Official EOS Blog

June Barrie said:
Sunday, August 29, 2010 @ 10:18 AM

this would be an excellent idea but at moment some people on our community forum are not actually owners. I have been trying to collect individual email addresses so I can just email owners and not the others who view our site. We have no objection to others viewing our site but there are some things we have to keep just to us

image designer said:
Sunday, August 29, 2010 @ 11:26 AM

- group communication always properly moderated, there should be a group admin who anyone can contact

- opt out option on the bottom of the community email msg

- emails kept private (of course)

Those are my suggestions and it will be a great feature of EOS

Paulb said:
Sunday, August 29, 2010 @ 3:53 PM

Justin,
You have a very powerful tool here in the EOS. Used properly, it is fantastic, used wrongly, it is very destructive. Therefore, I propose some Q´s to you;
How would you know who is president of the community, therefore having permission to send out to all?

How would you know the president had the best interests of the community, not personal gain?

If certain members of the community wanted to change the president/administrators, the tool you are offering would be perfect for them to use, but again, how would you know of their intentions?

How would you know who are members of individual "sub communities" as for example in Roda Golf, the are a whole number of communities?

There is a MASSIVE problem here in Spain that MOST owners have NO idea of their responsibility to either themselves, or the community, in that they NEVER attend their AGM's. Giving the tool to use to either the admin, president or others, would be a great asset, of sorts, if used in the right manor. Giving the same tool to those who would like to change the president/administrators would also be equally, if not more than, appealing.

Are you as EOS really in a position to offer this service without really knowing who is who in the individual communities??

Justin said:
Monday, August 30, 2010 @ 10:07 AM

Thanks for your comments. I think there are two different points here.

One is, who can email EVERYONE following a community and secondly, how to contact ONLY owners of a community.

Our proposed facility would enable contacting everyone who is following a community, ie., those that have added that community to their profile.

We don't know out of those who follow a community, which ones are actual owners.

I think the voting system, where other members vote for who should be the admin contact for the community, is probably the way to go to start with. We can then perhaps set up a different area for owners only and it would be up to the admin contact to accept or decline requests to join the private owners only area.

What do you think?

Thanks

Justin

sonatigh said:
Monday, September 6, 2010 @ 4:20 PM

Not a good idea our communitity is very large and has its own broadcast facilities, website etc. Unfortunately many owners have left EOS due to a minority of posters who continue to damage our community on your forums. I would not like to see these people sending posts to everyone in the community.
Basically a good idea but will create many problems and tons of unwanted mail.

John said:
Friday, September 10, 2010 @ 3:13 AM

I would not give exclusive rights to one person. On EOS there are more readers than writers (which is normal anyhow on a forum). There could be a very small minority who then chooses their admin or spokesperson.

To avoid spammers consider a combination of the time they are registered, the time they follow that specific community and subtract these factors by the number of communities they follow. If you add to this formula the number of posts they have actually made per year (and not in f.i. the last three months) you have a good yardstick to avoid spammers.

If you subsequently implement a strategy where people could let the system now that they don´t messages from a certain people you could collect statistics and if the number is quite high block these people of using the system.

Together this would everyone a chance to dm the others on their forum, but it would automatically be restricted to people who are clearly long term, active members of that exact community. If the function would still be abused the statistics/feedback system (a system of likes / don´t likes f.i) would ascertain that it annoying would lose their rights.

What should not happen is that people get the chance to opt out of messages of person A while blocking person B as this would destroy the functionality. In my proposal the only possibility you would have is to state in your preferences that you don´t want to receive any of the bulk messages.

I hope you understand my proposal. It would ascertain that every really involved person has speaking rights instead of a lobsided selection by having an election.

John said:
Friday, September 10, 2010 @ 3:20 AM

I would not give exclusive rights to one person. On EOS there are more readers than writers (which is normal anyhow on a forum). There could be a very small minority who then chooses their admin or spokesperson.

To avoid spammers consider a combination of the period they are registered, the period they follow that specific community and subtract these positive factors by the number of communities they follow.

If you add to this formula the number of posts they have actually made per year (and not in f.i. the last three months) you have a good yardstick to avoid spammers.

If you subsequently implement a strategy where people could let the system now that they don´t like messages from a certain person you could collect statistics and if the number is quite high block these people of using the system.

Together this would everyone a chance to pm the others on their forum, but it would automatically be restricted to people who are clearly long term, active members of that exact community. If the function would still be abused the statistics/feedback system (a system of likes / don´t likes f.i) would ascertain that the annoying ones would lose their rights.

What should not happen is that people get the chance to opt out of messages of person A while reading person B´s ones as this would destroy the functionality and the advantage to the community. In my proposal the only option you would have is to state in your preferences that you don´t want to receive any of the bulk messages.

I hope you understand my proposal. It would ascertain that every really involved person has speaking rights instead of a lobsided selection by having an election.

Thedts said:
Sunday, September 12, 2010 @ 3:03 PM

Its a good idea in theory and nice that you are thinking of innovative ideas. But in practice, I would be very nervous about spamming. There are a sad minority of people who take a perverse pleasure in spreading negative messages. Voting for an administrator would be tricky, as the contributors are too diverse for people to know who they could be confident in (and the users of our forum fall into quite diverse interest groups). I could potentially support it on a private forum (provided there is an opt-out facility and other safeguards), where access is monitored and controlled. But personally, I would block an email blast from an open forum.