Joining a Group Using the Web
Summary
- There are 17 posts — by 4 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Richard Waid at 2007 Sep 25 23:59 UTC
The simplest of all the joining tasks: an registered user joining a visible
group. I cannot think of anything that I have left out…
Joining a Group Using the Web
If you already have an account registered with GroupServer, you can
join a group by carrying out the following tasks.
1. In the group you wish to join, click Join. You are now a member of
the group.
Note: Administrator Joining
Some administrators can join you to a group. If this occurs, you
will receive an email stating that you have joined a group.
On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 15:57 +1200, Michael JasonSmith wrote: > The simplest of all the joining tasks: an registered user joining a visible group. I cannot think of anything that I have left out… > > Joining a Group Using the Web > > If you already have an account registered with GroupServer, you can > join a group by carrying out the following tasks. > > 1. In the group you wish to join, click Join. You are now a member of > the group. Do they receive an email letting them know they have Joined (as they do in the current system?) I think they should, since this email gives them the details for unsubscribing (and also maintains the cohesion between web and email).
--Richard
Oops, disregard the note in the above post: I have covered it better in the following post http://groupserver.org/r/post/7rMoazg11O1hVgm6a2Js1G
Yes, Richard, they will get an email saying that they have joined. The leaving information is shown on the group homepage, which us the first page that the user will see after joining, so that should not be a problem.
I'd like to see an interim page that says... Confirmed. You are now a member of xyz online group. Then: Change Delivery Options Your default delivery setting when you join a new group is full e-mail delivery of each new post. You may change delivery for this group: * Set to Topic digest - A list of recent topics with web links to view online * Set to Web-based - E-mail delivery turned off except for a monthly e-mail update or special notices Web-based users may be particularly interested in the web feed for this public group. To change your default delivery option for future groups you join, update your default delivery settings.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://stevenclift.com Sent via mobile: +1 612 203 5181 > ------- Original Message ------- > From: "Michael JasonSmith" <email obscured>> > To: <email obscured> > Sent: 9/23/07, 10:57:03 PM > Subject: [groupserver development] Joining a Group Using the Web > > The simplest of all the joining tasks: an registered user joining a visible group. I cannot think of anything that I have left out… > > Joining a Group Using the Web > > If you already have an account registered with GroupServer, you can > join a group by carrying out the following tasks. > > 1. In the group you wish to join, click Join. You are now a member of > the group. > > Note: Administrator Joining > Some administrators can join you to a group. If this occurs, you > will receive an email stating that you have joined a group. > > > ----------------------------------------- > Full text of this topic in GroupServer Development: > http://groupserver.org/r/topic/rZrJJGwMOkO0Uuqbd0n89 > > To leave GroupServer Development, email > <email obscured>?Subject=unsubscribe > > GroupServer Development is powered by > OnlineGroups.Net http://onlinegroups.net > >
Thanks Steve ... I think that's actually a pretty valid idea. A number
of users won't know about things like the delivery settings unless we
prompt them, and it could potentially reduce our support issues a lot
(particularly in the large, busy forums) if we enabled people to switch
to web-only early on. An alternative, for join-via-web could be to ask
them as part of the interim screen eg.
There are three ways you may wish to participate in this group:
web only ( )
every post via email ( )
daily digest of topics via email ( )
--Richard
I am not against the idea of making the group harder to join, by adding an interim step, but it smells of “right information; wrong time”. I would prefer it if a user got a message saying how to reduce the amount of email when the volume of email in a group becomes high — rather than right at the start of the group membership, when the user has very little idea if the volume of email will be a problem or not! How about we emphasise the email-settings on the group homepage? There are lots of lovely Ajax visual effects we could use to point out the initial settings. Remember, at the design stage you can do anything ☺
Richard Waid wrote: > Thanks Steve ... I think that's actually a pretty valid idea. A number > of users won't know about things like the delivery settings unless we > prompt them, and it could potentially reduce our support issues a lot > (particularly in the large, busy forums) if we enabled people to switch > to web-only early on. An alternative, for join-via-web could be to ask > them as part of the interim screen eg. > > There are three ways you may wish to participate in this group: > > web only ( ) > every post via email ( ) > daily digest of topics via email ( ) > When people sign-up is the right time IMHO. An old thought I've had for previously registered site users, was a pull down: Join with [E-mail Delivery] Or [Topic E-mail Digest] [Web-Based] I want to highly recommend you shift from "No E-mail" or Web-Only to "Web-Based." At a minimum all group members should get a monthly reminder of the groups they are members of and the number of new topics/posts. This way us group hosts can bring passive web folks back and better yet drive them to unsub so we don't have inflated members numbers. Steve Up with the wee baby.
