January 31, 2011 Huddler Release

[iacas]

There are several MAJOR updates in this release:

• Commenting
• Bumping in B/S/T

Commenting:

With this release, members will now be able to leave comments for the following types of content:

• wiki articles
• image albums
• album photos
• member lists
• product reviews

We developed this feature to promote engagement; people enjoy receiving a response, so members will receive email notifications after someone comments on their content.

There are new account settings to control these comment notification emails. Members who don't want to be notified when comments are posted should click the "Edit Account Details" button that appears on the right side of their profile page; on the next page that appears, scroll down to the "Email Preferences" section. To receive alerts, members must leave the boxes checked for "Notify me when people comment on my content" and/or "Notify me when people comment after me."

Comments themselves will use a rich WYSIWYG editor or the more basic BBCode editor depending on the user's preference. A limited formatting set is supported: Bold, Italic and Linking. Comments are for feedback on content, and we didn't think it would be fair to the content's author if comments overwhelmed the page with too much noisy formatting.

Bumping in B/S/T:

Updating a Classifieds post to bump it to the top of the listings is common in classifieds forums. But to keep this behavior from dominating the classifieds front page, we've added an explicit "bump control" that enforces a fair schedule. With this release, each ad may be bumped every 72 hours. The ad will tell its creator how much time is left before the next allowed bump, for convenience. We hope this will help unsold items get new attention without overwhelming the front page with older ads.

To reflect the fact that some Classifieds have been bumped, we now offer 5 ways to sort listings:

• Last Updated (this is the default sort and shows new & bumped ads).
• Newest Listings (this shows only newly-created ads).
• Most Recent Reply (traditional forum sort - any reply post in an ad will send it to the top of this sort).
• Price (Lowest -> Highest)
• Price (Highest -> Lowest)

Reputation (this marks a return of reputation for us - our site was one of the ones that prompted this to be created) :

Starting in this release, we're adding something to the "thumbs up" button you can click underneath a post. You'll now be able to leave a short text comment along with your thumbs up. A new section of the user profile page will display all the thumbs up a user had received and given, with these comments.

We're also going to begin tabulating this thumbs-up feedback into a quantitative user reputation score. A reputation system can be a strong motivator and powerful feedback mechanism. This may be sensitive in some communities, though. So by default, scores will only be visible to admins. If you decide that a user-facing reputation system is right for your site, talk to us and we can help you customize it for your community.

Change Username:

This release permits Admins to change member usernames; previously, these requests had to go through Partner Services. As an option, Admins changing a username may add a note to the affected user's profile informing other members that this username has been changed (for privacy reasons, this note does not disclose the previous username).

[iacas]

This update is now live, though our reputation will be another week or so as we've got to import all of our old values.