More New Features: Reports, Autocomplete, Question Help Text
I feel like we’re cheating a bit by posting another new features entry this week. These are coming from a backlog of features that have been in private usage, but needed some polish before being opened up to the public.
Reports
We’ve added a slew of reports to the Admin section. All networks now have reports for most popular, loneliest, most active, activity by day, and general usage. The reports come as HTML, for easy following, and CSV, for times when you want to work with them in Excel.
We also have a few reports that are specific to conferences: session attendance and session ratings.
I want to give a little bit of back story on two of the reports, most popular and loneliest. The idea of popularity on a network is completely unscientific, but often it can tell you a little bit about the community and even suggest people you want to meet. Before CrowdVine, I built a social network for people in tech. The first time we looked at the most popular list, the founder of our company exclaimed of the most popular person, “This list is useless, I’ve never heard of this person.” The person turned out to have founded a wonderful company that was recently acquired for $22M. The correct response from our founder should have been “I must meet this person.”
The loneliest users list is an idea that I first heard of from Flickr. The point is not to identify and then mock unpopular people. It’s to find people who took the time to join your site but have not yet had meaningful social interactions. Not everyone is a social butterfly and part of the job of a great moderator is to welcome and greet new people.
Tag Auto-complete
One of our best features is our ability to turn common profile answers into tags so that people can click through and see everyone who gave that answer. However, tagging is a rough business and people often choose different words to mean the same thing. We’ve added auto-complete when you’re filling out your profile we can guide you to the most popular answers. The goal is not to turn people into clones, but to help them converge on one answer when there are multiple answers that mean the same thing.
Here’s an example from a network I’m on for former employees of O’Reilly Media. The division I worked in is referred to by many names, including O’Reilly Network and ORN, but the one most people have settled on is OPG.
Question Help Text
A lot of people have asked for help text to go along with the profile questions. You can now add help text to any question from Admin -> Profile questions -> advanced options.
Tags: autocomplete, features, questions, reports, tags