Important announcement for all network users

Hi all,

Please read the following information.

We wanted to let you know that in response to your questions and feedback, and in seeing the way you are all using the network, we have planned an update to the online network code over the next few days, most likely on Wednesday. This includes a number of small bug-fixes, but also some new functionality, that you will notice.

Notifications

The most obvious improvement is that we are turning on 'notifications'. This means that you will receive either a personal message or email (depending on the way you set your preferences) when someone comments on one of your posts, or separately in a post you have commented on.  The purpose of this is so that you can easily follow conversations you might want to go back and respond to, without having to remember where you posted, or visit lots of places.

We're a bit excited about this and hope you are too, but it does mean you will receive more email from the site, so don't get a surprise when that happens!  

You will be able to turn these notifications off if you don't want to receive them. To help you work your way through that, we'll provide instructions in a 'how-to' format on the 'help' page after the update is made.

You will also be able to subscribe to an individual member's blog if you don't want to miss their posts, and all members will also be automatically subscribed to the BCNA blog (again, you can turn off, or cancel these if you want to).

Threaded comments

After the update, comments will be 'threaded' which means that a collection of comments will appear like a tree, with each comment attached to the entry it belongs to. This visually represents each conversation and makes it easier to follow. Newest comments appear at the bottom of the tree so you can read them in order (we're excited about this one, too!

Network activity

If you click on the tab on the homepage labelled 'Latest network posts', at the moment you can only see the last five public blog posts by users (plus contacts-only posts from your contacts). That's not really enough to see what's been happening if you've been away for a number of days, so we've added a 'view all posts' link at the bottom of the page so you can click through page-by-page and see more.

Featured posts

We will be able to 'feature' posts to bring them to the top of the list and they'll have a label on them so you can tell which these are.

Recommend this

If you're in a hurry and don't have time to make a comment, but still want to let someone know you enjoyed their post, you will be able to click a 'recommend this' link to show your support.

The aim of these changes is to make the network easier for everyone to use and participate in -- I will post a more comprehensive list at the time of deploy for those who are interested, so please check back.

The site may be unavailable for a short time during the update, but I'll try and give you all a couple of hours notice before we start -- fingers crossed we don't break anything so there should be minor disruption!

Oh, and finally, none of the existing content should be disturbed, your profile and blog entries will remain unchanged.

Feel free to ask if you have questions.

Di