2015 in Review

2015 was full of changes for Spokt. As we’ve grown, we have added several new features throughout the year to make Spokt more enjoyable for you. Here’s a summary of enhancements and features from this year.

Organized Member List

For Hub Admins, you can now view your member lists in order of first name, last name, or date joined.

Replace Photos

We realized that sometimes, you might accidentally upload the wrong photo, or find a larger one after you post, so we made changes so you can replace photos without having to delete the post. Simply click “Edit” on the particular post, and select “Choose File” next to the words, Replace Photo. Don’t forget to save your changes!

Mobile Site Enhancements

With the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, we updated our mobile site to fit the larger screen sizes. We also implemented landscape view, and added the ability to edit posts and replies on your phone.

Book Updates

While Books itself was released in December of 2014, we made improvements to it throughout 2015.  You can now view Books as a list, or in alphabetical order. If you want to see how books work please watch this screencast.

Calendar

Calendar was released on April 1, 2015, no joke. You and your Hub can keep organized together, plan events, and celebrate a number of occasions like birthdays and anniversaries. It is a great tool to help members continue to connect with each other. You can also print your calendar. For general calendar information, you can watch a screencast, or check out this post.

Video Embeds & Updates

In August, we made some changes to Videos. You can now upload videos from your smartphone, and you can use the new embed codes from YouTube and Vimeo.

Harbor

We released Harbor on October 18, 2015. Harbor is our backup tool, so you can have peace of mind, knowing that your data will always be safe. We offer Harbor backups a la carte for $49, or as part of our Extended or Premium Hubs, compare these new plans here.

 

We are excited for 2016 and what it will bring, and glad you are along for the ride!

16 thoughts on “2015 in Review”

  1. Books serve very little purpose if you cannot search within the book. When I go into a book and want to go to the next item, I have to use the back button to return to the original book page. If a person hits “next” it takes you to the next item regardless of what book it might be placed in. Can we have a “next” and “previous” within the book itself?

    1. Dan says:

      Angelee,

      Insightful feedback. I know we have plans to improve the search feature, I’ll pass along the rest of your feedback to the product team in our next meeting.

  2. Karen says:

    I wish that each comment or post would be stored chronologically in a stream as it was on the ancestry site, which allowed anyone to scroll through and comment days or weeks later, continuing the dialogue . Currently on Spokt I see the latest post but it can get ‘buried’ in later posts and is quite hard to find again. This single issue has stopped my previously active extended family from returning- no dialogue:(

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Karen,

      Thanks for the feedback! We do plan on making some changes that I think you’ll like but for now you can use the “Recent Items” tab on hub home to see the newest content.

  3. Millie says:

    I’ve had several family members ask if there’s an app for Spokt. I notice above that you mention a mobile site. How do I access that? Thanks.

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Millie,

      Just load up http://spokt.com on any mobile device. Enjoy!

  4. DonE says:

    We’re getting some very long threads in our family site. If would help if there was a clickable choice, at the start of a thread, that any one user could make to show the thread “oldest” or “newest” posts first. This would save a lot of paging down. Hope this would not be too difficult to implement. Thanks for considering.

    1. Dan says:

      Thanks for the feedback Don. We are very interested in solving that problem!

    2. Dutch Wiest says:

      I agree, Don. But my approach to solving this problem would be to simply give us the ability to search for and scroll to the next blue dot from anywhere within a thread. We have some threads that were created over a dozen years ago and have become really long.

  5. Tom says:

    When, oh When, OH WHEN will you provide the capability to sort the CONTENTS of any book alphabetically/chronologically by title??? Without that capability, the “Books” are no easier to use than the great big Shoe Box full of randomly deposited photos that I have in my closet. Finding and/or re-finding any one particular photo is tedious, at best. If sorted by Title, then I could easily find photos of Uncle Joe, or Mom and Dad, etc. The MyFamily site by Ancestry provided that sorting capability, and many of my relatives used it frequently. While many of them initially signed in to SPOKT, most have become totally inactive.

    1. See there ya’ll .. I’m not the ONLY one complaining about Books being a giant “fail” on Spokt’s part!

  6. Riley says:

    How do I add video clips??

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Riley,

      Click the Add Video link. Contact support if you have issues: https://spokt.com/support

  7. Ron Cox says:

    It would be nice to be able to customize your hub home page, it that option has been added please let me know. I’m pretty sure there were plans a year or so ago to do this for the admins. I would greatly appreciate this ablity to get rid of the white screen, but at the options of the admin.

    1. Dan says:

      Hi Ron,

      Thanks for the feedback. We don’t publicly discuss unannounced features but I’ve passed your comments onto the product team.

  8. Well picky picky! Even though I haven’t had much luck getting The Family to come over to Spokt My daughters and my sister And Grandson(who started our Ancesters Family site) are so grateful you saved our years of Pictures and memories! Thanks for your fforts in trying to co tongue to make it even better! Whatever we are posting is not owned by Facebook! My o lay Disappointment was I thought the name was Mayflower when I signed us up!

Leave a Reply to Riley Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

We read every comment. We will reply when appropriate. Some comments are not shown right away and need to be approved first. We may remove any comment that contains content that is not family-freindly or is off-topic. If your comment would be more appropriate as a support request we ask that you contact support here: http://spokt.com/contact.