Article: What's New on WiserEarth

Created: May 23, 2007
Updated: Nov 18, 2008
Viewed: 697 times
Page Status: active

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What's New on WiserEarth

November 2nd, 2008

You may have noticed something new at WiserEarth: Introducing WiserEarth 'Solutions'!

In our recent user survey, 85% of you asked for a way to share and search for best practices. So by popular demand we give you WiserEarth Solutions - a collaboration tool that allows people and organizations to describe and catalogue solutions to the environmental and social issues we face.

WiserEarth has always been a reflection of the ingenuity and innovation emerging from the environmental and social justice movement. WiserEarth Solutions is the next level of global knowledge-sharing. It is a way for you to share with others what is working in your field. So if you come across a well respected practice, whether it is in the form of a pdf, powerpoint, website etc., you can now document it for others to find and use.

What's different about WiserEarth Solutions is that you can catalogue not just the practice itself, but who consults on it, who practices it, and who funds it - a big plus for someone thinking of implementing a Solution. Other WiserEarthlings can also rate the quality of these solutions and make recommendations. Overtime, you can generate a feedback loop of improvements.

We encourage you to share Solutions that you have personally seen be successful. We want to help others implement these practices - so it is best to have them documented like recipes-- with clear step-by-step instructions. For an example of a solution, click here.

To get started, you can view the Tutorial, or read the FAQs.

Be a part of the Solution!

October 30, 2008

Thanks to your helpful suggestions, we have recently made a series of changes to WiserEarth Groups. Our hope is that these changes will make Groups more intuitive and easier to use. Here's what you might notice if you are an administrator of a group:

1. The layout of the admin tools and the group tabs are redesigned - you can view a short tutorial on these changes here.

2. Any group you now join will be automatically added to your Watchlist updates

3. You can now upload files directly to a sub-folder (if they exist)

4. Under 'Sent Invitations', both internal and external invites are now merged into one list. Sent invitations can now be sorted, and invitations can be canceled or edited. You also have the ability to invite a person multiple times to a group.

To share more ideas or ask for further help visit WiserEarth Group Support.

October 13th, 2008

WiserEarth will be at the following conferences, come and see us at our booth:

ConEx (Conservation Learning Exchange), Vancouver

"Blogs, Wikis & Virtual Realities: New Media Tools for Conservationists"

Tuesday, October 14 from 9:30-11am, PT and Wednesday, October 15 from 1:30-3pm, PT.

Bioneers, San Raphael: We will be located at the computer lab right by the bookstore.

October 2nd, 2008

Thanks to the community's suggestions, WiserEarth Ratings are here! You can now rate any organizations or other information on WiserEarth. This gives you the opportunity to identify content that you feel is particularly valuable to the greater community. Here's the scoop:

-Ratings are based on a 5-star rating system, which calculates the average number of stars. Simply click the rating box in the upper-right corner of the item you are rating. You will then be invited to select the stars and add your comment.

-You can rate anything on WiserEarth other than groups and people

-You can rate an item (organization, events, resources etc.) as often as you want, but it will only count as one rating

-You can change your rating whenever you like, but only your most recent rating counts.

To learn more about ratings, check out our FAQ section.

Have fun!

September 30th, 2008

Thanks to the Earth Portal , you can now find cutting-edge, reputable articles and resources from the scientific community on WiserEarth. Check out the Climate Change portal, the Water and Sustainable Development portal, and the Energy Policy portal. If you are interested in learning more, contact Maggie Surface.

September 1st, 2008

WiserEarth is becoming increasingly international! The site generated visits in August from 180 countries/territories and 48% of all visitor visits were from outside the US.

August saw 754 members join the community.

There are over 109,212 organizations, 4,282 community resources, 369 jobs, 274 events.

There are 116 discussions on WiserEarth covering a total of 489 topics

In August, 55 groups were added bringing the total to 784 groups.

August 21st, 2008

We are pleased to annouce two new team members on WiserEarth!

Bowo is now joining WiserEarth as Chief Editor, and one of his main responsibility will be to manage the community of WiserEarth Editors. Along with welcoming new editors and helping to get them familiarized with WiserEarth, Bowo will ensure editors understand their roles and feel empowered to make contributions across the site. Bowo has already been doing similar tasks in a previous volunteer capacity on WiserEarth, and we feel very lucky to have him onboard!

Shawn is our new user interface (UI) designer! Shawn has done some very fine work for Global Oneness Project, among others, and brings his talented expert eye in web, mobile and application design to WiserEarth. He will work directly with the development team, turning the great ideas and suggestions from the community into visual mockups that our developers can use right away.

Welcome to both Bowo and Shawn!

August 17th, 2008

We are excited to announce the expansion of the WiserEarth organization 's directory to include for-profit and government entities, a change we’ve made in response to the community’s requests.

You can now add the profiles of business or government that are creating lasting change in the environmental and social justice fields. Please review the WiserEarth principles and guidelines before entering a new organization's page

August 15th, 2008

The First WiserEarth widget was created a few days ago by bowo, one of WiserEarth Active Editor: thank you Bowo. You can now display the featured organizations, events, groups from the WiserEarth homepage on other sites. For more details, click here.

August 1st, 2008

--> The position is closed. WiserEarth seeks an fulltime online community manager to join our WiserEarth team based in Sausalito, California. WiserEarth is a community networking forum for civil society, the private sector, and government to collaborate, define, address, and solve social and environmental problems.

July 25th, 2008

Network relationships started as a community suggestion by Angus Parker, who noticed that the list of choices from the drop-down menu weren't always fitting of relationships a person would have. After taking a look at the complete list of relationships, we've since gone in and cleaned out the ones that didn't make sense, and added in more appropriate relationships. It's step 1 in a long-term effort to improve out network connectivity features. Eventually, we plan on allowing users to search the database based on relationship types, such that you can find all those people tagged as mentors or organizations flagged as funders. This should add a much more robust and rich feature to the networks on WiserEarth.

