Rich and Anthony deployed a boat load of fixes and enhancements to Mix on Friday night.
I might have mentioned before the Mix is going to be used more by internal teams, so we addressed groups with this deployment for the most part.
Some of these are bug fixes that have been needed for a while, so if you’re rolling your eyes thinking “about time”, all I can say is. Noonan! If you’ve hit any of these issues previously, I’m happy to report them as fixed.
Here we go:
- Profile cards in IE had some issues. You can request to join a private group, and when you do so, group administrators see a number next to “Pending requests to join” on the group home page. The profile cards on that page with the requests to join showed only pictures. In the words of the person who reported the bug, “It is quite difficult to see the names of the people who want to join.” That’s a nice way to put it. Anyway, we fixed that.
- Also in IE, the profile cards on the People tab had no names, making it difficult to tell one smiley face from another. The reporter of this bug put it very drolly, “Even the pictures are minimally useful as I don’t know what you look like and as such, wouldn’t know which picture to click if I wanted to network with you.” D’oh, thanks for putting this in a nice way.
- The resend confirmation email link that Anthony added a few weeks ago to the user profile page is now a link in the orange reminder message that appears until you confirm.
- The groups home page wasn’t parsing the HTML tags in group descriptions. It is now.
- The link to edit a group throwing a 500 internal server error for some odd reason, which made it really awkward to demo. It’s always fun when you go to show a feature and it turns out to be hosed.
- I don’t know how many people actually know about the blog feature within groups. It’s a light-weight way to communicate with a group. Just click the “Post a topic” link on the group home, and from there, you can post an idea, question or blog post directly to the group. Anyway, the edit function, which appears for posts you have written, was throwing an error. Not anymore.
- After we tore down the work email wall, we missed a few housekeeping details, like the confirmation emails still referred to using your work email address. We cleaned that up this week.
- Activity in private groups was showing in summary form in the Activity Log. That was a surprise, and now, that’s fixed.
- Previously, as noted here and here by friend of the ‘Lab Frank Bradley, users who were not members of Mix could not be invited to groups, making it rather difficult to spread the Mix love. We fixed that, and added a lovely yellow widget box to show you any group invites you have. Do you like?
- When you were invited to a group, the invite showed the group’s owner as the person who invited you, regardless of whether that was true or not. Not anymore, now the person who invited you shows in the email.
- If you’ve got comments on you profile, you might have noticed that the message still said: “No comments yet. Comment on someone’s profile and maybe they’ll return the favor.” even though you had comments. That always bugged me. In a classic fix, the new message says “Be nice. Comment on someone’s profile today and maybe they’ll return the favor.” This made me lulz, since I had over-engineered a fix that required an if statement. Kudos for de-Rube Goldberg’ing my fix.
- Finally, the invite process remembers who invited you to Mix. If you joined Mix because someone invited you, you might remember that person was not automatically added to your network of contacts. This was very limiting and anti-social. So, we fixed it.
That’s a lot of fixes. Rich and Anthony are planning a more general approach to invites, so eventually, all invites will show both on the pending invites page and in the yellow widget box.
If you’re a Mix user, thanks and keep your eyes peeled for more new features and changes. If you’re not, join up and get some context for these posts.
Sound off about what you think of the changes, what you think of Mix, anything Mix-related in comments.
