We just rolled out a redesign of the What's New box.  We tried to streamline it a bit, and make the individual items small enough to fit 10 on your homepage so it's easier to see at a glance what your friends have been up to.

 

We also decided that the tabs that used to be at the top of the box were probably not that useful to most people, and perhaps contributed to a cluttered look, so we removed them.  We're planning going to add back notification filtering soon though (but in a different form), so if you did use the tabs, don't worry.

 

Anyway, let us know what you think of the new design.  Hope you like it!

 

Team Zoji

Ah, the trusty old blog post.  You can use it for so many things...telling a funny story, posting pictures of your vacation, ranting about something that irks you to no end.  And until now, it was the primary way that Zoji group members would communicate with one another.  You want to see if there's interest in a poker game tomorrow night?  You post to your poker group's blog.  You want to ask a question about Zoji?  Post to Zoji Talk's blog.  And so on.  People would reply to your blog post by posting comments.

Aside from the fact that this falls somewhat outside the scope of what blogs were meant for, it also had some drawbacks.  The group page would only display the latest post--if there was an interesting post, it could go unnoticed if someone made another post right after it.  It was hard to go back and find a post if it was beyond the first page of the blog, and you didn't remember when it was posted.  If someone replied to an old post, nobody would see it unless they were subscribed to comments on that post.

Team Zoji to the rescue. :)  Tonight we just rolled out Group Forums.  Forums, if you've never used one on the web before, are essentially what group blogs should be, for how people have been using them.

You can post a message to a group forum in much the same manner as posting to a group blog.  This message now becomes the first post of a thread.  Other people can now post replies on the thread.

The group page's Forum box displays the 5 threads with the most recent posts:



Click a post to view the thread, or click "view all threads" to see a list of all of the threads in this group's forum:




The forum page lists all of the forum's threads in order of most recent activity.  There isn't really the concept of when the first post was made, as there is with blogs--the threads with the most recent replies will always be at the top.

Check out the Zoji Talk group for an example of forums in action!


Converting Your Group Blog to a Forum

"That's pretty cool," you say to your computer screen.  "But what about all those existing blog posts in my group?"  Well, first off, I hope you're not expecting a response from your monitor, because that would be weird.  But anyway, yes, we thought of that too.  In your group's "Manage group" menu, you'll find a link that says "Convert blog to forum".  Click that link, and in a couple of minutes, voila, all of your group's blog posts are now forum posts!


Hiding Group Boxes

Also in tonight's deployment is the ability to hide boxes on your group pages that you may not be using.  Groups can serve a wide variety of purposes--people can use them to organize events, share pictures, post blogs (like this Support group), discuss topics (like Zoji Talk), etc.  Most groups don't need all of the features Zoji provides--for instance, this Support group has no need for an events box, pictures box, music box, etc.  The Zoji Talk group really needs only a forum.  And so forth.

Well now you can customize your groups how you want to by turning off boxes you don't use.  You'll find it under the Layout & Appearance section of your group's settings.

Anyway, those are the two biggies we rolled out...there's been plenty of other stuff since our last blog, including a new Electronics category for reviews, "taglines"/subtitles/pithy quotes/whatever you want to call them for your profile and group pages (you'll find these in your group and profile settings, respectively) that appear under the page title.  Probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting, but I'm too lazy to look it all up.

Have at it!

As mentioned in a previous post, we had temporarily disabled designer skins for groups until we'd finished updating them for the new group page design.  Well, we're done with that, so they're back, along with some nifty new skins courtesy of Josiah!

If you've ever created or administered a group, please read this.  I'd like to hear what you think of this before we move ahead with it.

We've recently been looking at improving the group organizer experience.  One of the changes we've been looking at is to simplify the group privacy options.  As they are right now, they give you very fine-grained control most every aspect of your group's privacy.  The downside to this is that there's a lot of overlap between settings, and they can get pretty complex.  Here's the list of settings right now:

1. Who can see this group? (anyone, anyone on Zoji, members only)
   
2. Who can see this group's blog and calendar? (anyone, members only)
   
3. Who can invite people to the group? (anyone, admins only)
   
4. Can people join the group without an invitation? (yes, no)
   
5. For people without an invitation that want to join, is your approval needed? (yes, no)
   
6. Who can post messages, music & photos to this group? (anyone, members only, admins only)

Like I said, they give you a lot of control--however, our feeling right now is that that level of control is not needed by probably 95% of the groups out there, and for those 95% of groups, they just tend to make things more cluttered and complicated than they need to be.

Here's our proposal to simplify the privacy settings while retaining the amount of control that most groups probably need:

Eliminate options #2, 3, 4, and 6.  Basically we'd be left with two options: #1--group visibility, and #5--admin approval of new members.  We feel that #1 basically covers #2 and 6.  #5 covers #3 and 4.  Still with me? :-)

The new behavior of the eliminated settings, and our reasoning behind why they can be done away with:

• #2: anyone that can see the group can see the group's blog and calendar.  If you don't want non-members seeing the group's blog and calendar, is there really a reason for the group to be public in the first place?
• #3: anyone can invite people to the group.  This setting overlaps with #5--if you don't want people joining the group without your knowledge, you can turn on admin approval.
• #4: yes, people can request to join the group without an invitation.  If a group is public and people can view the group, it seems odd that you wouldn't be able to request to join the group.  If you don't want people requesting to join, why not make the group private?  If you want the group to be public, you can still turn on admin approval to control who can join your group.
• #6: only members can post content to the group.  Why should non-members ever be able to post pictures, messages, etc. to a group they're not a member of?  And are there many cases where an admin wants the exclusive privilege of posting to the group?  I can't think of any.
  

I feel fairly certain that this makes a lot of sense and is the right thing to do.  However, there are some groups that make use of these settings in such a way that making this change would make parts of them more public and parts of them less public than they were before.

For example, a group that is visible to anyone on Zoji, but whose blog and calendar are currently private--after this change the blog and calendar would become public.  A group that's set so only the admin can post messages, pics, etc., would now allow group members to do so.

The number of groups that fall into this category, though, is small.  We can mitigate any problems with #3 and 4 by turning on admin approval for any groups that have restricted membership.  I would not want to automatically make public groups private just because they have a restricted blog though, so this is where it becomes a little sticky.

Anyway, if you have any problems with this, do speak up.  I don't anticipate anyone will, but it never hurts to ask. :-)

We just rolled out a redesign of group pages, something similar to what we did to your Zoji homepage a couple of months ago.  Basically we rearranged what column various boxes appeared in, and gave a new look to the side column.  We figured it would make more sense to move all of the group content (e.g. events, photos, blog, etc.) to the larger main column, and all group information (e.g. description, members, admins, etc.) to the gray side column.  With our increasing focus on Zoji as a tool to organize events for your groups, the group events box now takes center stage.

One side effect of all these major layout changes is that all of our designer group skins are...er, well kind of broken.  So for the time being, designer group skins are disabled, until Josiah can finish updating them for the changes (have fun with that, Josiah! ;P).  Once that's done, we'll turn them back on, but for now, if you were using a designer skin for your group, it will appear unskinned.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Anyway, hope you like the new layout.  Let us know if you have any feedback!