Other changes we made were to improve the welcome email to new users, by adding a more personal touch to the emails. We also updated our forums feature by providing the "Post a Reply" link at the bottom of the page. That way, users who have sorted the forum replies from first to last, won't have to scroll all the way back up the page to post a comment.

Next up - for-profit and government agency inclusion into the WiserEarth directory. For an ongoing discussion of the features we'll be adding, and to jump in and offer your thoughts and suggestions, visit the suggestion page here.

July 19, 2008

Thanks to the requests from our community, we will be expanding the directory to include sustainable businesses and public agencies. This change will take place in the next month.

July 16th, 2008

Search Engine Optmization (SEO)
SEO has been a project long overdue for WiserEarth. In short, it's about improving your search engine rankings so that people using Google, Yahoo, etc will more likely see your website appear at the top of the search results. It becomes quite important, when you learn that the majority of any web browsing starts with a search query, and that most people don't venture past the first 10 search results.

For this project, we worked on cleaning up some HTML coding that was hurting our search rankings. We updated pages with more appropriate page titles, and we also made sure that each page has a unique meta-description for the search crawler to take a snapshot of. In the past, we had used a one-size-fits-all description, which limited the amount of keyword matching. Kudos to our developer Rehan for working on these tickets, and for also for pointing out a lot of these issues that could be easily fixed.

The last piece we tackled came with help from Gary at GetToTheTop.com, who generously donated his company's services to help WiserEarth's search rankings. Gary provided us with a sitemap that we could upload to Google and Yahoo. The sitemap is effectively a table of contents, and gives the search crawler a clear map on how to crawl your site. It makes a tremendous difference, and we've already noticed some of the benefits - our unique visitors to the site jumped 700 clicks in one day, which is a great sign of the benefits of working on SEO.

Next up - network relationships, and how to clean up nonsensical entries and replace them with ones that are actually effective.

July 10th, 2008

Our latest set of changes - many of these were community suggestions, so we're thrilled to see their ideas come to life on the site!

1. Additional buttons on the editing toolbar (suggested by bowo) - we've added some much needed and much requested buttons to our HTML editor. Users can now choose Font Family and Font Color, as well as insert in an Anchor and Indent text. We also included this nifty "Paste from Word" feature, which will clean up weird formatting issues when copying and pasting from a Word document. Try it out!

2. Forums (suggested by johncoate) - replies can now be sorted ascending or descending. Since we started WiserEarth, our comments have always been sorted where the newest post rose to the top. That follows conventional commenting that you'll see on blogs and websites, but it doesn't work quite so well for a discussion forum. Forum topics usually have it sorted by oldest to newest, such that the first opening post is at the top. It allows users to scroll down and follow the discussion accordingly. We've now offered the option to sort a discussion thread in either direction, so that our users can choose to view it however which way they choose.

3. Watchlist clustering (suggested by angusparker) - We noticed that times, the sheer number of edits to a page can quickly overwhelm a watchlist email report. To help address this issue, if you have set your watchlist to daily or weekly batches, we'll consolidate consecutive edits by someone. So, if a person has edited an article 5 times, it'll no longer send out 5 sentences all saying the same thing. Instead, it'll group all those changes together into one sentence and put a number at the end to indicate the number of edits.

4. Forums (general community suggestion) - a few community members pointed out that when a discussion topic spills over two pages or more, the breadcrumb links to return back to the original topic gets lost. We've since made sure those links stay persistent regardless of which page you're on. It should allow our users to jump back to other topics in the forum.

5. Geographic entries - For a number of our entries in the database, they curiously had a longitude/latitude of (0,0), which meant that it show them having a location off the coast of Africa. Likely, these entries didn't get "geo-coded" correctly when we entered them into our database. We've gone ahead and reset the geographic information for these entries, so they should now show the proper coordinates on a map.

6. Watchlist alerts (suggested by jonramer) - We wanted to make sure that the default view for seeing your watchlist activity report was the new improved version. Jon found a few inconsistencies across the site, where we were still sending people to the old version. We've cleaned it up, and all users should view the new and improved view by default.

Beyond that, we had some general site improvements to slip into this release cycle. We significantly optimized the query it runs when pulling information about the 100,000+ organizations in our database, so that should speed browsing and searching significantly. We also fixed a few typos around the site, and made some formatting changes to our welcome email. Next up - we'll be working on including For-profit organizations and business on WiserEarth!

July 2nd, 2008

TinyMCE updated!
TinyMCE refers to the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) toolbar that we use across the site. It's the toolbar that allows you to bold fonts, insert youtube videos, upload pictures, create tables, etc. However, some of these features would not work right with the new Firefox 3.0 browser, so we quickly downloaded the latest update of TinyMCE that addressed these issues. With over 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in the first day alone, we felt it was important to make sure the new browser was supported fully throughout WiserEarth.

July 1st, 2008

No-reply@wiserearth.org
We noticed that on occasion, some of our users reply to the message alerts that come into their email, thinking they can reach their fellow contact on WiserEarth in that manner. The reply-to emails for message alerts is no-reply@wiserearth.org, and we've updated it so that it'll send an automatic reply back to the user if they've mistakenly replied to it. That way, they will know they need to come to the site and hit the "Send a Message" tool if they wish to contact the person instead.

Inbox Redesign
We've added some slight amendments to the inbox feature for WiserEarth users. We've bolded certain sections, expanded the number of messages shown to 10 messages, and provided "jump" links to allow a user to quickly scroll to other messages in the past. These small but useful details should hopefully provide a better user experience.

June 26th, 2008

New User Registration process updated!
We reworked the new user sign-up process around the end of May to make it easier for visitors to get a WiserEarth account. Since then, we've gone back and tweaked the process a bit, by allowing new users to choose their Areas of Focus selections during the sign-up process. After filling out their username and password information, the second page will allow a user to choose both their profile picture and their Areas of Focus selections. As before, this step is optional, so users can always just click on the "Finish" button and head on into the rest of the site.

