Lists of lists

(picture above, our dogs – listening) (and wow, I’m really struggling with creative titles lately)

It’s been a busy, busy week and I haven’t posted in a few days, so there’s a lot to talk about! I hate coming on here and just making lists – but when there’s so much going on in the OD world that sometimes works best 😁 so here goes.

Contacting Support

I have to start by saying how absolutely great it is to have all of you here and helping us to test out the site. We have received tons of valuable input on enhancements and bugs from this group, and I want to thank you so much. Having said that, we are continuing to add more people to the group every day, and the number of communications and requests is getting pretty large. Add to this that we are receiving hundreds of emails a week from OD members interested in the site launch/status of their diaries (which is awesome) – and we have a lot of communications going on!

So, please – if you have questions/comments/concerns/bug reports to make – please go to the bottom of any page and click the Contact Support link. This is the best way to get your message to us, and gets it automatically into our ticketing system for the team to work on.

If you just want to leave a note/chat I’m always happy to have notes on my entries of course! But if you are having a problem, need to report something – please do so through Support rather than here or through my regular email. Thanks!

Previous / Next old entries

One of the problems we found after importing old diary data was that if you had posted multiple entries on the same day in the old system, the new site was not recognizing that in the Next and Previous navigation links, making it look like some of those entries were “missing”. The entries weren’t actually missing, but our navigation wasn’t handling them correctly, so you couldn’t get to them!

Engineering put a fix in for this last night, so I think it works as intended now – but it would be great if some of you who reported that problem could go take a look and let me know if this fixed it for you – thanks!

Endless notifications

We’ve also added a little link on the notifications dropdown to allow you to clear your notifications – if you are one of the people who was getting notifications for every comment from your old entries (and you don’t want to go back and revisit -every-single-bit-of-your-history-) you should be able to click that to make them go away.

Sharing icons on public entries

The sharing icons have been updated so they will only show up on Public entries now – so if your entry is not in public view (not members only, or friends, or private) it won’t show these icons to share it now.

Privacy levels

I’ve had a few questions about how the privacy levels work. The best way to think of it is that diary privacy is a level higher than entry privacy, so diary privacy will always supersede an entry, unless the privacy level on the entry is more restrictive. So, a few examples:

• diary is set to Friends Only, entry is set to Public – this entry will only be seen by your Friends
• diary is set to Public, entry is set to Friends Only – this entry will only be seen by your Friends
• diary is set to Private, entry is set to Public – only you will be able to see your entry
• diary is set to Members only, entry is set to Friends Only – only your friends will see it
• diary is set to Members only, entry is set to Public – only members will see the entry

Hopefully, that makes sense! As some of you are thinking about our upcoming public launch, what this means is that if you set your diary to Members Only, even if you have Public entries in it they will still only be visible to members.

Sorry, I hope that helped make this clear – and not more confusing!

Change your diaries from Private!

(if you want). When we first imported all the old diary data, we made all diaries private to protect the privacy of the members of the old site. We didn’t want anybody to be shocked that their diary had come back online without them knowing it.

There are still quite a few members who have joined the testing group who have their diaries on Private still – and are leaving people notes, but those people can’t see you to respond. If you want other members to see your diary, go to your Profile and then to Settings and then Diary – you can change the privacy level there.

Pasting URLs

Another great fix put in by Engineering (I love saying that because it makes me think I’m in Starfleet) was to update the functionality for pasting links to media (like YouTube videos) into entries. This wasn’t quite working right, but should be fixed now. In addition, there are a whole bunch of other kinds of embeds you can add to your diary, just by pasting or typing the link into an entry. A list of all the sites you should be able to embed from is below:

Whew! If you made it to here, thanks for reading 🙂