Beta Feedback

This online forum is intended for reporting bugs (problems) or suggesting changes to the website. Praise and kudos are welcome, but they don't really help us improve the site, so consider adding a comment to an existing positive posting, rather than creating new postings.

Sometimes, postings are more useful when they include this information:
1. Informative Titles - "Home Page artwork takes too long to draw"
2. URL Provided - "http://cohousing.org"

Did the site developers consider using Joomla - http://www.joomla.org/ - before settling on the Drupal platform? Just curious.

An anonymized email thread illustrates...

-----Original Message-----
From: Advertiser
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008
To: Craig Ragland
Subject: Re: Receipt - Classified Ads

OK, don’t bother with a refund.

-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Ragland
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:00 AM
To: Advertiser
Subject: Re: Receipt - Classified Ads

Hi,

1. Go to Subscribe Page:
http://www.cohousing.org/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=2
2. Using the breadcrumbs, press "Contact Information"
3. Went to this URL:
http://www.cohousing.org/civicrm/profile

with the following message:

"Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.

We experienced an unexpected error. Please file an issue with the backtrace

Return to home page."

"the some 100 built" is a little odd sounding. "100-some," perhaps might flow off the tongue a little better?

We got an email from a cohouser who wants to edit their current Classified Ad. Is this possible, or do we need to make the editorial changes to a live ad for them? If it is not possible today, we need to look ahead to a time when it is possible. It would be fine to link this to Premium Access, that is, require Premium Access in order to place or edit Classified Ads.

Is there a bug in the way that poll results are processed? Or are we getting "poll spammed?"

Look at the Date/Time stamps for the responses and the responses themselves:

http://www.cohousing.org/node/680/responses

It appears that for most of the entries, we have two responses which are always posted 2 minutes apart? Curious...

Note: this is only visible to Administrators, so if this is just confusing to you non-Administrator types, please forgive, but this is where we're putting this info.

The text at the top says that this is where you subscribe to the monthly magazine (by implication only that.. Then the mag subscription is only one of 15 choices, and it is the seventh one down in a visually very crowded field. I'd like to propose a different set of choices here that would get us as much information about the person's choices, but would be easier to manage, and clearer about what it means to check of any one of those boxes. Is there a limit to how lengthy the "labels" for these check boxes can be? And if so, what is it?

Joani

Speaking with a prospective advertiser, it was noticed that the directory header scrolls off the top of the page as you scroll down to look at the listings. This makes it hard to see the Units/Acreage item, which is confusing...

It seems like the wide-open flexibility of an empty text field for providing the feedback may not be what we want on a long-term basis. I wonder if getting smarter about this might make sense?

Perhaps some type of "page-specific feedback"? Clicking on a "give feedback" could open some view that shows both the current page and some well crafted choices to help guide the feedback. Maybe we could make it easy to see what relevant feedback has already been received?

1. cover for cohousing handbook is of older edition; 2d edition is in color
2. Geoph's video isn't in there. Or other cohousing-related videos

From Coho-L:

Just a thought. Have you and your team considered having private testamonials available on the website's professional listings? Not just the glowing ones either. Something like the customer ratings on Amazon or Overstock.com?

I suspect that most groups have experience with most of the professionals out there; it's a small pond. For example, Tierra Nueva has experience with Wonderland as our developer, and Laird Shaub as a mediator. I think that honest, thoughtful analysis of the perfomance of professionals would be a helpful aspect to the website.

"You can leave us a message about using the contact form below regarding: Tours"

Shouldn't this say, "You can leave us a message about tours using the contact form below"
or "You can leave us a message regarding tours using the contact form below:"

We don't what them to leave us a message about "using the contact form below."

While I'm at it, I don't think that the "input format" stuff at the bottom of this box is supposed to be seen by the public. Isn't that one of those editing things?

http://www.cohousing.org/tours

the display of first horizontal rule is odd on my PC

Win XP, FireFox 2.0

I think it would be useful to have another admin-only field, that does not display with an ad, that can used for leaving administrative notes. For example, I responded to an email and "unpublished" two classified ads (by turning off the publish flag). Ideally, I could easily leave a note for others that includes information about why they were unpublished.

In the Related Resources section, North American Organizations:
http://www.cohousing.org/na_orgs

1. The listings starting with "Cohousing Minnesota" really belong on the regional organizations page.

2. The Buddhist Cohousing YahooGroup hardly qualifies as an "organization". It feels more like it could fit in on a list of special-interest cohousing projects, umbrella groups tied to affinity rather than geography.

3. Cohousing for San Diego is defunct, according to organizers there I've spoken to.

4. The regional organizations page probably should be linked or at least related to on this page.

I just got a call from someone interested in my community (Tumblerock) and was shocked when she said she'd read on cohousing.org that our community was not open to GLBT members. Sure enough, our "no answer" to that question on the FIC questionnaire had somehow turned into a "No" on cohousing.org. I changed our FIC answer to "Yes," but I'd request that someone take a look at how those answers get parsed for inclusion in the directory listing on cohousing.org. I think I saw the same problem with the question whether there is a core leadership group.

Extracted from a Coho-L posting

To expand on what wrote, the URL for the Canadian Cohousing
Network is www.cohousing.ca. They have a directory of cohousing groups in
Canada.

There are a lot of cohousing groups in the U.S. that have been discussed
on the listserve but are not yet listed in the Coho/US directory.

's failed attempt to find Chaswood Green in the Coho/US web
directory reminded me of an issue: There should be a pointer on the Coho/US
website to the Canadian website, and there isn't. Or at least I couldn't

While talking an advertiser about adding a photo to a Classified Ad, they wanted to see an ad with a photo. We looked at the listing together and they were confused because when they clicked on the little camera icon, it didn't open the ad (or the photo).

If this is easy to make happen, we should make the camera a hot spot that also opens the appropriate ad.

In the "More for your brain" paragraph, when I clicked on "click here" for the conference schedule I got the spreadsheet schedule. It would be really wonderful if it could be printed on 1 or 2 easy-to-read pages; as it is, it comes out on 4. Thanks! Barbara