yuku blog

You asked, we listened.

Some of the frequently asked questions we have heard over the years:

1) Is it possible to add a shout box to my profile?
Not only is it possible, we have already added it for you.

2) Will we ever be able to send messages to groups of friends at once?
Yes, you can do that now. Check the friends on your list you wish to send a message to and message them all in one go.

3) One thing I really would like is being able to sort my pictures in my albums.
No problem. You can now sort your pictures inside your albums by dragging and dropping them.

4) Can I move my pictures between my albums? Please?
You got it. Pictures can be moved between albums, and don’t forget to check out the other features the new albums have to offer.

5) I wish we had a way of accessing our communities right from our profile pages.
The new profiles provide two ways to directly access your communities.
You can access the directory of your communities from your home navigation page, and you can jump to the control panels of the communities you own/admin via a dropdown menu in your navigation bar.

6) Why can’t I move my HTML boxes over to the left?
That’s history. Go ahead, drag and drop them to your liking.

A new chapter.

In our continued efforts to make your experience with us a geat one, and after months of hard work by our team, we are now ready for the beta release of our new profile pages. While we hope you’ve enjoyed the Yuku profiles you have been using so far, we wanted to take those a step further, offering you more features and easier interaction with your friends across Yuku.

The new profiles hold a multitude of options, rolled into three pages:
- Home navigation
- Profile navigation
- Settings page

Home navigation:

* Full display of your communities and your profiles

* Friends’ news

* Inbox preview

Alerts

Profile navigation:

Display your blog, friends stream, albums, HTML boxes, shout box, and much more on your profile page.
Profile themes can be changed with one single click. Expected time required to change your theme: a split second.

Settings:

The settings page allows you to fine-tune your account, privacy, forum, apps, and inbox settings.
Determine who can view the various sections of your profile page.

What do the profiles look like?

A picture speaks a thousand words.

Here are just a couple of the many themes you can choose from:

Desert Storm Theme:

Golden Gate Theme

Advanced filter options and lists

What it does

The advanced filter is a powerful tool that enables you to get a general idea of your members’ behaviour, how often they post, how long they have been members for, how long it’s been since they visited the community, how many members have warnings, how many members have visited in a day, a week, how many members are frequent posters, how many frequent posters have not visited the community in a while, etc..
There isn’t much the advanced filter can’t do. It is one of the greatest tools a message board admin could wish for.
With a few clicks, you can find out what kind of posters/visitors you have on your member list.

To start off, click on (all) members in your admin menu, which takes you to the full member list with the filter at the top

Click ‘advanced’ to see the advanced filter options.

How to filter

To filter, simply use the dropdown menus and make the desired selections.
Click ‘apply filter’ after making your selections. A list of members who comply with the selections will appear in your filter results.
Should you wish, you can put this list on the clipboard and turn it into a custom list.
You can also click ‘create dynamic list’ before you start filtering, this will generate a dynamic list of the filtered members.

What is a dynamic list?

A dynamic list is also called an auto-list. The content of the list varies according to the parameters you used for that list. For example, if you made a dynamic list of all members who have a post count of more than 100, any member who surpasses the 100 mark re post count will automatically be added to the list. If you make a list of members who have not been seen at the community for 4 months or more, any member who stops visiting the community will be added to the list after they have not visited for 4 months.

Each list can have up to eight criteria. It is not necessary to use all eight. You can create auto lists by:
*status: admin, moderator, member, banned, warned, pending, invited.
*group: create an auto list within one of your custom lists.
*Forum special members: create a list within the special member list of a specific forum
*warnings: 0, 1, 2, 3 or more.
*post count
*membership duration
*last seen
*kudos
You can mix and match any of the above in order to create a list that fits your purpose.

Useful things that can be done with the filter

Example 1:
You have an invisible forum that holds posts you only want to show to long time, regular members.
In order to know whom to give access to the forum, you can use the filter, filter all members with over 100 post count and a membership of longer than 4 months.
You can put the filter results on the clipboard and give bulk-access to all members on the clipboard.
After a few months, you could filter the members within that private forum, and see who has not visited the board in over three months. You will now have a list of members who have been MIA but still have access to the private forum. You can again use the clipboard to bulk-remove those members from the forum.

Example 2:
Filter the members who have not been seen in 4 months and have a post count of less than 2.
You now have a list of your inactive members. You could bulk-message them and send them a greeting, letting them know they are welcome to pay your community another visit some time.

Example 3:
Make a custom list of your moderators and administrators. How?
1) Use the status dropdown to filter your administrators.
2) Add the filter results to the clipboard
3) Use the status dropdown to filter your moderators.
4) Add the filter results to the clipboard
5) Click ’save selected as list’ on the clipboard.
6) Title your list.

You now have a custom list of your administrators and moderators. You can use the list to send messages to just this group of users. Custom lists will appear in the list section of the filter, Use the dropdown to select your admin/mod list to add them to the clipboard and send them a message.

The MSN exodus, seen through the eyes of the people behind an import tool.

MSN started offering the option to create ‘your own group’ in the summer of 1999. Nearly ten years later on Monday February 23rd 2009, the servers that hosted those groups were taken off line. The groups flourished at MSN and provided a wonderful home to many internet users, year after year.

How it all started.

At yuku, we heard about the pending closing of MSN groups in October 2008. MSN board owners were starting to register at yuku and we could feel a difference in our support forums. “Board owners” were called “managers”, “message boards” were called “groups”. We created an MSN test group in order to become familiar with the controls as well as the terminology so that we would be able to understand the system and thus provide help on a different, more adequate level.
A detailed guide was made for MSN users in an effort to make the transition easier to all.

Welcoming MSN refugees.

A public Yuku/MSN chat was organised on November 9 2008. The chat lasted 4 hours, attracting many MSN users who were hoping to see some questions answered.
While MSN refugees started to create their communities at yuku, our developers worked on building an import tool that would scrape the data from the MSN groups and bring it to safety.
The import tool was finished and announced on December 5th. An email was set up for the purpose of requesting imports from MSN. The requests became overwhelming, and looking at the waiting queue gave a daunting feeling but it was a challenge we were more than willing to take on.

Stenghtening the import team, adding servers.

We started importing with a single import server but soon we realised that one server would not perform the miracle of importing hundreds of message boards in the few weeks we had left until the closing of MSN. Over time, more import servers were added. Eventually, we juggled imports between no less than ten servers.
Arizona joined the import team, enabling us to concentrate on the multiple imports in progress while she prepared the boards and processed the requests. When February rolled around the corner, we started to work 12 to 16 hour days, weekends included. Oh the late nights, the six-packs of pepsi, and much junk food to save time on cooking! Slowly, one click at a time, the data was brought across from MSN to Yuku.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Unfortunately, there was no time to adjust the import tool with encoding for languages other than English.
Two MSN refugees, Neva and toasterwoman stepped up and volunteered to copy the posts of those boards over by hand.
The Dalat Vietnam community, a long time MSN group is one of the groups that would have gone down with the MSN servers if it hadn’t been for Neva and Toasterwoman. They relentlessly copied at all hours of the day and night.

During the last week of imports, many people were still waiting to see their groups imported to yuku, and we were painfully aware of the proverbial ticking clock. After many weeks of hard work, ending in a 26 hour shift that last day/night, we initiated the import of the very last groups in our waiting queue around 8 am EDT, just hours before the closing of MSN. We fought the odds and won.

Former MSN groups today.

Here are a few examples of former MSN groups, now flourishing in their new yuku home.
http://newschat.yuku.com/
http://ffn.yuku.com/
http://kennedyflairs.yuku.com/
http://christiandebateii.yuku.com/
http://aardisden.yuku.com/

The ultimate reward.

