Helping my members see their 'pending' Followers
Using Jamroom
OK, for the past two days I discussed the whole follow/privatemessage system options with my six sensible site Moderators (profile admins). I explained to them the various function and feature interdependencies of PrivateNotes, Followers, and FollowersToFriends... and the setting options available. Usually I don't have so much trouble making site decisions, but this issue kept frustrating me, I felt it was worth bringing them in and giving them the rather complicated (to us) function explanations.
I was relieved to find that they all seemed to favor the same choices... not what I expected at all, but it made the decisions much easier for me!
Two things distinguish my 9 year old site from the average social network: 1) I have a larger proportion of over-50 members with pretty limited online skills, and 2) Our site is extremely kind and friendly towards each other, with almost non-existent member conflicts or trouble occurring over the years.
Keeping those factors in mind, the moderators and I have all agreed and I've put into action our new site settings:
--most importantly, we're now allowing all members to private message all other members WITHOUT needing to 'follow' the other person in either direction. This will work well for our very friendly site, with safety/privacy options still available to members: being able to BLOCK anyone they don't like, and being able to turn OFF getting any PMs at all if they like. Allowing this PM'ing freely will address the SINGLE BIGGEST ongoing difficulty my members seek help with over and over: not understanding how to use the Follow system back and forth, and leaving their followers pending and then wondering why they couldn't send messages.
-- We're keeping the Follow system in place, to allow members to enjoy building their 'friends' lists and to enable them to keep up with only their friends' posts if they like, via the Latest Activity TAB on their own page. Taking away people's Followers at this stage of the game would cause members' heads to explode.
I've simply eliminated the dependancy between the PM system and the Follow system.
--Using the new toggle Tool made available recently, I've now rest all 3600 member profiles to again 'require approval' for new followers, and also set the default for NEW members that way. Individual members will still be able to UNset that again for themselves, but because of the FollowersToFriends module, this will help prevent the accumulation of Pending followers by members who seldom check their settings.
As in earlier in this thread, thanks to support here I've also added a user dropdown menu link to "Pending Followers" with a number, which will go a long ways to help members REALIZE they have some pending. (most members were not thinking to click the Followers TAB on their profile page... tending instead to just look at the avatar pics of their recent followers on their profile page widget...which does not show any 'pending' status. This is similar to the user menu link to Private Messages with a number following it showing one's unread messages.
--some sites would naturally not want to allow members to freely message non-followers because of the potential for spam. This is not a significant issue for my site because: I have several anti-spam safeguards in place that prevent spammers from ever joining (I've had only ONE spammer in 2.5 years get past the gates, and they were ID'd and banned within an hour), ...and also the fact that it's not very worthwhile for legit members to 'spam' each other via PMs since messages can only be sent to one person at a time. I have a strong moderation team of active well liked people who members know they can contact if they receive any messages that are unsolicited or uncomfortable.
I think perhaps I've covered everything. I'm hoping that sometime in the future this whole thread might be helpful to other JR site owners searching this forum for input on perhaps similar issues to those I've been struggling with for such a long time.
My big thanks to the JR Team for creating additional modules and tools for us all that give us multiple options to customize what we need for our particular sites.
And of course my big thanks to the Team as well for continuing to help me understand some of the settings and options available to me. My questions and confusions have been going on about all this for much too long and surely must have tried your patience.
I'm considering this PM/Followers issue to be SOLVED for my sites now. THANKS so much!
