulletin board, send a message to other people in the group, clean up
content on the homepage, and edit the public description of the group
in the "About" tab.
4. Files & Photos tab - we've moved
the file library module into a new tab, called "Files & Photos".
That should separate the files from being lost in the page.
5.
Events - searching will now bring up only upcoming or ongoing events.
We'll soon also refine this so that you can search for events by date.
April 22nd
Happy Earth Day!
April 12th, 2008
WiserEarth has a booth at the Green Festival in Seattle, come and see us!
April 8th, 2008
A bit of a delay in getting word out on our latest release, but
Release 14's fixes and feature enhancements are now up on WiserEarth.
It was a relatively short release, but has some pretty useful
improvements made site-wide.
1. "Add" content link available on
groups homepage - On your group homepage, admins and members will
notice an "Add" link at the top right of each content module, next to
the "Create" link. If they click on it, they will be taken to a new
screen where they can search for existing content to be displayed on
their group's homepage. This should make it much easier to link to
content.
2. Ability to connect to existing groups! -
Previously, you could only connect your group to one that was created
through your group's homepage. We have now added the ability to search
for existing groups and connect them to yours.
3. Ability to
embed videos, pictures into comments and discussion forums. - We've
added a more full-featured toolbar to our comments and forum postings,
allowing members to post much more content.
4. Internal
messages - URLs are now hyperlinked. When reading messages in your
inbox (not through your email), any urls will be hyperlinked and active
for you to click on.
Release 15 will address some search issues, as well as some usability fixes we'd like to shore up around the website.
April 2nd, 2008
The Natural Capital Institute released a generic version of the
software that they built for the wiserearth.org site. The software was
released as open source under the GPL 3.0 license, which allows anyone
to use, modify, or share the software without any restrictions. It was
released under the name 'WiserPlatform', and can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform .
The
WiserPlatform can be used to create web sites that manage complex
relationships between different entity types. It includes built-in
social networking and groupware functionality. Anyone implementing the
platform can define and configure their own entity types and taxonomy
for categorizing data on their site. The platform allows users to add
and edit information using a rich-text wiki editor.
March 28th, 2008
We just completed our latest batch of fixes and changes to the website. Release 13 had the following new developments:
1.
Folders for file uploads! - Now users can create folders to organize
their files. Subfolders can also be created, and users can move files
from any folder they choose to. This should greatly help groups and
users who have large files to upload to WiserEarth, but are seeking a
way to organize them.
2. User control over comments - After
hearing from multiple community members who wanted greater control over
their profile, we now allow users to remove comments as they deem fit
on their profile.
3. Groups frame feature revised - We had
heard that the way users had to "remain" within a group were confusing,
especially if they were trying to navigate to other parts of the site.
The group banner will still stay on top of the group, but if a user
clicks on links, they won't be forced to view the rest of the site
within the group frame. Also, we'll provide a link on the upper left
corner to "return" to the group.
4. Link colors - We recently
turned on the ability for links to change color after you've clicked on
them, which helps our users see which links they've already visited.
However, we noticed that some parts of the site looked odd with this
features, so we've re-tooled this feature to limit the color changing
to just certain parts of the site.
5. Jobs - We instituted an
expiration policy for jobs. Any job posting over 60 days old will be
moved off to an "expired" tab, but we will send out a notification
email to the poster. The email will contain a "re-list" feature, which
will allow the person to repost the job for another 60 days. This will
help keep job postings on WiserEarth current and more accurate of
actual openings.
6. AoF - Areas of Focus listings now include
statistics for groups, so you can see how many groups have tagged
themselves with a particular Area of Focus.
7. Comment box - A
suggestion from the community, we've expanded the comment box to 12
lines, which should provide greater visibility when writing longer
comments.
We also had our usual bevy of bug fixes, and slight to our spam monitoring features. Many of these ideas came from our Suggestions for WiserEarth group, which has given us great insight into how our users are interacting with WiserEarth, and what we can do to help improve their experience.
March 14th, 2008
Another set of fixes and improvements is up on our website! Release 12 had the following changes:
New Features:
1. Action Bar - We have a re-tooled "action
bar" on the right side. This should make more clear the action links
available to users on a page, such as adding to a watchlist, adding to
a network or to one of the user's groups. The new status messages
should also make it more clear when an action has been taken.
2.
Report Spam features - Users will have a link at the bottom of emailed
internal message to report spam, or if they go to their inbox, they'll
see a "report spam" link in between "reply" and "delete". Clicking on
that link sends an update to our Admin Spam Report, which our staff
will actively monitor to catch spammers.
3. De-activated users
- after de-activation, users can still view the comments left on the
page, and add in additional comments. This will allow admins to
explain why the user was de-activated, as well as keep a running log of
what happened to this profile.
4. Join groups - we realized we
had left out a link for people who were already members of wiserearth
to sign-in to, so we've added that back in on the About page of a group.
5.
We added the option to choose "other" for many of the "type" drop down
menus across the site. That way, users aren't pigeon-holed into
choosing something that they're not.
6. Events on the homepage
should now only reflect active listings, not events that have already
happened in the past. This will give our users a much more accurate
count of what's upcoming.
