Thanks to Katie, our newest Spokt team member, for her voice on this screencast. Books are how our users organize their posts on Spokt.com.
Remember each hub can have any number of books: you can decide what is appropriate for you and your hub. Posts can be included in multiple books simulutaneously.
Below is a list of enhancements we’ve made to Spokt during the past few weeks.
Mobile
• The mobile website now uses the full size of larger phones (like the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus) as well as landscape support.
• Edit your posts and replies on your phone.
• Simplified login screen.
Books
• View books as a list.
• View books in alphabetical order.
Hub Admin
• Filter Member lists and view in order of first name, last name, or date joined.
Other
• Replace Photos:
** 9PM MST Update: We’re back up and faster than ever! **
During the past few days Spokt has been down a few times. This afternoon it was down for about 4 hours and last night it was down for about that long as well.
This is not acceptable to us! We have begun making improvements to our infrastructure to keep this from happening. We have a good idea what has been causing these outages and are working to replace that piece of our system.
We are so sorry! It gives us a pain in our chest when we see that Spokt is down. It is a symptom of growth that we hoped nobody would ever have to see. We think we’ll have them taken care of by the end of the day. Then we’ll announce the improvements we’ve already made to the books feature.
We are excited to announce a few enhancements and features we have been preparing for you.
First, the big announcement: Spokt Books! Many of you have been asking for categories and albums, and we have been sagaciously stewing about how we can deliver an experience that satisfies the requests we’ve received, and that also fits well with Spokt’s roadmap.
Categories are a great way to organize content, but they can quickly get out of hand. We wanted to give categories a meaningful name because we want their use to have meaning. As we post news and photos to Spokt we build a family history. We felt the name book held the right amount of weight and tradition for this role. Below is an example of what your Books will look like. This feature is available in all Hubs now.
For those of you who migrated your site data from MyFamily.com we have preserved the categories and albums which were previously created. You can now find them under the “Books” link on the left nav of your Hub.
When you post a new item to Spokt you can place the post into as many Books as you wish. As you type in the name of a Book it will offer suggestions of existing Book names with a nifty little autocomplete feature:
We are excited for you to be able to use these Books and we have some fun future enhancements planned. We will make incremental updates as we continue to work on other features.
We have given a major overhaul to our Hub Search feature, streamlining both the way Search looks as well as the results we return. No more duplicate results, no more jumbled content. Now you get a beautiful grid of posts that match your query, and finding past content is easier than ever. Give it a try. We think you’ll love it!
We have also changed the way we send out new member invitations that should reduce the number of messages that are bounced and also gives admins more feedback when a message is delivered to a bad address. We’re working hard on this to make things constantly better, and will make more announcements as the invitation process continues to improve.
So what are you waiting for? Go create a new post, add it to a Book, and thumb through a few of your older Books (if you have them) and see some of the fun things you’ve discussed through the years. Oh, and by the way…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
October has come and gone. MyFamily officially closed their doors just over a month ago, and what we wished could have been a small vacation instead turned out to be a very busy month. We are, however, starting to see a glimmer of light at the end of the Mayflower tunnel.
Mayflower
Mayflower successfully transferred over 18,000,000 messages from MyFamily.com to Spokt.com. We’ve received a lot of expressions of gratitude and it really means a lot to us. Knowing that we’ve helped you has helped make all the hard work and long hours worthwhile.
We have completed almost 100% of all the migrations that have been ordered. There are a few migrations with issues and we are working hard to resolve those issues while we still can. It is not all sunshine and rainbows though: some sites were unavailable before we were able to retrieve the data and we feel very badly about those cases. Due to the costs incurred by each order we had a no-refund policy for all Mayflower migrations but have relaxed that for cases where we were unable to access your data from MyFamily.com and have issued partial or full refunds where appropriate.
New Support Tracking System
We had some problems with our old system. We think our support team did a good job with the tool they had but we encountered inefficiencies which were holding us back. If you contact support you’ll receive automatic replies letting you know that we have received your request along with a ticket number. I know this isn’t very exciting but it enables us to better serve you, and that makes us grin a little more these days.
New Features
No, we have not forgotten about the new features we announced earlier this year. Our top priority remains Mayflower migrations but we have begun the development process of these features. We are excited about them and can’t wait to finish them for you. We will begin rolling out some these enhancements within the next few weeks.
The size and scope of the Mayflower project forced us to also put Harbor on hold until we could get a handle on the massive influx of migrations, but we are still excited about making your data available to you in a portable format. You’ll be seeing more on Harbor in the coming weeks/months.
Thanks again for all of your support, trust, and feedback. We are a better company since you’ve joined us, and we hope to enjoy many fruitful years creating and sharing life’s memories together!
As we announced previously we will continue to have limited access to MyFamily.com until October 28th. This should give us ample time to perform our quality control and re-download the content for which we’ve encountered errors.
I have expressed a lot of gratitude to the hard working Spokt engineers and support staff who are still working very long hours to save your data and import it properly into your hubs.