No compensation of any kind was as rewarding as the numerous thank you notes we received, via email, private message and the support forums.
MSN as a board hosting service is no more, but the communities have survived and are still going strong today.
If you used to have a (public) group at MSN and you did not have a chance to migrate your group to any system out there, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we may be able to still find some of your posts.

Your friends at yuku.

We recently launched the new official LA Kings hockey team boards. While setting up her site, the LA Kings community moderator asked us this question:

It says I have two members pending, but cannot see them when I filter members by pending.

ChrisW, Yuku guru and helper extraordinaire, gave an explanation that might be worth sharing if you’re new to Yuku land:

The pending applications are forum applications. When you click on pending in your admin menu, you will see the forum(s) where the members are pending. Forum names with pending members are listed at the top of the page in blue font. To manage your pending members:

1. Click on the forum name and scroll down to the bottom on the resulting page where you will see “member exceptions”
2. The members with a yellow field next to their names are pending members.
3. You can click the blue ‘approve pending’ option to approve the application or you can click ‘use default settings’ if you don’t wish to approve the application.

A bit more information on that section:

• The member exceptions list is a list of members who have access to – or have a pending application at – that particular forum.
• Pending applications show a yellow field, approved applications show a green field.
• The member list is in alphabetical order. Once that list grows, you can filter the pending applications by clicking on ’show pending’ at the top right of that section.
• Use default settings means that the member complies with the default settings of the forum (e.g. if a forum is private, the member will not have access if you choose ‘use default settings’)

Hope that helps! Do you have support questions of your own? If so, you can

• Post them on the Yuku support forum, or
• open a support ticket

By the way, the LA Kings are still getting up to speed, so if you love hockey and live in LA, jump over and say hi to the Kings fans who are discovering Yuku/KickApps!

Also, Arizona helped with the design, pretty sweet, eh? Did you know she had mad design/HTML/CSS skillz? >:)

If you’re a new Yuku-ite, you might also enjoy the help documents and tutorials available at help.yuku.com.

Here’s a question for all the experienced Yuku people out there: what, in your opinion, was the hardest part of setting up your forum? Was it something technical or something more social?

(Photo by woodleywonderworks)

Yuku is looking for an experienced, enthusiastic PHP developer with magic fingers to join one of the biggest and most wonderful social networking technology companies on the internet.

If you love challenges and you believe that you can make a difference, then this may be just the job for you!  Become part of the hard-working team behind http://www.yuku.com

For more details, view our ad  http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sof/1222886553.html

“There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.”
Norman Vincent Peale

Tags: developer, hiring, jobs

While Mauvis (one of our front-end designer/developers) was visiting from the NYC office a few months ago, he shot this video of the people in the San Francisco office:

(Soundtrack is Paper Planes by M.I.A.)

We sometimes hear from people who are looking for old friends on Yuku (perhaps they remember that the friend was a Cher fan or drives a tow truck).

Looking for old friends, long-lost lovers, or deadbeat customers on a Yuku community or anywhere on the Internet? Here are 3 ways to find people on the web and get in touch.

Finding people on Yuku-powered communities

Join a related Yuku community and post your question in the general discussion forum, along with the person’s name. Posting a name in a public forum can have amazing results. It gets picked up by the search engines and found by other people who are looking.

You can search Yuku communities and profiles on find.yuku.com or on ForumFind.com, our custom Google search portal.

Finding people on the Internet in general

Here are some links to people-oriented search engines, in case you want to look beyond Yuku:

1. http://wink.com/
2. http://www.zabasearch.com/
3. http://www.journalismnet.com/people/
4. http://www.whitepages.com/

The best way to find people

Still, the best way to find people is the good old phone book. (Yeah, literally “old”.) Find phone companies in the area where you last connected with the person or where you suspect they might live. Many companies have archives of their old phone books. Ask to see a phone book for a specific year that handles a specific area code.

We can’t directly assist your search (partly because we don’t share members’ private information and partly because we only have so many hours in the day), but with the tools above you should be able to find people using publicly-available information.

Tags: people