June 18th, 2008

Our watchlist has been significantly upgraded to include much more informative updates, and to better point our users to where the change has happened. In our previous version of the watchlist, the email notification was pretty bare-bones - it didn't really tell our users what had changed and who had made the change. With our latest boost to the watchlist, you'll see full sentences that describe what's changed on the pages and groups you've watchlisted. Example:

   Articles:
      jonramer posted a comment for article: Including For-Profit and Public Agencies on WE +2.
      peggy posted a comment for article: Including For-Profit and Public Agencies on WE +2.

   Group: WiserEarth Suggestions
      peggy posted a comment for article: Option to reveal and see other's online status +5
      bowo posted a comment for article: Option to reveal and see other's online status +5

   Group: Suggestions
      bowo posted a new reply in discussion topic: Networking the networks
      bowo posted a new reply in discussion topic: See name when rolling over photo

We hope this will do a much better job of keeping users informed of changes across the site.

May 29th, 2008

We just released a new set of improvements across the site. Pulling in suggestions from the community, as well as adhering to our technical roadmap, here's an overview of what's changed across the site:

We noticed that there was some odd spacing when sending out messages, especially to group members. We've fixed it so that messages will be spaced out exactly as you typed it.
We also added in a full toolbar for messages, allowing users and group members to insert images, hyperlinks, and font formatting to liven up their messages. (Unfortunately, youtube videos won't play properly in messages)
For groups, the main logo is now linked, so that if a user clicks on it, it will take them back to the homepage
When editing a a comment, we've renamed the "Edit comment" to "Save changes" - suggested by Angus Parker
We added "Manage" to the "Related Groups" section, allowing admins to remove groups from the list, and to also set a group as a "sticky" - suggested by Bowo
We added a few new relationship types to the Network, including "client", "consultant", and "funder" - suggested by Angus Parker
Areas of Focus Portal Pages - we re-orderd the sidebar so that the progression is consistent across the site (organizations, people, groups, etc)
We added more options in selecting the type of Events, allowing users to choose "Award" and "Other" - requested posted in Suggestions forum

May 21st, 2008

For our latest release, we focused on improving and simplifying the new user sign-up process. We've shortened it to a 2-part process - fill out your username details and select an image, and that's it. We do encourage users to fill out their Areas of Focus selections as well as provide more information in their about section once they are complete, but we also wanted to make sure users could browse and use the site right away.

So, a quick list of the changes:

Shortened new user sign-up process
Groups - easier joining process after a new account has been created
Groups - the titles for Events were being cut-off prematurely, so we've lengthened their width
Bugs - the "Save" button would freeze in Internet Explorer 6/7 at times, so that's been resolved

May 15th, 2008

We've just released a new batch of features around the site! Many of these ideas came from our Suggestions group, so I highly encourage users to post to that group if they have ideas they'd like to see implemented on WiserEarth. We can't get around to all of them, but we do try to include at least one with every update to the site. Many thanks to Bowo and Angus for their work in developing these suggestions!

1. Comments can now be edited within 30 minutes of posting - as requested by the community, we are now allowing our users the ability to make changes or corrections to a comment within 30 minutes. This should allow for some quick fixes without the risk of people removing comments that might affect the structure of a discussion.

2. Send a friend request (suggested by Sheri Herndon) - A suggestion brought up in our WiserEarth Suggestion group, we are now providing a dialog box for users to type in a message when asking someone to become part of their network.

3. Groups (initiated by Tori Jacobs) - bulletin boards each have their own revision history. What does this feature does is it saves a copy of each change to a bulletin board. If a group administrator makes a mistake, they can always click on "Show History" and choose to return to a earlier revision.

4. Groups - Admins can choose to be notified anytime a new member joins. Previously, admins were only notified if a visitor applied or was referred to the group. Now, we'll allow admins to choose to be notified anytime someone has joined their group.

5. Groups (suggested by Tori Jacobs)- "Join Group" buttons moved to the "home" tab. By popular request, we've moved the links to join a group to the "home" tab, and also made that the default page that a user will see when clicking on a group.

6. Network (suggested by Angus Parker) - Anything created by a user becomes part of their network. So if a user has posted a job, created an event listing, or added a new entry for an organization, that will now automatically go into their network.

7. Bugs - we also fixed a few mishaps around the site. Users who've filled out their about section will no longer get a reminder message. We've also fixed some image uploading issues, as well as some search results appearing multiple times.

April 28th, 2008

Some cool new features and a few changes on WiserEarth:

1. Multiple Bulletin Boards - Group administrators can now drag and drop as many bulletin boards as needed into their group. Bulletin boards are really just blank html canvases, and can be used in any way possible. You could potentially cover your entire group page with bulletin boards, and customize each one to showcase different kinds of content. See the tutorial if you'd like to learn more.

2. Stickies - the ability to keep things at the top of a list. Stickies is a term used in a lot of forums, but basically it means that you can set something to always be at the top of the list. This allows group admins to keep important things, like an interesting discussion topic or an Frequently Asked Questions page to always stay visible. Any item that has been set as a "sticky" will have a yellow thumbtack icon. Check out our tutorial to see how this works.

3. Group membership roles - we've simplified group roles to just two types - administrators and members. Members will now have access to edit the bulletin board, send a message to other people in the group, clean up content on the homepage, and edit the public description of the group in the "About" tab.

4. Files & Photos tab - we've moved the file library module into a new tab, called "Files & Photos". That should separate the files from being lost in the page.

5. Events - searching will now bring up only upcoming or ongoing events. We'll soon also refine this so that you can search for events by date.

April 22nd

Happy Earth Day!

April 12th, 2008

WiserEarth has a booth at the Green Festival in Seattle, come and see us!

April 8th, 2008

A bit of a delay in getting word out on our latest release, but Release 14's fixes and feature enhancements are now up on WiserEarth. It was a relatively short release, but has some pretty useful improvements made site-wide.

