Ideas box

I have been working with a local company that screen prints owner wear and dog bandanas and donates their profits to charity. This company is a husband and wife team working out of their home, so they are able to offer their screen printing services at a great price. I am working with them to creat some t-shirts for our park to raise funds for projects. I thought that I would share their info with you in case you would like to produce any promotional materials for DPU. Owner wear and bandanas would be a great way to spread the word about DPU. The name of the company is The Dog Perk. www.dogperk.com

Lately their have been several posts on the public page for the Otter Lake Regional Off Leash Dog Area public page from visitors to the park who had concerns or were for some reason less than happy with their visit. What do you think about requiring user registration in order to post comments? By doing this, I would be able to respond directly to the users when there are problems at the dog park. As a user group, we really want to do as good of a job as we can to help eliminate or reduce these situations. Often times problems are just due to visitor†s lack of understanding of basic dog park etiquette. I have had great success talking to users and informing them of basic etiquette.

On home page for the Otter Lake park, there have been lots of poeple making comments and asking questions about our park. The comments are quite lenthy and you have to scroll down quite aways to get to the most current comment. Could it be changed so that the most recent comment is at the top of the page instead of the bottom? Then if anyone replys to this topic, it would be grouped in cronological order. So new topics would appear at the top of the page, old topics would appear at the bottom and replys would appear with the original comment in order that they were posted. Just thought it would be more helpful for our users. We have a lot of people that use the park and have been to the Otter Lake page of DPU, but for some reason have not or do not want to join our user group. By making these changes, the most recent/pertainent information would be at the top of the page when someone visits.

I was wondering if we could add the park rules to the park profile pages. It seems that there has been some confusion over the rules at our park latly.

This works well, we had a new member join today using the new format for our group. I did not see the checkbox to make a post public, but right now we will probalby keep most of our content private. Thanks for all your help making the site better.

So, I have updated the way that groups function a bit. Please test this when you have a chance. First, I technically updated your group to public. People can't ever ask to join a Private group, even though invitations, which is why adding new members is hard. A public moderated group, whose posts all all private will still have averything hidden from non-members. Log out and see if you can get to the group at all.

Also, I checked with a test user, and even when logged in, all I see is the group introduction, links to the gallery and calendar (but the are blank to me) and a link to join the group, which will send a request to you.

On all the pages when you create new events or forum posts, there is a little area called 'Groups', in there you will see Checkbox for 'Public'. This is how you can make post public if you want to, but it is off by default, thus making all new posts private as well.

So I think this covers all the needs and issues you bring up. let me know if not.

Greg

Lately I have had some park users express frustrations when they tried to join our users group, Otter Lake Dog Park Users. Currently I am having people give me their e-mail address. I then send them an invitation to join out group from the â€Å"invite friend† link within our group page. I think where people are getting confused is when they receive the invitation, they don†t realize that they must register with DPU, and then wait for me to approve their membership to our users group. I know that when we were first getting started, Greg had asked us why we choose to make out group private. Initially, I wanted to keep the group private and limited to a small group of core users so that that I could learn how the site functions and see if it would fulfill our needs. I am very pleased with all that DPU has to offer our park and its users. I am now at a point where I am ready to increase membership in our group. I have thought long and hard about switching our group from private to public. After consideration I would like to keep the group as private, in the sense that only users can view and add content. There are two key reasons that we feel this way. First it is a security issue, we often post what times individuals are at the park or other sensitive information that we would not want any complete stranger on the internet to view. We also want people to formally join the group rather than just view the content, so that we can show the county parks department that there is demand for the park and that they should continue to maintain and improve the park.

Now to my question, is there any way that we can keep the content of the group private to member only, yet make joining the group easier. We don†t mind if the group shows up in the group directory. When non-member click on the link for the Otter Lake Dog Park Users, is there a way to have them request membership to the group? I think that right now, if a non-member clicks on the link it says something like, â€Å"access denied.† Instead could you create a way that they could you create something like, â€Å"request membership to this group.† Thanks for your considerations. If you have any questions in what I am asking, or I did not make something clear, please feel free to contact me.

Hmm, for some reason you have reached your limit for files. I wonder if photo uploads count against the limit or now. Well, I have upped the limit of group admins to much higher, so you should be good now. Also, Yes you can upload multiple files to one forum post. Please note that files uploaded to a forum post won't show up in any of the group galleries.

I tried to upload an attachment tonight but it did not allow me to do so. I get a message saying "The disk quota of 20 MB has been reached." The file that I am trying to upload is less than 20 MB. Another question regarding attachments, will we be able to attach multiple files. For example it may be nice to attach a before and after photo for improvement projects at the park.

I thought we had this done correctly, but then I noticed you group admins couldn't see the 'Manage Group Forums' link that I could see. Now you should be able to create new forums as needed. Also, the Group Forums links should now be useful, taking you to a list of group forums. Let me know if this is what works.

Great idea. We didn't really see a need for this thus far, but your reasoning is great. Logged in members can now attached files to forum posts (only the initial post, not the comments). All members and visitors can view the attachments (if public, only group members is attached to a group).

Rather than having all the discussions displayed on the home page of a user group, might make sense to have a page linked of the home page for discussions. I find that the home page can become very full and hard to keep track of when there are a lot of discusions going on. On the discussion page, users could see all the discussions that are current. It may also be helpful to categorize the discussions so that users can find the topics that they are looking for easier.

It would be really helpful to be able to upload attachments along with a forum. There are times when documents would be relevant to posts, as is the case with proposed fencing at our park. It would be nice to be able to upload a file with a map to go along with the text. Other times when there are things at the park that are being discussed, it would be more relevant to upload a photo to the discussion rather than posting it in the album where is may be harder for others to find.

(From Farmall45b email)

"At some point it may be nice to enable the administrator of the group to edit discussion posts or move them to other discussions where they may be more relevant."

(From Farmall45b email)

Is there any way to add videos to our group site in the future?

(From Farmall45b email)

"As we add more pictures, it might be nice to be able to separate them in to different categories, for example having different folders for different types of photos, winter, improvements and projects, ect."