Fun Features Coming Soon
This is a quick update to remind all MyFamily refugees (and existing Spokt members) that we have some exciting updates coming. Our top priority, as you likely know by now, is making sure we help save as many people’s content as we can before the MyFamily shutdown happens. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t obsessing over, designing, and even working on these new features that will make Spokt a better experience overall for everyone. We appreciate your patience and restraint as we aim to keep our priorities aligned with that goal.
To that end, we felt it would be best to re-iterate the key items that are at the top of our development horizon here at Spokt so you know what to expect in the coming months.
Multi-Photo Upload and Photo Organization (i.e. Albums)
If you’ve migrated your site from MyFamily, chances are your photos were often stored in an album. We have saved this album data for every photo and we will be automagically adding them to the proper album once the feature is publicly released.
Oh yeah, and you’ll be able to upload multiple photos at once as well. Yeehaw!
Discussion Sections (i.e. File Cabinet, Recipes, etc) and Categories
Just like Photo Albums, we are safely storing the details of the proper section a discussion belongs to (File Cabinet, Recipes, History, News, Reviews), and we are working on a way for you to view all historical posts as well as categorize future posts in a similar manner.
Some members made heavy use of the “Categories” feature. Our upcoming solution will accommodate these, as well.
Calendar
While calendar items are not transferred via Mayflower, we will be releasing a calendar function soon that will allow you to schedule reminders for birthdays, anniversaries, special occasions, upcoming events and more right in your Hub.
Improved Member Tools
We have already rolled out the first phase of our improved member tools, giving admins additional ability to assist Hub members and their accounts. In the coming months we will be adding key features that will refine and expand on these tools for both admins and members alike.
2.0 Search
If you’re used to searching often for content on MyFamily, you’ve already noticed Spokt’s search tool is much improved in many ways. We’re glad things can be found more easily, but we want to make search even better. Expect some key improvements in the coming months.
No doubt you are as excited by these enhancements as we are. We appreciate your patience as we do our best to get things right for all Spokt members, new and existing alike.
Thank you again for being such an important part of our rich community!
– RJ
RJ,
Best thing you could do was to update us on your plans, Ancestry has kept is in the dark for so long it is a fabulous ray of sunshine in the providers space to see Spokt so focus on capture, keep and restore as well as moving forward with updating “missing” features and even expanding on areas we didn’t previously even have availble.
Please also forgive all us ex MyFamily admins if we get a little anxious and gun shy. Remeber we have been in the dark for many, many years.
Larry
2014AG30 17:50 Sydney Australia
Thanks for the update. Ditto Larry’s post.
For over 10 years we have been using a MyFamily site for our High School Alumni to stay in touch. Before we discovered Spokt we laboriously moved all the comments familycrossings moving service left behind. Our members were disappointed, so we searched again and found Spokt, which has already provided the feeling of being “back home”. We look forward to the upcoming features to finish the transition. Thanks
Love the updates and feedback. Keep the updates coming please. You’re easing a lot of stress for admins…Cheers…GIL
Great changes in the works! Spokt’s responsiveness is refreshing. But, we’re still having problems with responding to old items from MyFamily.com. Shouldn’t a reply bring them forward as unread items? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Maybe we’re missing something.
Hi Lee,
If you haven’t done so already please send an example link to support and we can look into it.
Keep it simple! And, keep it affordable. I may not live to see it, but your business model (whether it’s Spokt or other sites) will eclipse Facebook at some point in the future! Nothing worthwhile is ever free!!!
Wow! Amazing how this all worked. Am waiting for the Calendar and other items in the works! So far, so good!!
Also it would be nice if you can add a tags feature to hubs like we had it at MyFamily 2.0. I really liked that.
Hi Elena,
We don’t know what we’ll call them but that is pretty much what we’re talking about when we talk about categories.
