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
It’s great to learn the news about the forthcoming photo albums facility. Ancestry & MyFamily are now consigned to history as far as I am concerned.
Thanks for your hard work Sure miss the calender for birthdays, and anniversaries. Special events for our big family. Will be happy when you get it up. Thanks again, carry on. Pat
Ditto Pat’s comments. I am so looking forward to the calendar. No matter how hard we try to post “just dates” in a tread, someone always ends up commenting, RVSPing or otherwise goofing up our system for “just dates”. Again, thank you for all of your work. You have done a fantastic job.
One of my relatives really, really misses the ability to add a static picture on the home-page like MyFamily.com had, i.e. pic of the upcoming birthday boy, etc. Once you get that, I think I can finally convince her that spokt is the solution for us. Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback Craig we have our eye on the hub home for future enhancements!
I have noticed that the attachments are missing from the old posts in our News section. Will those be restored? It would also be nice if we could create categorized folders within the News section.
Also, none of putt old polls are in the Polls section. Will those be restored?
A few other thoughts and ideas:
– We would like to have an address book or means of viewing all our members and sorting them by last name, first name, city, etc.
– We would like to be able to add a photo or logo to our hub’s landing page and also have a spot for important announcements or links
– It would be great if the calendar could include birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
– It would be very helpful if we could add some custom sections or categories to our hub
Thanks for listening!
Hi Karen,
In the post above we announced that we captured the categories and plan on building the feature into our site. We are in the process of downloading file attachments and attaching them to posts that is why it is critical you do not modify your MyFamily.com password or remove any content from MyFamily.com. Polls are not transferred by Mayflower. We will keep your other feedback in mind as we improve our membership features, and add the calendar feature.
Speaking of attached photos…..there doesn’t seem to be a way to directly embed photos to posts aside from the original post on a thread?
Hi Chris,
You are correct, currently you can post a photo as an original post.
Thanks, Dan! You guys are doing an incredible job!
Will you please help us struggling computer users and explain how to download pictures to the site? Thanks
Hi Joyce,
I’d love to help. I’ve sent you an email asking for more information about what you are trying to do.
The Invitation emails that are sent people we invite show the From as Spokt.
This causes a lot of invitations to be marked as Junk. Would help if you could change that to a format that showed the Website of the Owners name.
Like: Spokt for McMaster New Family Site
Or: Spokt for user Pat@Ptmcmaster.com
Hi Pat,
We are aware that some of the invitations are categorized as junk by over-aggressive spam filters. Currently the email subject is “Pat McMaster invited you to Spokt.com” We do not believe changing the subject will increase delivery rates but thank you for the suggestion!
Dan,
You are correct, changing the subject of the invitation email will NOT increase responses.
That was why my suggestion referred to changing the FROM . Some email managers will of course still put it in JUNK, but the persons will see a family name that they know and open the mail and respond. People do not know what or who SPOKT and they are leery of opening mail from unknowns.
Hi Pat,
I’ll pass this onto the engineers!
How do you go about sending a re-invitation to someone on your hub who was migrated, but the email was old and has now been updated by me?
Could we maybe have a banner photo option added to top our hubs? This would definitely help to give the space a more personal feel as well as unify themes for hubs.
Hi Renee, we’ll take your suggestion into account as we design our next wave of enhancements.
Bobbi that’s a good question. I have a number of people who have changed their email address so I sent an invitation to the new email and they still didn’t get it.
How do I see these two website albums, photos and comments???
I’m not sure I understand, Ray. Would you mind elaborating a bit? Thanks!
Will we be seeing improved permissions option for users? Unless I am missing something, right now it seems to be either Admin or Not Admin. It would be nice to have several more roles, but at the very least a Contributor/Editor role that can edit posts/content but not necessarily completely manage the hub.
Hi Shad, we’ll take that into consideration.
Additionally, it would be nice in the manage hub section to be able to sort the user list by the displayed columns, such as sort, or reverse sort, by Name.
Thanks Shad!
SPOK needs to add family trees to the hub. This genealogy oinformation is very important to our family group.
Hi Theodore, thanks for your feedback. We don’t know much about family trees but if it is file in your computer you can upload it as an attachment to a news item.
We are slowly feeling our way around on Spokt. Several things we would like to see improved are: more user friendly, more eye appeal, unread posts need to be easier to spot, and some color in everything. Just our suggestions… Thanks!!
Hi Dan, I have admin rights on the my new Spokt site, which was a conversion from myfamily. as the conversion happened durng peak vacation time, only about 10% of ht members have visited the site. How do I do a bulk reinvitation? Thanks
Hi Phil,
I’m sorry but we won’t have time to send out a bulk email to your hub for a few weeks. You can send the invitations one-by-one by using the Manage Hub screen and clicking on the users name to pull up their profile.
