TGIF Chat: Do you like the changes Gather made?

You know, I can't really answer that. From where I sit I don't see much different.. and I tried to edit it... well, either I can't access it or I'm impatient. After a long time I gave up on it loading... so, I suppose I cannot really form an opinion on it.

Right now I dislike the lag/inability to edit it..

ping,ping, ping,ping,ping,
what ever it is, I hope it works better then the rater, its giving me an overstack error every time I rate

Wow. It sounds like you need to contact Gather and tell them about the problems you're having Jennifer and Deborah!

Michelle, from the Gather "help" page:

What are Pings?
Pings are notes that other Gather members can leave on your profile. You can also leave Pings on other people's profiles. It's a great way to say "hi" to someone you know and meet others who interest you.

Can I control who can "Ping Me"?
By default, any Gather member can Ping you. You can control your Ping settings using the "edit settings" link at the top right of the "Ping Me" area of your profile. Choose to let just your connections Ping you, or restrict Pings by unselecting the "allow Pings on my profile" checkbox. Want to know when you get a new Ping? Just leave that option on in your email preference settings.
You can also choose to approve Pings before they appear. If you turn this option on in your Email Preference settings, you'll be notified when new Pings need your review.

Can I delete unwanted Pings?
Yes. You can delete any Ping posted to your profile, plus any Ping you post on someone else's. Just click the "delete Ping" link under the member icon image. But realize that once a Ping is deleted, it's gone forever!

I have not noticed any changes, but I rarely look at the profile page anyway, lol.

Some changes I'd like to see are...
1. An edit feature for comments
2. The choice of "last page" as a link when you are viewing another members content.
3. A link somewhere for "groups I own"

I haven't looked at it yet.

went to the Aide Station and left a message. I can work around just about anything, just a little annoying, like my spelling :)

I didn't even check the changes yet...I will..

Okay, I went and checked it out.

Kind of odd to look at part of my profile when I access my gather content area. Wish there was a way to collapse that when it's our own profile.

The Ping feature is odd. At first I thought it was a private messaging chat, but the comments post on your profile. The default setting is that anyone can leave a ping. So I changed that to only my connections. I'm not sure what purpose this serves unless it's like a form of comment on your profile content.

I like the tagline feature though. Now people won't have to add all that stuff in between their first name and last initial. They can simply use the tagline.

I read mine but I couldn't tell if the profile were different or not. Just shows where I'm not paying attention. :-)

Well, here's my two cents. I looked at but haven't tried to use any of the features, e.g. "ping". I think it looks great and I like the arrangement and format. I too would like to be able to edit my comments and also be able to move pictures to the front so that they will be viewed more often.

I also would like Gather to tell us more about the point system. Such as, how are points determined for each post. How many points are awarded for each action. For example: If I post a picture or a comment, how many points do I get. Also what are the things for which points are awarded?

BTW, Goooooooooood Mornin all you wonderful people and you too Lydia :-)

Sorry for being away for a couple of days. I am on a new medication and it has been working on my mind. Makes me wobbley and can't think straight. I was wandering around somewhere out there in outer space and wasn't paying attention and stepped into a "black hole". Wow, what an experience. Do you know what's in a black hole?
No. Neither do I. I don't know what happened in there but when I came out I had to pee and I was hungry.
So, here I am. Ready to open my big mouth and stick my foot in it. Yep

Not really sure yet, I can't seem to find time to stay on here lately.

Well this is my third response to pinging. Guess I better work on upgrading my mind to understand what this is all about.

For the most part, I like Gather and I also had the same opinion as you, Lydia when the shutting down rumors where going on. If there was one thing that I would like to change, I guess it would be the ability to review who gave bad ratings. Personally I couldn't care less but it does seem to upset many members of my clan. Perhaps they should reverse it and not allow you to rate without a comment. Maybe that would slow down the trolls?

I dont understand the changes yet. So far from what I have seen of last nights, I dont like that one. If we are going to have a ping thing, why are we not told. What does it do and what will it accomplish.

The ping thing is like a myspace profile where you have comments on your actual profile. The problem I have found annoying today, and it would appear that others are also having the same problem, is that extra space is inserted in my article despite everything I've tried to do to remove it!

Harrel, it seems that since I cashed out for gift cards my points are CRAWLING along, LOL

You are so funny! Glad to have you back. Careful with those meds!

Lots of good suggestions here.
: )

I'm going to IGFA to volunteer for the rest of the morning, but I'll catch up with everyone this evening and hope everyone has a great day!

I think the changes to our profiles are kind of neat. I can't wait to see how well the ping feature goes over.

by the way I found out that are no points for pings, so why ping?

Kinks are getting better

Wow new burps,cool whatever,I just wish I could publish. Pings why keep up with the Jones? Seems as though there is just new problems, lol I let you know how I feel about all this later.