I also want to express my gratitude to the people at Ancestry who have worked very hard to make this extended access possible. We have been working with the Ancestry product team and they have been helping us every step of the way.
Thank you to our patient customers as well as we catch up on our support queue and begin development in the coming months on the new features we have planned.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
October 1 UPDATE: We are still taking orders for both the older MyFamily 1.0 (or “Classic MyFamily”) sites, as well as the newer 2.0 sites. So far MyFamily has been kind enough to not revoke our 1.0 access, so we can still migrate any type of MyFamily site for the time being. We don’t yet have a guarantee of when this access will end, so please don’t delay ordering your migration. If we cannot fulfil the migration, we will arrange refunds as needed. Order now at http://spokt.com/mayflower
First things first: if you are looking to migrate your site from MyFamily.com, you still have time! Over the last 2 months we’ve really dialed in our process, and over the last few weeks we’ve maxed out our server capacity so most sites get downloaded in a few hours. Don’t wait — initiate your migration now before it’s too late! We are prepared for partial or full refunds, as appropriate, if we cannot complete the job as advertised.
Now for the good news: Ancestry has granted us an extension to our MyFamily.com 2.0 access. We will have a few weeks after September 30th to download MyFamily 2.0 content.
We are still working with Ancestry on a 1.0 extension so we can finalize existing migration requests and (we hope) even accept the onslaught of additional requests.
What this means is that we have currently prioritized ALL MyFamily.com 1.0 download issues. This means if you contact us about a MyFamily 2.0 issue or even a MyFamily 1.0 issue that doesn’t require access to MyFamily.com to resolve we won’t be able to get to it until after the 30th.
We will be taking orders for both sites until further notice. Again, any sites we are unable to download completely will be eligible for at least partial refunds.
Three items of note:
1. We have been working to get Ancestry to extend our access to the MyFamily data. We started talks with Ancestry in July and we are quite hopeful that we will be granted an extension to our access. We’ll keep everyone posted.
2. If we are unable to negotiate an extension we will continue to accept orders through September 30th. Most sites can be exported in a few hours, however, we also plan to offer partial refunds for incomplete orders. We will make an announcement regarding this here on the blog in November after we’ve had a reasonable opportunity to import all data that we have downloaded.
3. Our support staff is very busy right now, we’ve doubled our staff in the past weeks but we’re still behind. Until we are able to catch up we’ve decide to close blog comments so we can focus on support. THIS IS NOT PERMANENT. We look forward to the time when we are once again able to engage with your candid feedback on this blog but for the next several weeks we need to be focused on exporting, processing, and importing MyFamily data.
Thank you for your incredible support, and for all of the patience, trust, praise, and word of mouth you’ve lent us. Our community is a much richer place because of all of you!
As I’m certain you are aware by now, Migrating data from MyFamily.com into Spokt is a very challenging and complex process. Our unique access to MyFamily allows us to do what many have not been able to do. Specific limitations also exist, as we’ve previously noted.
We have encountered an issue in our attempts to transfer the member records from MyFamily.com 2.0/2.5. We believe we can circumvent some or all of the hurdles we’ve encountered, but this will take some time. We expect to have this issue resolved before the end of next week (13 Sept 2014).
We expected to be finalizing imports of MyFamily.com 2.0/2.5 sites early this week but this issue has set back our timetable. It is important that you understand that there is no cause to be concerned: If your site is in “Processing Import” Status that means that we have exported all of your discussions, photos, videos, and files. This data is exported, and is now safely in our care. Once we are able to successfully transfer the member records we will be able to finalize the import.
As always you can check the status of your Mayflower orders here: http://spokt.com/mayflower/migrations. If you see “Export Complete”, “Import Queued”, or “Processing Import” then you can breathe a sigh of relief. We have your data. If you see “Exporting” or any other status we’ll have it soon!
MyFamily 1.0 Sites are unaffected by this issue and will continue to transfer as usual.
Thank you again for all of your support and patience as we work around the clock to save your data.
We know Spokt. We know what it can do and how happy our long-time users are. But it can be a bit difficult communicating all of it to others until they’ve used Spokt for a few days or weeks.
When we announced the Mayflower Migration tool we knew how the Myfamily.com data would look in Spokt and hoped that everyone would instinctively understand how great it would be. Obviously many caught the vision but others have asked what it will look like.
Now that we have worked through the vast majority of migrations in our backlog, we thought it would be good to take a few moments to show a small comparison between MyFamily and Spokt. Here is what you can expect when you are interacting with the content we’ve saved in your new Spokt Hub:
The Old Look:
Bigger, Cleaner, Sharper:
We hope this gives you a small glimpse into some of Spokt’s similarities to MyFamily, and some of the differences as well—namely cleaner layout, pictures that are double in size, larger, clearer text, simpler navigation, and member avatars, to name a few.
Are you ready to migrate your MyFamily site to Spokt? Start your migration at the link below, and pick up right where you left off at MyFamily:
