international online community for dna barcoding professionals

Wishlist for connect.BarcodeofLife.net

We are eager to hear what features and functions would make this online community useful and effective for you. Please give us your suggestions, requests and needs in this discussion thread and we will do our best to respond with answers and solutions as we can.

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 9, 2009 at 10:09am

Overheard at #barcode09: It must tie into my facebook feed or I will never use it.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Trizna on November 12, 2009 at 4:31pm

Hi Matt. It would be great to have the ability to invite non-colleague members to a group. It looks like the only options are to invite non-members through e-mail or my "colleagues."

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 13, 2009 at 10:34am

Mike,

Great question. The Ning platform does not allow people to do this to protect members from spam. Otherwise anyone could join the network, start a group and then spam everyone on the network. That being said I have a question into the Ning support team about this to see if there is an easier way to invite members than to befriend them each individually as colleagues first. I'll let you know what I find out.

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Permalink Reply by Karen James on November 15, 2009 at 12:54am

Hi Matt, two things:

I'd rather have it tie into LinkedIn than Facebook.

On the Members page, I'd like it to divide the list of Members into those that are already my colleagues and those that aren't (or at lease somehow show if someone is already my colleague). Even more useful would be a LinkedIn-type system which recommends colleagues to me based on my existing colleagues.

Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 16, 2009 at 11:08am

Karen,

There are no direct tie-ins to other social networks through the Ning platform, which is the platform we are using for this community. I'm not sure exactly what sort of a tie-in you would be looking for, as the profile data is distinctly different from one network to the next, so profiles won't port over well. As to any feeds that you might want to share, if it is RSS-compatible then you can add it to your profile page. You do this through managing My Apps in your Profile page.

As to the Members page, these are great suggestions. Ning does not support these right now, but I will contact them and see if they have any ideas about apps for member management. In the meantime, the Advanced Search feature in the Members section is very powerful, especially when coupled with the custom data in everyone's profile. For example, an advanced search of the Plant Working Group brings up a number of potential colleagues.

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Permalink Reply by Karen James on November 19, 2009 at 6:41pm

Do I share feeds through My Apps on my Profile page by adding the app 'My RSS'?

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 20, 2009 at 10:58am

Karen,

Great question. For some reason the RSS feature was removed in all of our recent customizations. It is now back. To add an RSS, simply copy the URL of the RSS you'd like to feature, login and go to your Profile Page. There you will find the RSS widget at the bottom of the left column.

Hope that helps!

Matthew

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Permalink Reply by Karen James on November 20, 2009 at 11:37am

Great! I went there and added an RSS feed - looks great - but can I add more than one?

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 20, 2009 at 1:05pm

Good question. This is another one for the Ning support team. I'll run it by them and see what they say. Get back to you soon.

-Matthew

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 23, 2009 at 11:31am

The only way to do this is by including an RSS widget, as Ning does not support this functionality out of the box. If you can find an appropriate RSS widget out there let me know and I'll show you how to add it to your page. Basically, any text field in Ning supports widgets, so it's easy to add as many as you like.

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Fisher on November 16, 2009 at 11:29am

In a conversation with Dan and Winnie we came across the need to not only identify the location of members' institution in their profile, but also the location(s) where members are conducting field research. I'll discuss this with David and others at CBOL to see if we can upgrade the profile to support this feature.