Ok i cant click my tag line and when I click edit it just keeps saying loading???

I also wish they would add a section to putour aol instant messenge and it would show wether we are onine in case we need to get a hold of someone quick.

also since the upgrades it tells me i have group invites etc then i click and nothing is there?

Thanks for clarifying the ping deal...I think it may just be a new way for the trolls to get to you though...hopefully not!

Have a great day Lydia!!

I agree with you Esther. Just another way to slam a member, however, it wouldn't be anonymous.

One other change I noticed and DO NOT like is that when you view your people, there is no longer when they joined or when they last signed into Gather. I don't know why they would take that away!

I didn't know they had made changes. I will; have to go and check them out.

Thanks for explaining the "ping" thing, Lydia. I was really lost about what it was. I'll go check it out now.

since the latest up date i am having problems approving comments it keeps locking up and it had never done that before!

I haven't tried the "Ping" feature yet, but that might come in handy sometime, for use in lieu of sending a private email.


changes I would like

1. The ability to click on page numbers when content spans more than one page. Although I'm normally interested in the most recent articles and images, sometimes I like to go deeper and look at something that's been there for a longer time. This currently involves clicking on the "Next" button perhaps several times to get at what I'm looking for. Clicking on a page number would make accessing such an article or image much faster when I already have an idea how deep it is.

2. Ease of article editing.
The editor that is provided for editing articles is temperamental.
The link to the html editor is very stubborn; it takes several clicks on the "html" link before it opens up. When it finally does, I have to copy text from Notepad before copy and paste operations function. Why that is is a mystery to me; it doesn't make sense to me that I should have to do that first.
I've had occasions when an article fails to publish after I click on "Publish" and, instead, gets deleted. When that happens, all changes made since the last time it was saved as draft are lost.

3. On the subject of publishing, I don't like having to scroll though the list of groups to select which ones to publish to. The checkboxes worked much better for me when it was done that way before. I still think that it would be convenient to have pre-selected collections of groups, set by the member, for publishing of certain types of articles. For example, if someone wishes to publish a "game", one checkbox could select chosen game groups - all with one click, rather than having to select them all individually.


Btw, I hope that Gather is not going away. One possible reason for making frequent changes is to desperately look for something to work, when the current setup is producing inadequate results.

I think it's cool, I hope my computer's memory doesn't quit on me, though.

I need to check it out a little more. One thing I would like to see changes is the way we choose what groups we are going to publish to. I hate having to click click click so much!!

Just updated mine ... go see, go see! Let me know how I did. I don't really understand the whole "ping" thing unless they're just comments on your profile, kind of like on MySpace, but OK. I'll roll with it. I already have one --- yay!

So far I am not very impressed ...although I haven't had a lot of time to explore as of yet, so I could change my views somewhat.

The profile updating setup is too complex, and requires way too many steps to update your profile. I think this will turn off newer members. Also, some obvious profile entities are not available within people search, which I think is a big oversight.

The 'ping' function is nice, but if you turn off email notifications for pings you should check your profile occasionally for snarky/anonymous pings. I am actually relying upon the ping capability for something I am rolling out this weekend in the Community Event Calendar. You will be able to send 'g'ift pings to members recognizing them for various traits or accomplishments. ...so I'm glad that it's finally here.

If I think of anything else, I'll be back!

I'll go look right now. Haven't had time to go see the new changes yet, but thanks for pointing out where they are. Now I won't have to search. :)

All views subject to change Kevin.
Lydia thanks for the info.

Its to soon for me to comment on these changes, but usually I dont like changes unless they are for the better.

I'm okay about the changes, but think there are far too many other more important changes that need to be addressed that have been listed above.

The photos in albums idea is so awesome - that would be a great improvement. I just logged into Gather so I'm off to see how the profile is different.

I think its great! It allows me to read about people and has more info so I cane get to know them better! Kinda like myspacebut not as much info to put in.

I haven't tried it yet i'll be back to put my two cents in soon enough, Do we get points for pings?

I think Gather has been noticed by publishers enough that as long as they are able to manage things they will be around.

I'm not sure about the pings.

It would be nice to be able to put our groups into folders so if we want to see what is happening in similar groups we would just have to go to that folder. The same would be helpful for people.

I'm still finding my way around. I see that with the new changes, when viewing other's namepages, the information seems garbled because Gather has combined previously separate items.

Thanks for sharing the imformation..

so far i like the new changes... things seem bigger and clearer... i think...
have a nice day...

Haven't ever touched it yet, so no idea what's different.

So far I am confused as to what the ping thingy is for. Is it to keep the comments that aren't comments on works off? I tried it once to talk to a connection and was surprised to see our comments published. I thought is was to communicate quickly and not have to form an email. Boy was I wrong LOL I had to delete a ping that was of the personal sort. Thx for the info! I'll return for more updates.