1. "Add" content link available on groups homepage - On your group homepage, admins and members will notice an "Add" link at the top right of each content module, next to the "Create" link. If they click on it, they will be taken to a new screen where they can search for existing content to be displayed on their group's homepage. This should make it much easier to link to content.

2. Ability to connect to existing groups! - Previously, you could only connect your group to one that was created through your group's homepage. We have now added the ability to search for existing groups and connect them to yours.

3. Ability to embed videos, pictures into comments and discussion forums. - We've added a more full-featured toolbar to our comments and forum postings, allowing members to post much more content.

4. Internal messages - URLs are now hyperlinked. When reading messages in your inbox (not through your email), any urls will be hyperlinked and active for you to click on.

Release 15 will address some search issues, as well as some usability fixes we'd like to shore up around the website.

April 2nd, 2008

The Natural Capital Institute released a generic version of the software that they built for the wiserearth.org site. The software was released as open source under the GPL 3.0 license, which allows anyone to use, modify, or share the software without any restrictions. It was released under the name 'WiserPlatform', and can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiserplatform .

The WiserPlatform can be used to create web sites that manage complex relationships between different entity types. It includes built-in social networking and groupware functionality. Anyone implementing the platform can define and configure their own entity types and taxonomy for categorizing data on their site. The platform allows users to add and edit information using a rich-text wiki editor.

March 28th, 2008

We just completed our latest batch of fixes and changes to the website. Release 13 had the following new developments:

1. Folders for file uploads! - Now users can create folders to organize their files. Subfolders can also be created, and users can move files from any folder they choose to. This should greatly help groups and users who have large files to upload to WiserEarth, but are seeking a way to organize them.

2. User control over comments - After hearing from multiple community members who wanted greater control over their profile, we now allow users to remove comments as they deem fit on their profile.

3. Groups frame feature revised - We had heard that the way users had to "remain" within a group were confusing, especially if they were trying to navigate to other parts of the site. The group banner will still stay on top of the group, but if a user clicks on links, they won't be forced to view the rest of the site within the group frame. Also, we'll provide a link on the upper left corner to "return" to the group.

4. Link colors - We recently turned on the ability for links to change color after you've clicked on them, which helps our users see which links they've already visited. However, we noticed that some parts of the site looked odd with this features, so we've re-tooled this feature to limit the color changing to just certain parts of the site.

5. Jobs - We instituted an expiration policy for jobs. Any job posting over 60 days old will be moved off to an "expired" tab, but we will send out a notification email to the poster. The email will contain a "re-list" feature, which will allow the person to repost the job for another 60 days. This will help keep job postings on WiserEarth current and more accurate of actual openings.

6. AoF - Areas of Focus listings now include statistics for groups, so you can see how many groups have tagged themselves with a particular Area of Focus.

7. Comment box - A suggestion from the community, we've expanded the comment box to 12 lines, which should provide greater visibility when writing longer comments.

We also had our usual bevy of bug fixes, and slight to our spam monitoring features. Many of these ideas came from our Suggestions for WiserEarth group, which has given us great insight into how our users are interacting with WiserEarth, and what we can do to help improve their experience.

March 14th, 2008

Another set of fixes and improvements is up on our website! Release 12 had the following changes:

New Features:
1. Action Bar - We have a re-tooled "action bar" on the right side. This should make more clear the action links available to users on a page, such as adding to a watchlist, adding to a network or to one of the user's groups. The new status messages should also make it more clear when an action has been taken.

2. Report Spam features - Users will have a link at the bottom of emailed internal message to report spam, or if they go to their inbox, they'll see a "report spam" link in between "reply" and "delete". Clicking on that link sends an update to our Admin Spam Report, which our staff will actively monitor to catch spammers.

3. De-activated users - after de-activation, users can still view the comments left on the page, and add in additional comments. This will allow admins to explain why the user was de-activated, as well as keep a running log of what happened to this profile.

4. Join groups - we realized we had left out a link for people who were already members of wiserearth to sign-in to, so we've added that back in on the About page of a group.

5. We added the option to choose "other" for many of the "type" drop down menus across the site. That way, users aren't pigeon-holed into choosing something that they're not.

6. Events on the homepage should now only reflect active listings, not events that have already happened in the past. This will give our users a much more accurate count of what's upcoming.

Bugs we fixed!
1. Comment box - a few users reported that the cursor would jump out of position at times, so we've fixed that issue
2. LInks - new and already clicked on - the colors of links on our site will now change colors if you've already clicked on it. That way, users will be better able to see which links they've already visited
3. Timestamp issues for a forum topic has been corrected
4. We addressed some TinyMCE issues. In particulary, the default spacing tag is now back to <br> instead of <p>
5. Areas of Focus selection - We noticed that if there was a validation error when creating a new entity profile (org/job/event/etc), the Areas of Focus selections would not save correctly. We've fixed that issue and the selection process should be much more forgiving.

For our next release (Release 13), we'll be working on improving our jobs feature. Stay tuned.

March 5th, 2008

Some of you may be wondering how we implement word-processing features like "bold", "italics", "font size", etc into the toolbar that's available when you edit the "About" sections. It's all thanks to the magic of TinyMCE, which is what web developers call a "WYSIWYG" tool. WYSIWYG is an acronym that stands for "What You See Is What You Get", meaning that changes you make to an html web page will show up as you have laid it out. There are no perfect WYSIWYG tools - not all of them work as advertised, but they tend to make HTML editing much more accessible to the average user. Best of all, TinyMCE is an open source software offerred freely to any website to use.

With Release 11, we upgraded our existing version of TinyMCE to version 3.0, which should eliminate some nagging bugs we had with the toolbar. It'll also allow us to eventually offer more formatting and linking options for comments and discussion forums.