I second the comment to keep it simple. One of the great things about Spokt today is it’s simplicity. So please don ‘t lose it in trying to respond to new requests. I agree that a few organizational features and a front page would be useful but beyond that I’m not so sure. That said, I do have my own list of “improvements” but these have to do with improvements for mobile users like me so that we can do most everything on our Smart phones or tablets that we can do on our computers. I’m sending a list of things that don ‘t quite work on my iPhone or iPad to Spokt customer support so that you consider for future upgrades. Thanks for listening and keep up your great work and customer service. Nancy Bryant
Thanks Nancy,
Some of us are big mobile users as well and you should start seeing some steady improvements there in the coming months as well. Mayflower has been a huge undertaking and we don’t see the workload letting up for at least a few more weeks.
SPOKT looks good, just now migrating from myfamily. Is there any chance in the future of developing a phone app?
Our mobile website is very good for catching up on news and we will be making improvements to it as well. We love our iPhones and would love to have an app but we have nothing to announce at this time.
I was interested in the app ability as well. As some of the younger generations do not seem to participate as much on the family sites as they do in Facebook with the facebook app.. I was hoping that we could encourage them to more frequently be involved in the family site if they could easily access and post from an app .. Some only have smart phones and no home based computers.. (what is this world coming too..)
We at Spokt love our pocket computers that we call phones. Our mobile site is very good but we’d love to also have an iPhone app.
Thanks for the great updates. The site is functioning beautifully. We enjoy the polls function for our fall college football polls. We’ve already had more participation from the family just due to the updated look of the site. Looking forward to the calendar function. I simply printed out the existing calendar from MyFamily. It needs to be cleaned up and updated anyway, so the new function through spokt should
work well for us once it is ready. Thanks especially for the timely responses to questions.
Nancy says “but these have to do with improvements for mobile users like me so that we can do most everything on our Smart phones or tablets that we can do on our computers.”
60-70 percent of “generational” myfamily members have gone there. What is best way to link some of these to our hub. ie post on facebook and link, embed, dual post etc to hub.Transfer info photos … This would bring some of younger gen to hub. having been trying to solicit family correspondents to post from their other accounts to this as well. Some family info never go on site because it goes elsewhere . What is best way to accomplish this ? ideas..
Mentioned before, apple users like me, do not have flash support. Not super important for me, but maybe is for others.
Thanks again for your efforts.ball my activity is on an ipad and works fine.
Thank you … Thank you … Thank you. We are so happy with the transfer and look forward to the updates. The only problem we have is with some of the HTML postings … We can’t seem to make borders around our post as we did in MyFamily. The ones that transferred over have the borders but the new ones created don’t come up with them. Keep on going.
Is there a way for anyone to click on a member’s name and access from that all his or her posts?
Also we have a NFL pool coming up beginning September 4th and want to know if there is a way to keep it separate or at least more easily accessible to those who wish to join and follow the games throughout the season? We had them under Reviews in Bushwick Buddies MyFamily.com
Hi Jim,
There is no way to list the posts made by a member currently but we have our eye on this space for future development.
You can create a separate hub to communicate privately with others interested in that topic. It’s kind of what hubs are for 🙂
Hi Dan, regarding: “You can create a separate hub to communicate privately with others interested in that topic. It’s kind of what hubs are for ”
Okay I created a separate hub called Anthony DeSimone NFL Challenge 2014-15 but don’t see it on the menu on the left side. Also I will need to transfer the entries already made when I set it up under News before knowing I could create a separate hub. Can you walk me through this?
RJ and team,
I actually enjoy reading your updates. They are to the point, yet very friendly and down to earth. I am definitely a SPOKT supporter and so appreciate of your hard efforts in developing this site. Keep up the good work.
Nancy
For the new categories, how about several “admin defined” categories? Rather than trying to guess what the admins would want, it might be better to provide flexibility as to the titles. Some hubs might use a “recipes” category heavily, but others not at all. This way, the number of categories listed in the left-hand navigation bar could be kept at a minimum and only those categories that would be actively used would be shown.