Bugs we fixed!
1. Comment box - a few users reported that the cursor would jump out of position at times, so we've fixed that issue
2.
LInks - new and already clicked on - the colors of links on our site
will now change colors if you've already clicked on it. That way,
users will be better able to see which links they've already visited
3. Timestamp issues for a forum topic has been corrected
4. We addressed some TinyMCE issues. In particulary, the default spacing tag is now back to <br> instead of <p>
5.
Areas of Focus selection - We noticed that if there was a validation
error when creating a new entity profile (org/job/event/etc), the Areas
of Focus selections would not save correctly. We've fixed that issue
and the selection process should be much more forgiving.
For our next release (Release 13), we'll be working on improving our jobs feature. Stay tuned.
March 5th, 2008
Some of you may be wondering how we implement word-processing features like "bold", "italics", "font size", etc into the toolbar that's available when you edit the "About" sections. It's all thanks to the magic of TinyMCE, which is what web developers call a "WYSIWYG" tool. WYSIWYG is an acronym that stands for "What You See Is What You Get", meaning that changes you make to an html web page will show up as you have laid it out. There are no perfect WYSIWYG tools - not all of them work as advertised, but they tend to make HTML editing much more accessible to the average user. Best of all, TinyMCE is an open source software offerred freely to any website to use.
With Release 11, we upgraded our existing version of TinyMCE to version 3.0, which should eliminate some nagging bugs we had with the toolbar. It'll also allow us to eventually offer more formatting and linking options for comments and discussion forums.
But what I'd like to draw your attention to is this very nifty file upload progress meter we just implemented. Previously, when uploading a file, you didn't have much feedback as to the completion rate, nor would it tell you beforehand if the file exceeded our size limit. It could lead to a very frustrating upload experience, particularly because you had to wait till the full file was uploaded before our server could check the file size.
For our File Upload feature, we now have a progress meter that shows your completion rate. It will also check beforehand to make sure your file falls within our file size limit, and will notify our users if it does not.
For groups, we now have an outbox for sent messages. Group administrators and editors who have used the mass messaging feature will now have an option to "View Sent Messages", and be able to look up what they have already sent to their group members.
One last note - for those who might be experiencing a javascript error, that's partly due to the new changes we implemented on the site. This error can be fixed by refreshing your browser's cache, which is done by pressing Control Key + Refresh (F5) on a PC, or Command Key (Apple Key) + Refresh (F5) on a Mac. Depending on your browser, there may be different methods of doing so. Contact support@wiserearth.org if you come across any difficulties.
February 25th, 2008
File uploads are here! Our latest technical release cycle, Release
10, had over 35 technical tickets that improved features across our
site, but the most requested and most noticeable change is our addition
of the File Upload feature.
Now, for just about every
feature on our website, whether it's an organization profile, job
posting, event listing, or group content, you can upload files, tag
them with keywords and a description, and allow others to download
these files. We've set the file size limit to be comfortable 50mb per
file, to make room for podcasts, mp3 audio files, video files, or
really huge PDF reports.
Other noticeable fixes that are part of Release 10:
RSS feeds for topics -
As
part of our experimental try with RSS feeds, now forums topics
available! Look for the RSS icon in a discussion forum, and by
clicking on it, you can add that feed to your RSS feeder, or turn it
into a live bookmark that will automatically update if any activity has
registered in the topic. Check it out - it's a cool feature, and
complements the watchlist in many ways.
Internal messages -
clicking reply includes the message received. Basically, when you
click reply to a message, the text of the message will show up in your
reply, to better remind your message recipient what was the context of
the message that you're replying to. It works just like email.
My groups drop-down menu -
For those users who have join many groups, the drop-down menu will now
feature a vertical scrollbar if your list of groups is very long.
Users can now scroll down the list of groups to access the ones listed
at the bottom.
Searching for users by full names - we've
tweaked the search engine to also check the full name of a user, rather
than just the user name. This will improve the accuracy of search
results.
User De-Activation - to help curb spam, user
accounts will now be de-activated immediately once the action is taken
by an administrator. If any user is suspected of sending spam, we will
be able to stop them on the spot.
Comments - We made some
revisions to access to private comments. Previously, if a comment was
flagged for review, both WE editors and administrators could view these
comments and take action. However, since some of these comments are
flagged in a private group, we decided to restrict access to just WE
administrators (as opposed to group administrators/editors).
We also
made some improvements to the comment box. Now, if a user hasn't typed
anything in it, the post comment button won't be active, preventing
users from accidentally sending in comments with nothing in the field.
Once a user starts typing in the comment box, the "post comment" button
will become active.
Another improvement we made to comments was to
accommodate long strings of text. If a user posts a long url or
something that stretches beyond the boundary of the comment box, a
horizontal scroll bar will appear and users can scroll left and right
to read the rest of the comment.
Group mass messages - To
help make it easier for users to jump to a group, the group name that
appears in the footer of group messages will be hyperlinked. Users can
just click on it and jump directly to the group.