I am so pleased with everything so far. Just hope the future is more of now. You are doing a fantastic job!!!!! TY! TY! TY!
FYI, after playing withtumblr, it does an excellent job with youtube embeded videos. It would be great to have something like that on spokt. Just thinking how outload. Thnx.
Cover Photo
The addition of a cover photo serves the purpose for every member of the Hub to illustrate the current topic of conversation on the Hub. At MyFamily every member had this ability but here no one does. Please put this on the nice to have when get a chance list.
Thanks again for your wonderful migration tool. We are forever grateful!
Yes….while the new site is great….and we are very happy with it….the one thing most of us miss is the ability to have a customized front page like the old version of myfamily had. We would change it for holidays seasons birthdays etc. Also as someone mentioned the “make cover photo” feature was nice too.
The Spokt people are really impressive! So professional and so user friendly. Waiting patiently for the updates and hope it includes Make Cover Photo and eventually over time where we add front page themes. BUT essential to our group is Adding Family Trees. Perhaps where we can upload Gedcoms as a minimum and they remain static…maybe others have other ideas. Please have the engineers look into how MyFamily handled these before the old site closes…. but even the MyFamily site had room for improvement which other Spokt members can advise on…. I can see these being adding somewhat later but the concept needs to remain….
Will there be a ?MEMBERS” category where under that catagory there is a ‘listing’ of approved info of any members personals that the member dictates, such as—home address, telephone, birthday, etc.
And another feature was a “ALL POSTS BY THIS MEMBER’ where one could read the entire thread that contained all the previous posts, and the datesthey were posted.
To Jim McDonough’s post, I too would love that ability to connect to all posts made by the member. Also, to Chris’s request for a welcome front page. He said that we often changed our front page for holidays, etc. and asked if there will be an administrative feature that will allow us to add front pages once again coming to SPOKT. It did define our site, and it’s the one thing noticeably missing from our migration.
I would add a very important item that the front page had an affecting “In Memoriam” section listing the Bushwick Buddies who had passed before us. It consisted of 22 names.
I am trying to get a member back on to our family site.
I went ahead and deleted them as a member and sent a
new invitation. They cannot remember their password and
asked that it be sent to their email (several times)
but they do not receive the email from you with the link
to change their password. It is not in their spam either.
How can I get them back onto the site?
One of the things that I think is very important is being able to place our pictures in different categories. Right now it is just a big glob of pictures . . . one big family, but we will need to have the ability to categorized them in generations, years, holidays, families, graveyards, or customize . . . if it is built, then we can sort. =D
While I greatly appreciate all that Spokt has done to date and am patiently waiting for Albums, I am hoping that when all the migrations have finished, several features can be added/addressed.
A redesign of the front page so that it spans the entire screen- the bigger the better, and the bigger font (perhaps a font size option for our older members?) the better. Right now, the left column is duplicating many of the headings across the top, and the Mayflower Migration square is unnecessary, as mentioned elsewhere.
The option to have a running slideshow of the photos- many of my older members loved this, and often a random photo flitting by reminded me of something I should be doing for our extended family genealogy website.
The option to tag individual photos from different albums, which pulls them into a group to address issues- we use this for old photos where we are still trying to identify people. Currently I have 109 we are working on- DID THE TAGS MIGRATE AS WELL?
I second the desire to have color options, and our Hub Name much bigger, with a photo perhaps, and a welcome paragraph.
Great job to date, SPOKT! Let’s keep working together to make the site even more wonderful:)
Just a few more things-
Is there any way to migrate the running commentary on various topics and photos (with the photo itself) that is a timeline of our site ? I know that the comments are attached to each photo, but even when placed in albums, the thread of our 4 years’ worth of comments has been lost. I have made pdfs of each of the 29 pages that make up our entire timeline, and I suppose I can add them chronologically to the NEWS section, but they will require opening to read and not have any way to continue and add to the thread of conversation without searching through our thousands of old photos to find the right one.
Also, it would be so very special to be able to put our Family Trees in gedcom file on the site. I doubt that Spokt would be able to negotiate a deal with Ancestry to allow them to connect “live” to our Ancestry.com accounts, but even a static gedcom with occasional updates would be so helpful.
Thanks, Spokt!
Right now Dan I really happy that you were able to import the data you have from the Ancestry MyFamily Site.
For the future whenever it would be nice to be able to get link / post to the net as was available on MyFamily.
Thanks