That is exactly what we would need for the Anthony DeSimone NFL Challenge. It could be just a general permanent heading like we used in Bushwick Buddies “Reviews” where everyone participating knew to click on to get to the pool. The title could be really anything, “Miscellanea”, “Sports on SPØKT™”.
Excellent idea here….. each hub has its specialties, and ability to change titles would be good.
We’ll announce more details on how the categorization features will work when they are ready.
Thank you very much for being so responsive to members’ requests. You are great! So far my family seems to be happy with Spokt.
I’m also looking forward to the calendar feature.
I could hardly add to what positive compliments have already been made. I will comment that I consider the MyFamily model to have been a quite versatile program as far as it went, and that Ancestry goofed in dropping the goose’s egg by shutting it down, as if the Dodgers were to decide to leave baseball and go play soccer somewhere. I’m glad you’ve taken up the challenge with your evolving vision! ‘Fair winds and a following sea!’
Amen!!!
One thing I would like for you to consider is some sort of search feature for the members list, either a fill in the blank type search box, or have a list of the alphabet with the last names associated with the letter to click and pull up the list of names with surnames beginning with that letter to make it easier to find a members page. One of my sites has almost 1,300 members and trying to find their member page to render assistance with any editing or helping them to get logged in is a bit of a problem without some way to search for them. Once they are beyond page 7, you can only advance 3 pages at a time to try to find the page of the list that they are on.
Amen, Rusty’s and Velma’s suggestion is right on. Finding a member is tedious as it stands now but with a list of the alphabet with the last names associated with the letter to click and pull up the list of names with surnames beginning with that letter would be most helpful.
I vote for that as well. We don’t have as many members as Rusty but it’s still tedious to find someone in the list of members. Any simple way would be acceptable – by alphabet, by first name on a page, etc. you might consider that sites for a particular surname have lots of that letter. For example our Bryant site has lots of B’s.
Rusty Weber took the words right out of my mouth! I was going to ask the same thing. Also a member brought something up that I think would be nice–is there a way that we can send a photo from the hub to an email address?
Hopefully Dan or someone will let us know that they have seen this suggestion and are at least considering a solution
You Guys are Totally Awesome – we are extremely happy here and in awe of your responsiveness! Thank-you So much, spokt Team!!
Is it possible to create a way for us to mark as read, postings that we are not intersted in viewing but don’t wish to see listed in our unread file over and over again? Thank you!
Hi Tamara,
If I understand correctly you are looking for a way to mark a news post as not interesting to you so you won’t be bothered with new replies to it in the future. Currently Spokt does not have such a feature but we will add it to our enormous list of things to consider.
Do the members have a personal email address like myfamily had. If so what would the address be.
Hi Pius,
No email addresses here.
We like your plan to expand the capabilities of the site. You are doing the right things to attract the old MyFamily users. Do you plan to have the ability to send emails from one member to another similar to (or better) than the MyFamily capability.
Hi Ernie,
We’ll put that onto our list of things to consider. thanks!
Thank You so much for a place for families to gather. We loved our my family page and was sad to see it go, but thanks to you we now have a place to hang out again…..We really like the page and the new things coming will be so cool…thank you for letting us know what is going on and not keeping us in the dark……
One thing I do miss is that we would add little pictures to our news and it would just show up in the new…… But you have done a great job on this page and for that I say a great big THANK YOU
Should we sign up for 2.0 upgrade before sept 30th or do we have time to do this later? Did the invite to spokt.com in our initial setup already go to everyone on our site? Will the photo text be visible to identify pictures at some point? Here’s hoping this site will be much more user friendly than myfamily.com!! Great job so far!
Hi Jean,
You will not be able to order after September 30th; You should order as soon as you can. Yes, the photos will be transferred with titles, descriptions, and reply comments.