But what I'd like to draw your attention to is this very nifty file upload progress meter we just implemented. Previously, when uploading a file, you didn't have much feedback as to the completion rate, nor would it tell you beforehand if the file exceeded our size limit. It could lead to a very frustrating upload experience, particularly because you had to wait till the full file was uploaded before our server could check the file size.

For our File Upload feature, we now have a progress meter that shows your completion rate. It will also check beforehand to make sure your file falls within our file size limit, and will notify our users if it does not.

For groups, we now have an outbox for sent messages. Group administrators and editors who have used the mass messaging feature will now have an option to "View Sent Messages", and be able to look up what they have already sent to their group members.

One last note - for those who might be experiencing a javascript error, that's partly due to the new changes we implemented on the site. This error can be fixed by refreshing your browser's cache, which is done by pressing Control Key + Refresh (F5) on a PC, or Command Key (Apple Key) + Refresh (F5) on a Mac. Depending on your browser, there may be different methods of doing so. Contact support@wiserearth.org if you come across any difficulties.

February 25th, 2008

File uploads are here! Our latest technical release cycle, Release 10, had over 35 technical tickets that improved features across our site, but the most requested and most noticeable change is our addition of the File Upload feature.

Now, for just about every feature on our website, whether it's an organization profile, job posting, event listing, or group content, you can upload files, tag them with keywords and a description, and allow others to download these files. We've set the file size limit to be comfortable 50mb per file, to make room for podcasts, mp3 audio files, video files, or really huge PDF reports.

Other noticeable fixes that are part of Release 10:

RSS feeds for topics -

As part of our experimental try with RSS feeds, now forums topics available! Look for the RSS icon in a discussion forum, and by clicking on it, you can add that feed to your RSS feeder, or turn it into a live bookmark that will automatically update if any activity has registered in the topic. Check it out - it's a cool feature, and complements the watchlist in many ways.

Internal messages - clicking reply includes the message received. Basically, when you click reply to a message, the text of the message will show up in your reply, to better remind your message recipient what was the context of the message that you're replying to. It works just like email.

My groups drop-down menu - For those users who have join many groups, the drop-down menu will now feature a vertical scrollbar if your list of groups is very long. Users can now scroll down the list of groups to access the ones listed at the bottom.

Searching for users by full names - we've tweaked the search engine to also check the full name of a user, rather than just the user name. This will improve the accuracy of search results.

User De-Activation - to help curb spam, user accounts will now be de-activated immediately once the action is taken by an administrator. If any user is suspected of sending spam, we will be able to stop them on the spot.

Comments - We made some revisions to access to private comments. Previously, if a comment was flagged for review, both WE editors and administrators could view these comments and take action. However, since some of these comments are flagged in a private group, we decided to restrict access to just WE administrators (as opposed to group administrators/editors).
We also made some improvements to the comment box. Now, if a user hasn't typed anything in it, the post comment button won't be active, preventing users from accidentally sending in comments with nothing in the field. Once a user starts typing in the comment box, the "post comment" button will become active.
Another improvement we made to comments was to accommodate long strings of text. If a user posts a long url or something that stretches beyond the boundary of the comment box, a horizontal scroll bar will appear and users can scroll left and right to read the rest of the comment.

Group mass messages - To help make it easier for users to jump to a group, the group name that appears in the footer of group messages will be hyperlinked. Users can just click on it and jump directly to the group.

Group admins have a new tutorial - If you're logged in and go visit a group that you're an administrator of, you'll see a link to the right of "admin tools" that says "Group Admin Tutorial". We set up this tutorial as a 5 step tutorial, explaining to admins all the features available to them and what tips/ideas they can use to better help the group grow.

Member Referral groups - We realized we had left out the "member referral" button when updating our groups the last time around. Now, a member can click on the "About" tab and there'll be a blue button up top that they can click on to refer a friend to the group.

We also had a bevy of bug fixes, including cancel membership fixes, uploading images improvements, and a few other issues across the site that is now hopefully laid to rest.

Upcoming for the next release (Release 11) - an upgrade to our toolbar options when editing the "About Section", and archiving sent messages for group mass messages.

February 11th, 2008

We have just been hit with our first major wave of spam attacks, primarily from 3 users - angel4Love, gukama, and norahkofia. These three users created accounts quite recently and sent messages to over 100 WiserEarth members. Luckily, the response from the community has been tremendous. Everyone has rallied around and posted notifications to the WiserEarth team, as well as hosting discussions and wikipages to warn others of these fraudulent emails. All 3 users have had their accounts de-activated, though some residual messages may still go through. We urge that anyone who has received these messages to simply delete them. We've also compiled a record of their messages, so that our users can always see what the messages were about.

We're also considering preventative measures, but we don't want to hamstring our user base simply because of a few bad apples. But, if you have ideas, please feel free to send them to support@wiserearth.org. But so far, we've been amazed at the collective unity of the community in response to these spammers - what great spirit!

January 28, 2008

We just improved a few of our existing functionality:
1. Mail alert - now, when you are alerted by email of an internal message, you can read the message in your email without having to log on to WiserEarth and checking your inbox!

2. WiserEarth welcome emails have been removed of sensitive username/password information. We used to include this in our welcome email, but we realize that given the un-encrypted nature of email text, it was probably a security issue.

3. Forums - when you're creating a new topic, there will be a "keep me updated" checkbox. If you check that, your topic will automatically be placed on your Watchlist, and you'll get email alerts that notify you of when someone has replied to the topic.

4. Groups - Join group membership buttons: We've noticed a lot of users not seeing where they would join a group or apply for membership. We've moved the join/accept buttons out from their previous location in the upper right corner and made it more prominent and bold. Hopefully, this should now make it readily apparent how they can sign up for a group.

5. Groups - Pending applications/referrals will send email notifications to the group administrators. Now, if someone has applied to join your group, or a member has referred that person to join your group, the group administrators will get an email alert notifying them of this event.