Let's see. I see no purpose in the ping thing other than to attract younger folks maybe. Doesn't interest me.

I hate the formatting on my articles posted today. Too many spaces between paragraphs.

I cannot get to my profile to update it, so I haven't looked at anyone else's figuring some folks might have the same problem.

I hate that they took away the info about when someone joined and last signed on that used to be visible on their namespace page.

Now...I would like to see more ability to organize everything - articles, pictures, videos, groups.

It would be great if, instead of hundreds of pages of our own writing, there could be a list (linked/clickable) without all the information about how many views and ratings each one has. With just the titles, you should be able to have 50 on a page.

I had not heard that the site was closing or selling out. But, I have worked at companies where they add products, people, lots of things before selling out - to make the package better for the new buyers.

And...the very first site where I got paid as a writer closed down without notice. They never gave us the "opportunity" to write without paying. Many of us would have done that. They just announced that if we had not saved our writings to our own computers, that we had 5 days to do so. (Pity the person who was on vacation, huh?) They shut down business owing us money we'll never see. (That was back in 2000.)

I'm not happy with the formatting of articles. What's with the extra spaces?

To be honest I haven't even had a chance to look yet

I haven't caught up with all the changes yet, but it is gather's option to make whatever
changes they want. I read that in tos.

Trish, I had thought about putting similar groups together, but it didn't occur to me to also do the same thing with a collection of people. Does make sense though, that way you could set a specific group of people to send different things to. Like one for religious stuff, another for political, etc.

Marilyn, the ping thing is nice if you want to just tell the world what you think of a person, etc. I like it because we can make comments based on the profile's content, too. (Like if we read the same book or like the same music)

As for the stuff they took from the Namespace page, it's still there, but now it's been moved to the profile page, that's all.

Your idea for the organization of articles, etc. is awesome... but I like the idea Edward mentioned too, about having page numbers to click on instead of having to go through all of them also. I think those two ideas combined would work best.

i havent had much time yet to really check out all the new features, but i don't see anything that is any real big improvement or benefit. The only thing I wanted to see was a way make managing which groups we publish which article to a lot easier.. being able to make groups of groups by type, and then being able to publish to all the groups within a group with one or two clicks.. and as I see by A LOT of other people's commnents I'm not the only one who wishes for that. The albums for the photos would be a great thing too ..as well as listing a member's photos individually on a page, to make it easier to get to them all. Then the older stuff would get seen too, not just the most recent few.

Well, it looks to me like we're trying to keep up with the other kids.

Instead of this window-dressing I'd like to see some REAL changes:

1. A Bulletin/Discussion Board within Gather, for Gather members, to ask questions of the management, and expect timely answers (I have a dickens of a time getting answers to my concerns and questions).
2. An edit feature on comments.
3. A special option of tiny thumbnails to show more images/articles per page when searching our own content (not other member's content)
4. The option of not having ANY reference to videos on my personal Gather page (or any other feature I don't want to use)
5. An option to not allow pings!!

I have been off here alot lately! I noticed a ping button and stuff. I think an album for pictures would be AWESOME! make it much easier for people to see what they are looking for specifically!!

Jimmie, you can turn pings off in your profile settings. Just go to the section that says "Ping Me" and then click on "change settings" and deselect the box that says "Allow Pings on my profile"

Going to take a look now.

Wow! This is the 7th most viewed article at the moment!
: )

What Marianne said.

I only wish they made adding groups to an image or article easier. That is the only thing I could change

I like all of Jimmie's suggestions and I most likely will turn off the ping function.

I didn't know they had gotten rid of the "last sign in date" on our lists of "our people". I use that every so often to disconnect from people who are no longer on Gather. Hope it can be replaced in a future update. It would be rather time consuming to go to each profile and check the last sign in date. I wish that would have been kept on the person's front page instead of having to go to their profile and look for it.

Now there's a link there that I hadn't seen before. It says "view my people's activity" and results in a list of what your connections have done most recently... interesting. VERY interesting... wow. I'm glad they decided not to clutter up the home page with that stuff like facebook does.

The only thing I have found easier to do is publish an image to an article.

I haven't investigated it yet. I will have to do that after I finish going through my emails.

Lydia,

I can't say enough good things about Gather. It's an almost spam free resource that is available at no cost. It provides a wide audience too. How can you beat this?

Alexander

Alexander, I agree with you. Not just the friendliness and the lack of spam but the $$ or gift cards too. I've gotten $95 worth of GC so far!

I haven't seen the changes yet, but look forward to getting my feet wet in the profile add ons.

It's pretty nifty... but I can see where people with older computers or dialup might havev significant difficulties.

sure