Please have a slide show feature for all the grandpa & grandmas out there and move the older , newer photo buttons to the top of the page – grandma not happy to go to bottom of page to see next photo
Our site still seems to have problems with members being able to actually sign into it via the invitation that Spokt sends. The member list shows them there, but they tell me they get to a certain point… and their email or password is invalid or email is already taken. Some have tried several times; very frustrating to them, as myself.
I’m not sure of what to do next.
Other than that, all information/data/photos seems to be intact… I’m still learning myself.
Thanks!
***I tried the File Cabinet after it was imported but couldn’t find any way to play the music. The comments were there but that’s about it. Will this change or do we have to get used to the fact that the music is gone?
A big thank you for all you guys have done so far. Unlike myfamily.com and familylobby.com you at least communicate with your admin/members. I know you’ve already got the suggestion to loose the hub home but rather than lose the hub home, add a home for each hub and let the admins customize it if they would like, simular to myfamily.com and familylobby.com. Thanks so much again for all you guys have done for us refugees of myfamily.com. Thanks for taking the challenge. I know it’s been a big headache, but we do appreciate all you do.
We are very happy with the migration of our site from myfamily.com to SPOKT, which helped save 10 years worth of content on our old site.
I know you are adding new features as time goes on, but one thing we really miss from the old myfamily.com site was the ability to have a welcome front page. We often changed our front page for holidays, etc. Do you know if there will be an administrative feature that will allow us to add front pages once again coming to SPOKT? It really defined our site, and it’s the one thing noticeably missing from our migration.
I would rate this as a very low priority. It was nice to be to “decorate” occasionally, but the MF Front Page was also very busy and some members failed to scroll down to see the whole page until I pointed this out, they were at the mercy of their resolution settings. Most never say Recipes and I removed these elements from my MyFamily site because of the crowding with non-essentials (to us).Far more important to us are functional elements, such as Albums and Categories.
I would rate this as a very high priority. We also miss this ability to customize the front page for various seasons and events. Just adding the ability to select theme colors and upload a banner image would be a very welcome new feature.
Albums and categories would be more of nice-to-haves for us.
Kudos to the Spokt Team. The issues with my 2nd hub have been resolved. The all-member invitations that were sent out have generated responses from more that one old soul. I am still canvassing a few who could not access a few weeks ago to see if that problem has been resolved. MyFamily videos and audio files have migrated without a problem. I could not be happier.
You have seriously saved our hash, I wish you had a DNA site as excellent as the MyFamily one was, we are having real problems with our alternate choice and may never recover the Surname Grid that was abandoned by Ancestry.
We are very pleased with the results of our migrations, and look forward to History and Albums being developed, along with Categories.
My only complaints are minor: 1) HTML does not seem to work in the POLL section, and my Poll explanation and question is one massive paragraph, not very attractive or readable, 2) the default font on the site makes it very difficult to distinguish a period (dot) from a comma. We see this in the captions for our Photos which we are proofreading; the migration did not keep many spaces and we are adding spaces and tags to fix this, but the text I am typing this in (as an example, not a recommendation) is much clearer than the text on the site.
Addendum: the text I typed this in with looks like a Courier type font, with is fully serifed, while the result on-screen is a sans-serif system font.
One feature I would like to see that my family had was the ability to click by the members name to view all their particular postings. Is that something spokt is looking into doing for us?
Hi Diana,
We have our eye on improving membership tools. Thanks for the suggestion!
How do me make members an admin?
Click “Manage Hub” (left menu) Then click the “Yes/No” in the admin column for a user.
A serving suggestion
My Hub members are grateful that we have found this new home for our genealogy sites. I would like to comment on the KISS recommendations on the Spokt blog. On the whole, I agree with simplicity. While many of us are yearning for some of the features of the MyFamily site to be replicated on Spokt, MyFamily was a busy main screen that confused some users. As an Admin of several MyFamily sites, I had been hoping for some improvements on MyFamily 1.0 that did not take place before MyFamily began pushing it’s useless (for our needs) 2.0 version.
ALBUMS: this feature for the PHOTO section was not well-served in MyFamily because it was not prominent and many members were unaware of it. With the volume of images we were getting, the nested ALBUM concept was a major organizational tool for us. The current thumbnail display on Spokt is not as useful for us because our images are an archive, we consider them equally important regardless of “date of posting.” Many new users just look at what they see on their initial screen and ignore the rest, probably a habit from Facebook, where the emphasis is on the “latest” posting. The floating pointer display of the title is helpful on Spokt, but please consider this concept: If all of the PHOTOS are essentially on one “Folder” on Spokt, that folder (album) might be called “All Photos.” What we wanted on MyFamily (and would like to see on Spokt) was a graphic representation of an ALBUM, with the default of containing “All Photos,” but with representations of individual sub-ALBUMS inside that “All Photos.” album. Each “layer” of album from the top would have the further “sub-ALBUMS” represented (nested) inside. Each Album would display the text name on or under it. Seeing an icon of an ALBUM would be more intuitive than a TEXT item and far more useful than a bunch of the most recent PHOTOS onscreen, and would allow the user to drill down to the various individual sub-ALBUMS. Here is an example of what we had:
All Photos -> [arrow represents a further sub-album]->Arthur & Rachel -> John 1
This “nesting” continued down to a fairly specific depth, so that a user could see (for instance) a large family group several generations down from the top, but with a clear path back.
This allowed the viewer to “filter” for as much “granularity” within a family group, or, for no filtering at all. Please consider this concept for one possible visual addition to the default Hub page. Just a single ALBUM on the main screen as an addition would be fine, since the All Photos as the default album will serve as a gateway.
I expect that Spokt will have its hands full until Ancestry pulls the plug on Sept 30 , but until then, thanks for any consideration you can give to this matter for future deveopment.
Hi Clinton, thanks for all the detailed feedback!
>> As regards posting by Mary Hew Held
Our site still seems to have problems with members being able to actually sign into it via the invitation that Spokt sends.
We have a member who reports that she is not being allowed to use the same e-mail address for notifications from two hubs. It seems counterintuitive to me that this would be an issue, surely there are people who want notifications from multiple hubs, why would this matter? This member read the “merge accounts” note and like many, was scared by the implications of not being able to “undo” something. She has contacted you directly, but I wanted this to post because I am not sure that this is exactly what Mary New Held is reporting in her post.
Hi Clinton,
It sounds like you may have members that could by helped by the account merge tool. Because of the way MyFamily.com allowed users to share email addresses it is causing all kinds of duplicate accounts and other headaches here at Spokt. See the blog post about account merging and tell your members about it.
As an addendum to my posting “a serving suggestion,” putting another TAB item in the PHOTO section labelled ALBUM, would not take any more real estate, and choosing the the TAB item could show the ALBUM icon representing all PHOTOS.
I will also add that I was not enthusiastic about allowing USER accounts to create Albums and Categories, and asked my MF member to leave that to Admin. We had quite a few overly specific and redundant creations. If this is going to be allowed, Admin should be given the power to delete them at will, and reassign postings to admin-approved categories and albums.
Hi, I was told about your site only today. If MyFamily.com mentioned you in their initial email to me, I’ve over looked it. I’ve spent 6 wks creating a Facebook Group for my family site and manually transferring most of my 1500 family photos. I’m almost finished or I would open an account.
When transferring albums from MyFamily, will the comments with each photo be transferring with it?
Yes Yvonne! We capture the titles, descriptions, date taken, place taken, owner as well as the comments. We also transfer the News, Recipe, Review, History, File Cabinet sections with comments. The comments are even properly indented.