6. Events - we added in "meetings" to the list of types of events, and also fixed some timestamp issues with events.

Overall, we worked on usability fixes across the site, and we hope these fixes will smoothly translate into the site working more along the expectations of our users. Release 9 is scheduled to have our file uploading feature, as well as possible improvements to our personal profile layout. More on that as we work through this current release!

January 21, 2008

Over the past few weeks, we have noticed intermittent issues with the WiserEarth website, and some users have come across a few of these problems. With our latest release cycle, we have seemingly found a solution to the issue, so the website should be up and running.

For Release 7, we had our usual assortment of bug fixes and enhancements, with the Watchlist activity report being the most prominent. Now, when you look at your profile, and click on activity reports, you'll notice that your Watchlist report is being presented in sentences that more accurately describes the change that happened. You can always view the more detailed, more inclusive report by clicking on the "detail We'll work on transitioning this view into the email report very soon.

For groups, we amended a few bugs that had slipped through the production line. Removal of forum topics has been fixed, as any application/membership issues. We also made sure the group invites to people are going out successfully, and we renamed "History" to "Activity Log" so that people wouldn't confuse that tab with the history of the group versus the activities of all members in the group.

One last thing that we also amended was the auto-complete entries for filling out cities. We noticed that the list had become encumbered with mispelled entries, and was being more a hindrance than a helpful feature. We have turned that off across the site, so you will no longer have to navigate around it.

For upcoming release 8, we are working on File Uploads, and looking into how much more we should develop the Watchlist feature. We're also redesigning the layout of the right-hand sidebar, to make the actions like "Add to your watchlist" and "Invite to groups" a more prominent feature. Lastly, we have a new design in place to better alert people of how they can join a group. We'll be moving the sign-up section to someplace much more visible.

January 8th, 2008

We have been experiencing issues with loading images in the last 12 hours.
We thank you for your patience, we are currently looking into the problem.

January 7th, 2008

A Happy New Year to everyone - we've just updated our website with the latest set of enhancements and bug fixes. So far, we have added the following:

Sent messages folder to archive any outgoing messages
"Wider" wikipages - on wikipages, users can now get rid of the right-hand sidebar and use that space for content instead.
Group Admin tutorial - Creators of groups will get an email directing them to our Group Admin Tutorials.
Page status indicators - If a page has been locked, marked as duplicate, or had its status changed in any other way, it'll show up next to the timestamp box on the top right corner.
Bug fixes - image upload, user profile editing, watchlist "off" setting

December 26th, 2007

Happy Holidays to all our members and visitors. We just put up 3 major overhauls across our site - one to our user profile pages, another to our "Watchlist" feature, and the last to our "Networking" interface.

User Profile pages - we consolidated our tabs down to a much more cleaner and intuitive set. Users will just see "Main | Inbox | Photos | User Settings | Activity Reports " when viewing their own profile page.
Watchlist - now watchlisted items are emailed to our members via an email digest that they can set to be daily, weekly, monthly or off. To do so, go over to the "User Settings" tab on your profile. If you are looking to add items to your watchlist, look for the grey eye icon on the upper right, usually placed next to the "Created" field. We'll work on making this more prominent and more easily findable in a later revision.
Networking - we've instituted "Permission-based" networking across our site when connecting from a person to another person. Now, if someone wishes to add you to their network, they'll have to send you a friend invitation request, which you can accept/decline.

Also, one change that was small but heavily requested was the ability to remove discussion topics from the group's main page. Now, group administrators can click on the "Manage Content" tab and they'll be able to remove topics as needed.

December 20th, 2007

Last month's statistics were quite interesting.
-For the first time, the number of visits from people in the US was almost equaled by the number of visits from people outside the US - 51% US visits vs 49% International visits. One of the goals for WiserEarth is to serve the global community rather than just the community in the US, so this is a major milestone.
-Out of the 49% international visits, the most non-US visits came from the UK (7% compared to 3% the month before). Both Mexico and the Netherlands have doubled the number of site visits since the previous month (from 1% of all visits to 2% for the month).
-The month of November saw the greatest increase in community members to date.
-There are 59 discussions on WiserEarth covering a total of 249 topics. There are 220 WiserEarth groups.

December 5th, 2007

We'd like to welcome and introduce our latest addition to the technical development team, developer Rehan Iftikhar. Rehan's first major project will solely be focused on preparing our source code for release, so that the open-source community can finally download our source code and take a peek under the WiserEarth engine. We anticipate that this could take anywhere from 3-4 months (hopefully by March 2008) for Rehan to familiarize himself with the code base, and to prepare it for release.

November 29th, 2007

For this release, we focused on enhancing features on the site that were heavily used, such as the user signup process, the commenting section, and making it easier for people to access their groups. We also laid some groundwork for our upcoming Email Alerts Notification feature by implementing an "Email Confirmation" request on our site.

The reason for this to ensure anyone who signs up with an email address is the actual owner of that email. Only after the user has confirmed their email (by clicking on a special link), will they then be able to receive email alerts. This helps prevent someone else from using another person's email address and using it maliciously to forward unwanted alerts to the unsuspecting person.

Without further ado, here's a list of updates on the website:

My Groups - hovering over the link brings a drop-down menu to show what groups you can jump directly to
Users - Confirmation message after signing up to verify their email is eligible for receiving alerts
Comments - Now, when users type in a web address, that web address (i.e. www.google.com) will become automatically a hyperlink for them. Anyone who reads it will be able to click on that text and go to the webpage address
Areas of Focus - We added Up and Down arrows on the right side of the Areas of Focus selection box, which allows them to rank their Areas of Focus as desired
Homepage - Updated our homepage with our latest survey link
New User Sign-up - We noticed a lot of users being frustrated with having to type in the security code again when they were trying to sign-up. Now, if they've entered it correctly the first time, it'll be "remembered" and they won't have to enter it again

November 21st 2007

For this release, we addressed some of our most common usability issues, including the Areas of Focus selection process and the ability to invite multiple people to join WiserEarth or join your group:

1. Areas of Focus selection process - Users can now select multiple Areas of Focus by holding control key (on a PC) or command key (on a Mac) keys and clicking on each additional AoF. We redesigned the interface using left and right arrows to make the selection process more intuitive.

