I’m sure others might like the timestamp for each message. I do not. I find they are unnecessary, and waste space in the conversation. I’d like to have the option, at least as a user, to turn them on or off. That way those who want it, can see it, and those who don’t-won’t
Author Archive for kinkspaces Page 2 of 3
I can’t stress this enough. You’ve got way too many required fields on the event! When we’re posting events, not more than a small percentage of them are going to be ticketed events. No one counts Male Tickets and Female tickets. And if you’re not selling tickets, no one cares when ticket sales begin or end because it is a free event. They way you have it set up does not make sense at all.
Events can be:
- Birthdays
- Chat Events
- Meetings
- Seminars
- FYI of events outside of your site
- Reminders
All manner of different things. Right now, all you are thinking of are ticket sales based events. Not very many of us are really doing that.
Look, your users are gonna want to be able at some point to submit articles. Right now, when an article is submitted, there’s no tag for who wrote it. There’s no way for a user to submit an article either. The users need to be able to submit articles to. If need be, make a special tag on their profile that allows them to write, then you could have writers–moderators–admins.
You’ve got a really powerful Article System, which I like, but it doesn’t mean anything if no one on your site can participate in posting articles but the admin. At least give Admins the option to allow users to post articles…
It doesn’t make any sense to separate the Moderators from the user logins. Odds are, you’re going to have someone on your site you want to make a moderator. Then you have to go about creating a login for them. So now your moderator has two logins for no reason. The moderator has no profile, and so you can’t really make the moderators friendly to the users– They have no idea who your moderators are.
Just put it as a check box on the user profile whether or not you want to make the user a moderator or not. It would be a helluva lot simpler to manage then the way you have it now. Especially if the site grows in size and becomes very successful.
It doesn’t make any sense that you cannot separate the “Description” from the “Ideal Match Description”. They shouldn’t be connected in the profile. If anything, it should be setup so that the Description of the Ideal Match Falls in Looking for Section. You’ve got to be able to allow admins to be able to separate them. That’s the most annoying thing about the profiles.
You’ve got these sections laid out in the profile, Some of the information you can’t move from section to section. That also does not make any sense. Some information cannot be removed at all.
Some of the fields I don’t want to have even as an option of filling out. As the Admin, I should be able to remove them. I don’t need a Language 2, Language 3, or to know their address… But as the admin, I can’t remove them. I should be able to.
One other thing, you waste all that space by having the member menu running vertically on the profile page. Put the Member Menu at the top. If you want, you can have a DHTML effect where the selections slide out underneath the button when you click on it. It Frees up a lot more space on the profile page that is cut off by that Member Menu.
I’m noticing that the polls don’t display properly in the user profile. They show up there, but the edge of the question is cut off from view. You’re not using the entire size of the polls container to show the question. There seems to be a scroll effect when you put your mouse over the question, but it’s really just annoying. If it’s a question for a poll, it would be better to just show the question completely then trying to make these little neat effects.
If you’re posting links, you’re going to want to have them logically grouped, like you do with groups, articles and blogs already. You should have the links the same way–where you can created categories for your links and place them in the categories.
Also–I’d like to see that you could add address and phone number for your links–if they are a business or place, you’d like that information to be visible as well.
I Noticed in filling out an event, that it doesn’t take into account that each event is not a paid affair, or require tickets.
| Ticket sale start | |
| Ticket sale end | |
| Female ticket count | |
| Male ticket count | |
| Couple ticket count |
These fields are not necessary for most events people are going to post. They’re nice fields to have, but they shouldn’t be required in order to post an event. Also–it doesn’t show you a link to submit a public event, you have the option to browse or view the event calendar–there’s no link for creating or submitting an event from the events tabb.
Also, there’s seems to be no way for users to post a public event. It gives you the link to
Events. The events section will allow users to submit events to the group’s calendar. The events created could have a picture associated with the event, and when the event came through, the event will show up on the front page bulletin section for everyone to see. Events would be:
- Moderated
- Unmoderated
Bulletins. The Group owner/Moderators can place important messages here. The bulletins section would be 100% Moderated. Events would show up in the bulletins section with links to full descriptions if they are too long, and the admin could add Member birthdays to the bulletins section if they wanted.