See this blog post for a sample of how complete the transfer is and how nice it looks on it’s new home: http://blog.spokt.com/general/what-a-mayflower-migration-looks-like/
Ok I know you guys are really busy, but acknowledging an email is not hard to do. I have sent support several emails, but I have received nothing yet in close to a week. I am usually not one to complain, but that was the reason I moved my second site from familylobby to Spokt, no response from support or anybody else. I’m not a fan of having to dish out cash I can’t afford to save history. Monday my status for Mayflower was click to finalize import, I clicked, it said something went wrong, and now the status is back to processing import. Please try to improve your customer service and inform your admins if you want a long healthy relationship. Thanks for your kind attention to this matter.
Hello Ron,
We are working through an increasingly flooded support queue (many new signups every day) after a long and unexpectedly busy holiday weekend of signups. We are taking the emails in the order they are received, and we’re doing our best to take care of each and every customer that needs our help. We appreciate your patience as we get to your requests.
RJ
I’m very nervous! Are we going to complete the migration before the deadline? Please give us some information every day…. at least a few words of hope.
Hi Samuel,
If you’ve already placed your order then we’ll have no problem getting it all by Sept 30. Currently it is taking about a week to import sites.
Thanks, RJ. At least there is a response from you unlike your competition. I guess they could careless. Thank you so much for all you do.
Spokt admin,
I have just been through our FTM user group site and am very pleased with what you are offering. Maybe in time I will seek more features but, for now, I’d like to start to use what we have a bit better. Many thanks, Bill
Thanks for everything you have done for us, so naturally I bite the hand…
Problem for admins and possibly for users:
When I am editing an item such as a photo item after the initial posting, I cannot see which of my hubs I am on onscreen. Seems minor, but I have two “constituencies” of researchers and I need to know at all times which hub I am on.
This is a special problem right now, because at this time, after an item has posted it cannot be sent over to the other site by a checkbox. This was a feature on MyFamily that is sorely missed, since we could edit and distribute to other sites anytime, SPOKT only allows us to see the hub we are on at the creation of the initial posting, and then does not show us where we are, and disallows distribution to another site after that point. Very occasionally I have to post queries to both “constituencies.”
Hi Clinton, we have our eye on improving this aspect of Spokt as well.
We appreciate your valiant efforts to preserve our site’s data.
MyFamily had a very useful feature which allowed viewing a list of everything that a member ever posted; this was very helpful in locating an old item. Any plans to implement similar on Spokt? (After everyone’s site has been migrated, of course).
Hi Chet, we’ll keep this suggestion in mind as we build out our membership tools and our search improvements. Thanks!
You are doing a fantastic job with migrations and responses to peoples suggestions.
Is there a way that a picture can be selected to appear on the home page? When it’s someone’s birthday, I like to have their picture on the home page.
Hi Jean, we have our eye on the hub home page as an area for improvement. Thanks for the suggestion!
Your giving members the ability to opt out of admins updating their profiles has already caused some “trouble in paradise”.
I highly recommend that you make that ability an admin option, just as you gave admins the option to allow or disallow members to invite new members to their hub.
Hi Dutch,
We’ll discuss this issue internally. Thanks for the feedback!
I don’t have a problem opting out of admin updates, but I think that may cause problems later, therefore I would recommend that it be made an admin option. My reasoning is if a member later has a problem with their account the admin can not help. I have noticed one such opt out so far. I chose to leave the members allowed to invite until I have a problem with members making bogus accounts, then I will turn it off. I have a lot of older members on both of my hubs, and a lot don’t know what they are doing when it comes to computers. So their needing help is pretty much inevitable.
Hello…..just wondering why when I view our Spokt hub on a phone (Android) there is no edit button for posts? The viewers button is also missing. It its really a pain not to have the edit feature when using a phone.
Hi Chris,
I agree, it is a pain and we want to address it soon. We deployed some very minor enhancements to mobile this past weekend and will continue to make improvements over the coming months.