Group admins have a new tutorial
- If you're logged in and go visit a group that you're an administrator
of, you'll see a link to the right of "admin tools" that says "Group
Admin Tutorial". We set up this tutorial as a 5 step tutorial,
explaining to admins all the features available to them and what
tips/ideas they can use to better help the group grow.
Member Referral groups
- We realized we had left out the "member referral" button when
updating our groups the last time around. Now, a member can click on
the "About" tab and there'll be a blue button up top that they can
click on to refer a friend to the group.
We also had a bevy of
bug fixes, including cancel membership fixes, uploading images
improvements, and a few other issues across the site that is now
hopefully laid to rest.
Upcoming for the next release (Release
11) - an upgrade to our toolbar options when editing the "About
Section", and archiving sent messages for group mass messages.
February 11th, 2008
We have just been hit with our first major wave of spam attacks,
primarily from 3 users - angel4Love, gukama, and norahkofia. These
three users created accounts quite recently and sent messages to over
100 WiserEarth members. Luckily, the response from the community has
been tremendous. Everyone has rallied around and posted notifications
to the WiserEarth team, as well as hosting discussions and wikipages to
warn others of these fraudulent emails. All 3 users have had their
accounts de-activated, though some residual messages may still go
through. We urge that anyone who has received these messages to simply
delete them. We've also compiled a record of their messages, so that our users can always see what the messages were about.
We're
also considering preventative measures, but we don't want to hamstring
our user base simply because of a few bad apples. But, if you have
ideas, please feel free to send them to support@wiserearth.org. But so
far, we've been amazed at the collective unity of the community in
response to these spammers - what great spirit!
January 28, 2008
We just improved a few of our existing functionality:
1. Mail
alert - now, when you are alerted by email of an internal message, you
can read the message in your email without having to log on to
WiserEarth and checking your inbox!
2. WiserEarth welcome
emails have been removed of sensitive username/password information.
We used to include this in our welcome email, but we realize that given
the un-encrypted nature of email text, it was probably a security issue.
3.
Forums - when you're creating a new topic, there will be a "keep me
updated" checkbox. If you check that, your topic will automatically be
placed on your Watchlist, and you'll get email alerts that notify you
of when someone has replied to the topic.
4. Groups - Join
group membership buttons: We've noticed a lot of users not seeing
where they would join a group or apply for membership. We've moved the
join/accept buttons out from their previous location in the upper right
corner and made it more prominent and bold. Hopefully, this should now
make it readily apparent how they can sign up for a group.
5.
Groups - Pending applications/referrals will send email notifications
to the group administrators. Now, if someone has applied to join your
group, or a member has referred that person to join your group, the
group administrators will get an email alert notifying them of this
event.
6. Events - we added in "meetings" to the list of types of events, and also fixed some timestamp issues with events.
Overall,
we worked on usability fixes across the site, and we hope these fixes
will smoothly translate into the site working more along the
expectations of our users. Release 9 is scheduled to have our file
uploading feature, as well as possible improvements to our personal
profile layout. More on that as we work through this current release!
January 21, 2008
Over the past few weeks, we have noticed intermittent issues with
the WiserEarth website, and some users have come across a few of these
problems. With our latest release cycle, we have seemingly found a
solution to the issue, so the website should be up and running.
For
Release 7, we had our usual assortment of bug fixes and enhancements,
with the Watchlist activity report being the most prominent. Now, when
you look at your profile, and click on activity reports, you'll notice
that your Watchlist report is being presented in sentences that more
accurately describes the change that happened. You can always view the
more detailed, more inclusive report by clicking on the "detail We'll
work on transitioning this view into the email report very soon.
For
groups, we amended a few bugs that had slipped through the production
line. Removal of forum topics has been fixed, as any
application/membership issues. We also made sure the group invites to
people are going out successfully, and we renamed "History" to
"Activity Log" so that people wouldn't confuse that tab with the
history of the group versus the activities of all members in the
group.
One last thing that we also amended was the
auto-complete entries for filling out cities. We noticed that the list
had become encumbered with mispelled entries, and was being more a
hindrance than a helpful feature. We have turned that off across the
site, so you will no longer have to navigate around it.
For
upcoming release 8, we are working on File Uploads, and looking into
how much more we should develop the Watchlist feature. We're also
redesigning the layout of the right-hand sidebar, to make the actions
like "Add to your watchlist" and "Invite to groups" a more prominent
feature. Lastly, we have a new design in place to better alert people
of how they can join a group. We'll be moving the sign-up section to
someplace much more visible.
January 8th, 2008
We have been experiencing issues with loading images in the last 12 hours.
We thank you for your patience, we are currently looking into the problem.
January 7th, 2008
A Happy New Year to everyone - we've just updated our website with the latest set of enhancements and bug fixes. So far, we have added the following:
- Sent messages folder to archive any outgoing messages
- "Wider" wikipages - on wikipages, users can now get rid of the right-hand sidebar and use that space for content instead.
- Group Admin tutorial - Creators of groups will get an email directing them to our Group Admin Tutorials.
- Page status indicators - If a page has been locked, marked as duplicate, or had its status changed in any other way, it'll show up next to the timestamp box on the top right corner.
- Bug fixes - image upload, user profile editing, watchlist "off" setting
