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!

Guten Morgen!

Up until now, we've only supported the Latin character set, which supports English and most European languages.  The vast majority of Zoji users have been writing in English, so this has worked out just fine.

However, we've noticed an increasing number of non-English and bilingual speakers using the site, which is great!  Except for the fact that if you're, say, Chinese, and enter some characters, you'd quickly find out that Zoji garbled them all up, displaying a bunch of question marks. Not exactly the most friendly user experience, in fact, outright annoying!  Especially considering there are technologies and standards for handling this ... so there's really no excuse for us not to get on the ball.

So for the past couple weeks, we've wrestled with getting international character set support working. The technical name for this all-encompassing character set is Unicode, which you may have heard of.  To get Unicode to work, it took some figuring out on our part:  How to convert existing stuff in the database without garbling anything, how to transmit information through all the layers of software we run, and how to ensure that data YOU enter gets stored properly on our end.

After some pretty drastic changes, including upgrading our web server, we're happy to say that we finally got things to work.  For most of you, this probably won't make one iota of difference.  But for those of you who have been dying to write in other languages, things should be way smoother now.

Vielen Dank,
   沈华仁
a.k.a. ShennyD

P.S. If you're running Windows and have trouble seeing Asian language characters, you may have to go to start->settings->control panel->regional and lanugage options ->languages tab -> install files for east asian languages.

It's been a while since we've blogged, so I'd figure I'd shoot one out to satisfy the throngs of people who have been clamoring for our next post. :P

You might have noticed a new box on your homepage titled "Favorite Groups".  Assuming you're in a few groups, choose the ones that you're most interested in.  They'll appear in on your homepage, and you can use it as a kind of bookmark/shortcut to your favorite groups.  The other neat thing is that whenever the group is updated, e.g. a new member joins, someone posts to the group blog, sends a message to the group, etc., you'll see it in your Favorite Groups box.  We think it'll help you keep up with your groups better than just plain "What's New" notifications, which often scroll off the screen if you haven't logged on in a few days (shame on you!).


Let's see, what other interesting things have we rolled out since our last post...

• Completely redesigned the front page (props to Josiah)
  
• Reorganized the account settings page to make it more user friendly (and prettier)
• Added a new category of "What's New" notifications: Friend Updates.  These currently include notifications for when your friends add friends and join groups.  The new friend notification replaces the "New Friends in Your Network", which we thought was kind of a waste of space for something that didn't change much.  If you're the secretive, paranoid type, feel free to turn these notifications off in your account settings, and your friends will be none the wiser when you join a group or make a new friend.
• Groups are now included in the Search box autocomplete list, so you can use it as a quick way to get to your commonly used groups (but come now, why haven't you made it a favorite group?)

Enjoy!

Tonight's roll-out includes the much-anticipated feature of Custom Status Messages, a feature that has been heavily-discussed in the Zoji Suggestion Box .  Thanks to Kev's good work, you now have the ability to conveniently jot down a short note describing what's on your mind, your current mood, pretty much whatever you want (how much you love Zoji? :)    Your short note can be seen by all your online friends.

You'll also notice an overall redesign of the Now Online box -- with the additional UI elements of custom status messages, it made sense to condense certain links into icons, and move other elements around.  Hopefully you'll get used to the new arrangement quickly.

Now that you're able to vent your mood swings online, I fully expect all of you to be noticeably more pleasant in your daily person-to-person interactions :P

-Dan