EFX3 Blogs

The left-side column is an image taken directly from the Google Buzz front page (google.com/buzz). The right-side column represents the comparative efx3 features.

Well, you DO have to sign up if you’re not already a gmail user.

What else do we have?

Customer support. Every single member of efx3 can contact me or Rusty and receive a reply the same day, if not the same hour. Dr Dog sent me a message this morning asking for some theme tweaks and I did them for him as soon as I got the message. If I see a bug report from any of you, I respond as soon as I can and we fix it as soon as we can, unless it’s something we have to rely on an outside source for. Where else can you expect to receive this level of personal service?

Community interaction – if you want something, we do our best to implement it. We listen to what you want, not that many of you have requested much and seem to be quite happy with what we provide.

Here are some more things we don’t have:

We don’t claim to own your content. Anything you post to Google wave or any other Google service becomes property of Google.

We don’t take your private data and make it accessible to third-party spammers, malware and general ne’er-do-gooders. See Facebook. (Don’t believe me? – http://theharmonyguy.com/ – read the Facebook posts.)

We don’t use viral marketing – our budget is pretty meagre and relies on word of mouth to get new members ;)

We don’t have a big brand name like Google that inspires people to sign up to absolutely anything they put out ‘just because it’s Google’.

Is Google Buzz something new and fancy? No, of course not. Social networking exists in many iterations across the web and it’s whoever has the biggest voice that’ll come out on top. So before you go signing up to ‘the next big craze’, give a thought to what it’s offering you that your friendly neighbourhood efx3 doesn’t have.

Over today and tomorrow I’ll be preening the selection of themes we have available to choose from. Some of them don’t work properly so I’ll be finding out which ones they are and ditching them. Don’t worry though – I’ll also be uploading new ones that do work properly so there’ll still be loads to choose from!

This might mean that some of you will lose your themes, but I don’t think anyone’s using a broken theme so it should be okay. If you DO lose your theme though, know that it’s for the best :P

Also, next week I’ll be removing the ‘theme tweaker’ plugin. It’s causing too many layout issues on what would otherwise be perfectly fine themes, so it’s got to go. So just a heads up for anyone who’s using it – and if you’ve done a huge chunk of theme modification with theme tweaker, drop me a line and I’ll see about keeping your changes via the Custom CSS plugin. :)

15 new themes added. :)

We’ve upgraded the BuddyPress core that efx3’s social side (everything apart from the blogs) runs on. Aside from a few security updates, they’ve also tweaked some features, added in some new ones, and generally made the whole thing a bit more usable. One of the main things you’ll notice is that the sitewide activity feed on the front page now has a ‘filter’ button – so you can choose to just see blog updates, profile updates, etc.

I see we’ve been having some spam comments left on our blogs since the update – that’s because we had to remove the plugins and re-activate them after the update, and the anti-spam-comment capcha one hasn’t been updated sitewide yet, but we’ll do that ASAP, I know how annoying it is to log in to a bunch of spam comments you have to delete ;p

I think there are also a few layout niggles on some of the pages like your profile, inbox, etc., but we’ll get to those also. Meanwhile if you come across anything that isn’t working or doesn’t look right, use the Tech Support group to point them out to us :) And as always, if you have any questions or want help with something, you know where I am. :D

Enjoy!

As some of you might have noticed from the notifications on the site and the, er, possible spam to your emails (sheepish grin) I’ve added an ‘achievements’ plugin.

It doesn’t really do anything, it’s just for a bit of fun. You can see your achievements from going to My Account > Achievements > Summary. From looking at the other options beneath Summary, you can see which Achievements have yet to be ‘unlocked’.

Enjoy! :P

(Also, we’re very very sorry about what it’s done to the sitewide activity feed. We didn’t know it was going to do that. Sorry! >.<)