2. Invite emails - both personal and group invites: We redid the layout of the invites, so that now you'll see the person's name in the "From" field, and also their email address in the "Reply-To" section. For the personal invites, we added a header that says something like "[Username], a member of WiserEarth, has sent you an invitation" to better introduce who's sent you the invitation.

3. Ability to invite multiple people at once - as part of our first iteration, we expanded the text box field so that now you can type in multiple email addresses at once (separated by commas). You can use this to invite people that are both members of WiserEarth or have not signed up yet - our system is smart enough to check email addresses and send invitations to both.

4. New users going straight to invited groups - To address the issue of people who sign up and can't find their way to the group they were invited to, any new user that has been invited to a group will be taken directly to the group's homepage after successful registration.

November 16th 2007

A summary of the WiserEarth survey that has been running on the site is now available in the WikiPage section. Please take a look and share any observations or comments you may have.

November 13th 2007 - Usability Fixes

We were fortunate enough to be invited to the FLOSS (Free/Libre/ Open Source Software) Usability conference, where we came with many terrific and immediate ideas on improving our user interface. One big particular area we've been focusing on is improving our search engine, and the way results are presented to users. Thanks to all our FLOSS usability experts for their feedback - here's the latest batch of tickets we pushed live to production.

Search:
We added more options for people to customize the look of their searches - namely allowing them to show more than 10 search results per page, adding a list of page numbers along the top, and adding a "Relevancy Match" meter to show how accurate your search results are.
Also, one big change is that people were clicking on the entities under the main search bar [All | Organizations | People | etc] and not getting anything out of it. We made those links "action-able", so that clicking on them will initiate a search. A small change, but really will address the first clicks people are doing when searching.

Email my messages:
We've changed all profiles to have the "Email my messages" turned on. Since most people don't realize they can turn it on or don't know where to go, we'll make it turned on by default.

Sign-in Prompt:
Now, when an unsigned-in person clicks on an edit link and gets the "sign-in" prompt, there's a few sentences explaining why they have to sign-in. What we noticed was that organizational reps would come to our site wanting to edit their profile, click on edit, get a sign-in prompt and would think they needed a special username/password to proceed. In other words, they would never realize WiserEarth is a wiki-site where they would need to create their own profile to edit content. These few lines of text will hopefully address that scenario.

October 31st 2007

[Enhancements] Search module added to Groups!
Our latest addition to Groups is a Search module that only searches through the content of your group. To add this feature in, go to a group that you're an administrator of, mouse over to "Admin Tools" and check "Customize Layout". If you click on the "Add Content" link, a sidebar will pop up and you'll be able to drag and drop over the new Search module anywhere on the page you like.

October 25th 2007

[Enhancements] Groups continue to develop and change. Last night the tech team made their latest work live, so you may see some changes when you are viewing your groups.

The Top Header which usually contains the search bar is now replaced with your groups title and introductory information. That environment will remain as you work within your group. You will not be lead out to WiserEarth. All the information contained in your group will be viewed as a separate entity yet still remain in WiserEarth, hidden. This assists for those of you who wish to use WiserEarth as a main organizing tool for your Organization. Talk to me about incorporating your WiserEarth Group into your existing website.
For further organizing you can create Related Groups, which reside within a group. By adding a new group, you are creating a sub-group that maintains all the normal function of your current groups. The only difference is its inherent location to the group from which it was created.

The image on the right depicts the structure of how the new Related Groups feature works.

If you are an Admin of a group you can add a Related Groups module to the homepage of your groups. These new groups will always be linked to the original and have no limit to how many within each that you create. If you wish to create a new group separate from your others, return to WiserEarth and select Create a Group from the left menu.

ATTN: The Related Group, Map, and Bulletin Board modules are not defaulted. You must add them to your home page in order to use them.

Here are some basic instructions on how to add the group module to your group in order to begin creating groups within groups. The following explains how administrators of a group can do this.

1. Mouse over the "Admin Tools" link on the right and select "Custom Layout".

2. Then on the left, next to the "Save Changes" and "Cancel" buttons, choose "Add content".

3. A menu will popup on the left from which you can drag the "Related Groups" (or "Map" and "Bulletin Board - not shown") module into your group's home page.

After you have successfully moved the module(s) into your group's home page, if you haven't already, this is a good time to move the modules around. You can arrange them as it suits your group's activity and you may also decide not to use a particular module by clicking the x in the top right corner of the module itself.
Dragging and Dropping modules have been enhanced and made little easier for you that are Admins of groups. Go to the Admin Tools >> Custom Layout.
Inviting People to your groups has been developed further as well. You can now invite people from WiserEarth more efficiently and invite people directly to your group who have not yet heard or signed up for WiserEarth. Look for the Group External Invite and you may invite other via email addresses which also searches for them in WiserEarth, in case they are already a member. You can also now invite users of WiserEarth more easily by clicking the link on their profile Add to Groups.

As always if you have any questions or need assistance you can contact Adam.

October 17th 2007

[New Feature] The groups remains a focus of our current development effort, and more is yet to come. We, here at NCI, have heard a lot of suggestions from the users and hope to continue to hear about how the Groups can best serve them. The most recent updates include a bulletin board that can be added to a groups home page, a visual map that reveals location of group members, and an easier interface for organizing the groups content. Look at some of the public groups for ideas on how you can make your group more useful.

October 9th 2007

[New Feature] The groups have been enhanced and users now have more control of the data in their groups. Administrators and Editors have may notice a new tab when viewing their group page called Manage Content. It features an automatically generated list of all the information on WiserEarth related to your group's chosen areas of focus. This means that you no longer have to search for relevant data to post to your group. it comes to your doorstep. Just add to group or exclude from list. If you add or subtract an area of focus in your group the list of Suggested Content will change accordingly.