News Articles. Any group member would be able to submit articles, but only the Moderators/Owners can approve them. The Owner should be able to designate users who may post without approval. Kind of like the Multiply addon for Wordpress, where multiple users can blog here, but it shows up in just one blog with admins being able to approve articles.
Editorial Blogging. In most groups, you’re going to find there are people who blog furiously, and about things directly related to your group. Basically, you are syndicating their existing community server blog, and not creating a new one for them. The blogger could ad their own Picture to the text, and then their blogs will appear in the editorial section of the groups for everyone to view. This is not adding another Blog per user. This is allowing the view to use something like an RSS feed to syndicate their blog in their group IF they are given permission to do so.
You could put like a syndicate blog check box, and if they check it, they can chose from a drop down list, the groups they belong to and have permission to blog in.
Documents. Group Members can submit documents like PDF, DOC, XLS of things pertinent to the group.
- Moderated
- Unmoderated
I’m popping these of a mile a minute, but I really want Dolphin to be the best out there. There is an issue that I think bears serious thought. Conventional searches are giving a lot of users headaches. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it doesn’t work in a way that is intuitive to both the searcher and the people being searched.
Most profile searches let you search by Gender, Sexual Preference, Age, and Distance. That’s not bad. The trouble is, your search results are going to contain probably 40 to 50% of matches that don’t fit you, because the person is not searching for someone like you. I mean, the search function should look at the match preferences of each user, and return results that are closer to what you both are looking for.
Therefore, you spend a lot of time sifting through profile after profile of people who aren’t necessarily interested in you, hoping to find the few that are.
If you take the search engine, and make it look at each person’s match preferences–then you will see fewer results in your search, yes. But those results are people who are looking for someone who fits your basic characteristics. Your chances of actually making contact have gone up quite a bit.
I hear it all the time, and you see profile containing something similar this:
“Please don’t contact me if you’re over/under this age. I’m really not interested in meeting you.” OR “I’m not interested in Republicans” OR “Please don’t contact me if you live more than an hour away.” You see what I’m getting at?
If your users know that the search results are going to return people who are interested in their particular race/color/creed/distance then they are going to come back more and more. More relevant results means a better chance at getting to meet someone.
Take for instance: I’m an Asian Male, aged 47. I’m Heterosexual.
I hit the search button and I get back 200 profiles, only some of which are females interested in someone my age. Or someone of my race, sexual preference, etc.
On the flip side, I’m a 21 year old white woman, who’s gay. I don’t want to show up in a search to every heterosexual male looking for a female. I also don’t want to show up in searches of guys older then say 26. There’s no way for me to control who my profile shows up to in a search request.
I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it, trying to be politically correct. I see this a lot where you want to have people connected to one another in a special way on a community site. Take for instance a married couple.Well the problem is, you always have confusion as to who you are talking to, if they create a couples profile, then you still have confusion about whether or not you are talking to the husband or the wife.
In addition, that means sharing a login, and a mailbox, and galleries and groups. Both husband and wife can’t chat at the same time and all other manner of problems.
Answer: Mate Linking
This would be a little like the friends linking in principle. There would be a request to link, and the second party has to accept the link in order for the mating to complete. If the invitation is accepted, then you can use a device like CSS style tabs to put each member on the other’s profile behind it in a tab. So if you click to view someone’s profile–you can see immediately that they have a husband/wife/domestic partner on the site, and who they are.
They can post separately, have separate mailboxes, and chat separately–but anyone viewing their profiles would know that they are linked. I’ll try to throw together a mockup of what I’m talking about.