> > --Richard > > > ----------------------------------------- > Full text of this topic in GroupServer Development: > http://groupserver.org/r/topic/2EbIEXgl0xhZV7C4nhBrap > > To leave GroupServer Development, email > <email obscured>?Subject=unsubscribe > > GroupServer Development is powered by > OnlineGroups.Net http://onlinegroups.net > >
On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 01:17 -0500, Steven Clift wrote: > I want to highly recommend you shift from "No E-mail" or Web-Only to > "Web-Based." At a minimum all group members should get a monthly > reminder of the groups they are members of and the number of new > topics/posts. This way us group hosts can bring passive web folks back > and better yet drive them to unsub so we don't have inflated members > numbers. I couldn't agree more. My bad for using that terminology, web based is much more accurate (since we do send email out). I can't remember if Mike has sent out the details of this, but we have a feature on the road map which will send out emails in the following situations: - Monthly reminder of groups (and stats) - Significant change of volume (if the group suddenly becomes high volume, they will be reminded of the option to switch to a different setting) There may be other cases.
--Richard
Without experience of participating in the group, the user will have little real idea if the email load will be too high or not. One thing that we know is that the user wants to join the group. I find it highly unlikely that the user wants to switch from joining the group to fiddling about with his or her account: it is quite removed from the task! Let the user participate, and remove the obstacles to that. Reminding the user how to reduce the amount of email traffic when he or she wishes to leave the group, now that is something else entirely ☺ (And something for a new topic.) Sleep well, Steve, and thank you for your suggestions. I appreciate the opportunity you give me to clearly state my thoughts and ideas.
I disagree. When I tell people there is a digest version when recruiting new members they often express a huge sigh of relief. In fact, ideally with future paper sign-up forms we'd be able to include a "digest" check off box and set that manually with any bulk uploads. We just had 70 people sign-up at one event for a new mpls-seward@ neighborhood forum ... so the ultimate interface My direct experience over the last decade is that there are the "don't really know people", "send me it all" e-mail people I can filter, the "must have digest, gimme my digest people," and now we have web forum folks who are shocked by almost any flow of e-mail as a default. My ultimate goal as a host is to get web forum people to choose digest so they are regularly drawn into the forums rather than have them choose the most obvious route of bluntly unsubscribing they received 10 e-mails in the first few hours. The percentage of folks in Richards, I don't know until I experience it column, might be about 40 percent which comes down with public groups where people can see the volume before joining.
Cheers, Steve
so the ultimate joining interface ... oops didn't finish line ... might be a paper form optimized for OCR that feeds nicely into the GS bulk upload. :-) FYI, we use this format - http://e-democracy.org/uk/ifsignupform.doc - with a space for each character because if you give people straight lines 1/4 of the e-mail addresses are completely illegible.
At no point am I trying to discourage the use of digest mode. I acknowledge that it is useful and usable (even if both Alice and I miss the topic-keywords). However, I do not think that interrupting the user's flow is the best way of promoting it! The group homepage needs serious work; maybe moving the message-delivery digest options to the homepage itself would be a better way of promoting them. It would be part of a far bigger clean up, to reduce the current clutter on the homepage.
Steve, I wonder if you are actually thinking about the registration interface, rather than the interface for joining a group via the web. If so, then please take this up in the "Joining a Group and Registering an Account Using the Web" topic. http://groupserver.org/r/topic/7ojOA069zPQquIRZrWzpmR This topic relates to users who are already registered and logged in. It is likely that these people already have a decent idea of what being in an online group involves, and are among the group most likely to change their delivery settings if they want to.
Dan
On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 09:35 -0500, Steven Clift wrote: > The percentage of folks in Richards, I don't know until I experience it > column, might be about 40 percent which comes down with public groups > where people can see the volume before joining. The "I don't know till I experience it" comment was strictly related to inviting people to participate. I completely agree with your comments on volume, I think that *particularly* for a public group, where volume is pretty obvious, letting people change their option early on is a good idea. I think you may be overlooking the 'panic' aspect of a new user Mike -- I've seen it in a number of groups where users just go off the rails when they get more than a couple of emails a day. They just don't know how to cope. Especially if they're expecting a web-forum (but don't recognise that we do both). I think giving them the option to change *early*, but *after* they have already joined, is a good thing. It doesn't significantly complicate the join procedure, and they get given useful information (how to control the volume of posts) early on. I also think we should have a metric at the top of each page that says what the rough daily volume is -- I think we should use a 95th percentile metric for this: measure posting levels over the past 3 months, throw away the top 5% days, and the highest level after that is what we state (it is actually quite a common traffic billing metric, BTW).
--Richard
Richard, by definition a new user cannot *join* a group. A new user must *register* and join a group http://groupserver.org/r/topic/7ojOA069zPQquIRZrWzpmR In this topic I am *only* talking about the case of a user who has an account, joining a group, as the help text in the first post says ☺ http://groupserver.org/r/post/1KOtevr6QTbZtnO4PBMuVu Joining a Group Using the Web If you already have an account registered with GroupServer, you can join a group by carrying out the following tasks. I do like the volume-meter idea.
On Wed, 2007-09-26 at 11:54 +1200, Michael JasonSmith wrote: > Richard, by definition a new user cannot *join* a group. A new user must *register* and join a group I'm talking about a user who is new to a group, not necessarily a new site member. Incorrect terminology in this context, sorry.
--Richard
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