In addition, administrators have two new tools that provide more options for their groups. A Manage Members tab and more Admin Tools which includes a customizable layout.

Using the Customize Layout, you may drag the modules into any location on the group home page and select which ones are active and how many results are shown. If you have any problems please contact adam.

[New Feature] Also, as promised you can now more easily Invite Friends to WiserEarth. On your personal profile, you will see the tab to invite up to five people at a time.
[Another New Feature] A Gallery tab for images and photos has been added to every entity across the site. That means event postings, resources, jobs, and wikipages can store a photo library. This can be really cool particularly for events. Showing off the previous related events people and things or highlighting what is to come. The gallery tab also includes all the images that are uploaded intended to be in the about section but you may use this just to show off interesting photos as the name infers.

October 3rd 2007

[coming soon]Users will be able to invite friends and collegues easily to join WiserEarth. If you have suggestions about this feature please give them.
[coming soon] With the advent of Groups came many new ideas for how to make this an even more valuable resource. In the next wave of changes administrators of groups will be able to customize the homepage of their group. The next release is expected to be in two weeks.
[coming soon] A restored and renovated portal is long overdue. The new design will be functional and available to users in two weeks. The redesign promotes the vast knowledge of our users and offers a simple interface for communication and awareness of the issues. Check your areas of focus portals in a couple weeks.

October 1st 2007

[Media/Outreach] Postcards in English about WiserEarth are available for download on our Spread the Word page.

September 25th 2007

[Update] Groups are continuing to be redesigned. The layout and functionality will continue to be enhanced for the next few weeks. You can join in on the ideas and developments by making a suggestion.
[Community] We have begun the taking on the task of inviting all the organizations listed here on WiserEarth. If you would like to know more about our outreach efforts contact peggy or melinda.

September 18th 2007

[New Feature] WiserEarth groups are LIVE on the site. WiserEarth groups offer the ability for two or more people who share a common affinity within the nonprofit community to come together. Each group is able to create its own unique space where it can set up dicussions, share or post resources, collaborate on projects and engage in ongoing conversation. Existing networks can link to groups on WiserEarth from their website, or use a WiserEarth group to replace the need for a website altogether.

For more information about groups, WiserEarth Groups.

August 28th 2007

[Coming Soon] WiserEarth groups. Through groups, WiserEarth members will be able to have access to a growing body of information flitered in the group on an ongoing basis. You will be able to grow your network, participate in discussions and create content relevant to your interest.

August 3rd 2007

[Enhancement] New home page design. Let us know what you think by adding your comments to the User Feedback page.

July 13th 2007

[Enhancement] We've added a couple new fields to Job Postings, such as Level of position, Salary, and Duration of position. Salary is an open-ended text field because some positions pay weekly, monthly, etc.

June 22 2007

[Enhancement] A lof of you suggested that we enhance the registration process. It is now shorter and much simpler. More improvement is possible, share your suggestions with adam.

June 20 2007

[New Feature] The wysiwyg function is now live on the site. Any editing in the wiki-text can be accomplished without knowing any html code at all. If you find any bugs or run into a problem using the new feature contact adam.

June 15th, 2007

[Update] We are currently working on making the sign up process easier so please be patient with us. Coming soon, you will be able to easily invite your friends on WiserEarth.

June 1, 2007

[BUG ALERT] Editing your About section of your personal profile issue. If your edit button does not open up the box, scroll your page down to the bottom left then press the edit button. For more help contact adam.

May 30, 2007

[New Feature] My Network automation and is complete. Check out the My Network Guide for more information.
[New Feature] Forums are now up and running. The community of users may now begin conversations about any topic and relate them to areas of focus, keywords or entities. For more on how to use the Forums, read the [a::Forum Guide].

May 29, 2007

[transparency] The Editor's Page has recently been updated. Search through the links and find your way to make this website work for the whole community.

May 24, 2007

[Community] WiserEarth has more than 1000 people signed up!

May 23, 2007

[Community] Translations of the site are underway. Please visit the Multilingual page to see what is available now or to see how you can help.
[BUG ALERT] The comment section is temporarily disabled for reconstruction. It should be back online tomorrow.
[BUG ALERT] Sign-in recently disabled. Currently enabled to full working status. If you are still having difficulty contact adam.

May 16, 2007

[transparency] All major features in development and conversation by NCI are visible to the community.
[transparency] A new section has been added to the editor's page, Standards and Procedures. This houses the library of resources which define the structure of the site.
[transparency] The tech teams activities are now completely transparent to the community and viewable in the General Tech Report.
[community] Partcipate in creating WiserEarth and ad your opinions to the Deliberations. They are ready to go forward. Also view the method to the madness flowchart.
[tech] The Bugs Report Page is working for you now! check this page for updates and postings of problems on the site.
[Organizations] We have made it to 100,000 Orgs!!! Congratulations to all those who contributed to the directory.
[Personal Profiles] Update small avatars by viewing photos and reselecting the image by clicking set avatar.
[Community] The democratization process has begun being developed. Check it out.
[Community] The suggestion box and the question box are fully formatted and ready to collect info from the community. This will bring us closer to the ability to make decisions about the site collectively. Access it right here on the editor's page.
[IRC] The IRC channel is fully functional and can be accessed by all.
[Community] invitation email has been sent to the beta testers on Yesterday April 4th!! Congratulations everyone on your hard work!
[Technical] We have just finished the process of setting up 6 dedicated servers for WiserEarth.
[User profile] We are currently working on the registration process, hoping to make it easy and fast, while respecting your privacy.
[Internal messaging] You can now exchange internal messages with community members within WiserEarth
[Editor's community] There are now 36 active editors within our community.

Comments (1 - 2 of 2)

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bowo about 1 month ago

I share your fascination too Mohammed. Thank you for helping to get the word out about WiserEarth. Best wishes with the important work that you do.

Bowo