I’m 35 years old. My eyes aren’t getting any better. Default layout leaves a lot to be desired when you’re looking at the fonts and everything is so small. It’s hard enough to read when people start changing their profile pages, but you really should look into making it easier on the eyes. The default font needs to be larger. The Size here in WordPress is a prime example of how large it should be. It’s easy on the eyes.
Just something that I would like to see addressed. Your layout wastes a lot of space in the browser. All that background is unused. I know you can change it in the layout, somewhat, but there really should be a more efficient use of space on that desktop.
I don’t see how you can give a section to everything else but a person’s blog on their user profile. You can see the blogs in the Blogs section, but people who are viewing profiles should be able to view your blog too–especially if you’re an active blogger. I don’t see any section for blogs on the user’s Profile.
I’ve installed the Dolphin 6 beta. I’m impressed with the great strides being made, however, I’m concerned about the admin panel still. You’ve got to make it more intuitive to navigate. I mean, when I see settings, I’d like to be able to change all the settings related to that section. Most of your options for the site, are not easy to navigate still. If I’m in the Settings for photos, I’d like to see all the options for it right there. I would like to be able to set:
What user level can upload photos
How many photos
Do the photos require approval to be displayed
What sorts of extensions for photos will be accepted
The same goes for all your sections. The Postmoderation section, I think should go. It’s redundant when you have sections for each type of content in a section titled “Settings” That way, if the admin wants to change the settings on a particular section of the site, he doesn’t have to look in more than one place to find it. You have it separated great. Content–Settings. Your moderators should only be able to see the section for Content. Your admins can then be allowed to change the settings, or moderate the content.
It’s got to be easy for the admin to be able to manage things without a lot of clicks in different places, to do stuff. In reviewing the layout, it wore on me after only a few minutes. It still is unclear to me how to set the site so that people’s photos are automatically approved.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Ray has the ability to filter. I hope you’ll see this as something to be implemented in future versions. I would hope you would allow admins to set the filter criteria for Ray.
I for one, would like to be able to set the filter on age and sexual preference as well. I think of it this way, if you’re a lesbian, seeking other women, you’re going to have to sift through all the women online at the time. If your community becomes very successful, then this can lead to a lot of tedious time for your users. Or you can go even further, if that’s your wish. I mean if you’re looking for a bisexual Asian female, the Filter should help you find her. I’m not saying you have to do it for every question, but the admin should be able to set the criteria in RAY
Nothing against Orca, but you’ve said yourself that it’s still not there with all the features. I was wondering if Dolphin 6 will still be able to support other forums like PHPBB and WowBB or VBulletin. I see that some people have created mods for it, but will these mods continue to work in the new version?
There are those people out there, who for whatever reason, may not want to use Ray with Dolphin. My question is, how do these people get to be able to manage and maintain Ray without the management panel featured in Dolphin?
There doesn’t seem to be any documentation on how to do this outside of the Ray/Dolphin environment.
I know it’s asking for a lot, I really do. But Ray is desperately in need of an installation routine/script/program. I have tried on numerous occasions to get the script to run, but each time I’ve met with failure. I have seen software every bit as complex as Ray install with ease. I’m talking about Jive Messeger server, RealChat Chatrooms, 123flashchat server. They’ve all installed within 30 minutes with little or no difficulty whatsoever–and without as much difficulty.
I didn’t mention those names because I’m trying to advertise for the other guy. In fact, I like the fact that you’ve drawn this all together, and I desperately want it to work out of the box. But from what I see, a lot of people are having similar troubles. If there are settings to be added, why not have the installation script ask for them and fill them in for you as it runs? Just like feeding the database username/password as you install a new script.
I’m just curious to know. I’ve read the documentation that says the user interfaces is fully customizable. If the customization files are freely available for others to make skins for, why not include them in the download of Ray?
That way, you don’t have to go hunting all over the place for the files you need. The default options are fine, but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation on how to turn on/off certain features of the interface, or information on where to get the resources to make your own client skin.
I may have missed it, but I wasn’t able to see any of that information in the tar.gz/zip of Ray Beta.
Make Meaning Or Die
