EFX3 Blogs

Been revamping efx3 a bit – initially intended to put just a couple of new things on and then the list grew so I thought I’d better make a post about them!

Two new measures in an effort to reduce the amount of spammers signing up to the site. It’s difficult – it seems the only spam registrations we get now are from genuine humans who can circumvent the capcha on the registration form.

Firstly, new registrations come to the admins for approval. Users can sign up, but to interact with the site they’ll have to get approved. Since there’s virtually always an admin around, nobody will have to wait very long to get approved and in the grander scheme of things it’ll cut back on the amount of spam appearing on the front page.

Second, the ‘flag’ button you’re probably seeing everywhere now. If you see a spammer that we haven’t noticed yet – either a profile, blog, or even a comment – flag it. We’ll get a notification and take action.

On to the more interesting/fun stuff!

Display your site profile in your blog sidebar – if you go to your blog dashboard and navigate through appearance > widgets, you’ll see a new widget that lets you insert your site profile into your blog sidebar. You can see it displayed at the top of my blog (http://welshpixie.efx3.com). You can choose which parts of your profile you want it to display. If you’re wondering how to get to your profile to edit that information – from the bar across the top of the site, hover over My Account, Profile, and then Edit Profile.

While you’re looking at your profile, notice the new ‘invite users’ link. This lets you send invitation emails to your friends for them to sign up on efx3; you can even suggest some groups that they might like to join when they sign up. Also within your profile, you can now manage exactly who can see each separate item in your profile; from everyone, to just your friends, to just you.

Activity Stream changes – a comment made to something in the activity stream will now bump that item to the top of the list. You’ll also see a ‘share’ button – click on that, and a little menu expands that lets you share that activity to sites like facebook, twitter, reddit, etc. or via email. Written something to the activity stream and hit ‘publish’ just as you spotted a typo? Fear not – you can now, within a certain timeframe, edit your updates. Hurrah!

Better pagination – it always bugged me that when you’re looking at, say, the member listing on the site, you can only skip pages at the top of the page. No longer! There are now pagination links at the top AND bottom of the page, and they’re bolder for easier noticing.

Simple Music – it’s only small, but we’ve added a little music widget that lets you showcase a song in your blog sidebar. Find it with the rest of the widgets (blog dashboard, appearance, widgets) and drag it to your sidebar for settings.

There’s another feature we’re possibly adding in, it just needs some tweaking to get it to work smoothly; when it’s working, you’ll be able to click or hover on a user’s avatar anywhere on the site and see a little pop-up balloon containing some of their profile information and handy links like ‘message’ or ‘add friend’.

Whew, I think that’s everything! Happy networking ^.^