Oh No! You Forgot Your Password???

An email will be sent to you within a few minutes.  Please be patient as this can take some time to be sent to your email program.  If you don’t see it in your inbox, please check your spam and junk folders to locate the email.  It is also a great idea to add “donotreply@spokt.com” and “support@spokt.com” to your “safe senders” list.  The email will look something like this:

Please click the long link embedded in the password (highlighted in yellow above). When you do, you will be taken to a page that will direct you to enter a new password.  You can also use the password you thought was correct.  In either case, whatever you enter here will be your new password going forward.  Enter your new password in the space provided and click “Update Password”.

From this point on, whenever you log in to your Spokt.com account you must use this new password.  If your internet browser remembers your passwords, it will likely try to remember your old password instead of the new one.  We recommend finding where to update your saved passwords in your internet browser application and updating the password there as well.  Regardless, you MUST make whatever changes necessary to your internet browser to allow you to type in your NEW password – even though it is most likely remembering your old password.

We hope this post is informative and helpful and improves your Spokt.com experience!

What Does an Invitation Look Like?

We frequently have Hub admins ask us what happens when they invite new users to join them on their hub using the Invite tool. This post is to help you see what the invitation looks like and what the newly invited user should be experiencing as he or she gets signed up to view your hub.

Using the Invite tool inside your hub, you should enter the person’s name and email address.  Spokt.com has already drafted the email text (shown below).  If you would like to customize your email message, you can do so by clicking on the tab titled “Customize Message” and enter in your own text for the invitation email.  If you do this, be sure to click “Update Message” when you are finished typing your custom message.  You DO NOT need to customize your email, but you are certainly welcome to.

You can see all the different areas of the Invitation tool in the image below:

When you are ready,  simply click “Invite” at the bottom of the page and your invitation will be immediately sent out to whomever you have invited.

Those people will receive an email just like this:

The newly invited user should simply click on the blue “accept invitation” link.  They should NOT click on the blue “Spokt.com” link above, as it will simply take them to our main website and the user may get confused as to what to do next.  If the “accept invitation” link does not work, they can copy and paste the URL at the bottom of the message into their browser and it should take them to a screen that looks like this:

Here the user needs to make a choice right off the bat.  If they are already a user of Spokt.com with the SAME email address you used to invite them, all they have to do is simply log in to their Spokt.com account by using the box on the right that says “I Have A Username”.  All they need to do is enter their existing password and they will be brought directly into their account where they can choose to view your hub.

If the user does not already have a Spokt.com account that has the exact SAME email address that you used to invite them, then they need to set up their new account in the larger box on the left.  The user’s email address will auto-populate into the first block. Then they need to create USERNAME for themselves.  This can be almost anything they choose, but if another user has the same username, it will not allow duplicate usernames.  For example, the username of “John Smith” is most likely taken already. They may need to create a username of “JSmith1956” or something like that. Then they should enter their first and last names (if they are not already auto-populated) and a unique password.  The password can be whatever they choose.  We recommend a six letter minimum password and also recommend using at least one number or special character.  But again, this is up to the user’s discretion.  We try not to make our password requirements too stringent.

Once they have completed all these steps, all the new user has to do is click the green “Create Account” button and they will be automatically taken to their brand new account and will be able to see the hub you have invited them to immediately.

Of course, if a new user wants to then create their own hub for their immediate family, church group, school class, or garden club (whatever they desire), they can create a new hub once they’ve logged in by clicking the words “Create Hub” at the very tip top of the page in the black bar.  They will then be guided through setting up their own hub.

Hopefully this lengthy description is helpful and will assist you in getting more and more of your associates, friends, family members, and more to join you in your new hub at Spokt.com!

As always, feel free to send us an email directly at support@spokt.com if you have specific questions about your hub or account. We love to hear from you!

Spokt.com Support Team

Infrastructure Improvements

** 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.

Announcing: Spokt Books

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.

Search

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!

Invitations

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!!!

Updates Coming VERY Soon!

Hi everybody. We sincerely apologize for not blogging more often and make a promise here and now to never leave you hanging this long again.

We are finally out of the tumultuous migration stage and into the updates and improvements stage. A quick note on migrations: MyFamily servers were extremely intermittent and buggy during the last 3-4 weeks of migrations. After their official shut down (September 30th) we were still able to connect to their servers and we successfully migrated thousands of MyFamily sites over to Spokt. However, as time wore on, the migrations stalled, stopped completely, and frequently came back with super spotty data and information. Many users’ photos had been replaced with a basic MyFamily photo stating that their site was over the storage limit – even though this was not the case.

Suffice it to say, we were bombarded with a deluge of requests to fix the migrations – and many of them we were able to fix. However, unfortunately, there were several people whose sites we were not able to salvage. We begged and pleaded with MyFamily for more time and better connectivity… but to no avail.

Since the dust has settled from the migration period, we have updated several seemingly insignificant parts of Spokt to make it more complete and user friendly. Some of the updates you may have already seen are:

– Credit Card Payment Information: You can now update your own payment information right on Spokt.com. To do this, just log on to your account, click on “Edit Account” at the top of the page and then click the blue “Account” button in the middle of the page. There, you’ll see credit card info. You can delete existing cards and add new cards there. Be sure to click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page any time you make a change.

– Replace Photo Option: If for some reason you have photos that were changed by MyFamily to the “Over Site Limit” photo, or a black square, you can now replace that photo with a saved photo on your computer. All the comments and posts attached to the photo stay in place and all you have to do is simply replace it with the correct photo. If you want more information on how to do this, let us know by emailing us at support@spokt.com.

– MyFamily .Zip File Upload: If a whole host of your photos were missing from your migration, we are offering the opportunity for you to send us your .zip file that you presumably downloaded from MyFamily before they shut down. We are still working on the right way to get the photos replaced in your hub, but we’d like to get the .zip files from you as quickly as possible so we can start to work on the replacement for you. To do this simply click on this link: http://spokt.com/mayflower/uploads/new.

Now the news you’ve all been waiting for…

We are about to make the updates and changes for the new Calendar feature as well as the Album (Categorization) feature. Instead of “Albums” we are calling them “Books”. We have received confirmation from our programmers that these two features will be ready and functioning before the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Please keep an eye out for these changes. Once they’re live, we will post about it here.

More and more features will be added in the very near future.

It goes without saying that we really truly appreciate EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of you for your pioneering spirit. Taking the trip on the Mayflower had it’s ups and downs, and we are SO glad you all made it. We look forward to working closely with each and every one of you over the coming years to create the best private family sharing website on the internet. With your suggestions and ideas, we will do just that!

Happy Holidays everyone!

The Spokt Team

End of October Update

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!

Extended Access for Mayflower

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!

3 Days Left! (Extended Access)

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.

8 Days Left

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!

Mayflower 2.0 Imports Initiated

This is a quick update to let you know that we have implemented a member matching solution for Mayflower 2.0 sites and have initiated limited Mayflower 2.0 migrations over the weekend. We will be ramping things up over the next week, and in the coming days we should have more details on ETA for fulfilling the 2.0 backlog. We have proactively prepared the content for all of the 2.0 orders we’ve received to date, so we do not anticipate any issues getting the backlog cleared out in a timely manner.

Thank you all for your patience as we continue to serve you to our fullest capacity.