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Let me start by saying I no longer have a license for whatever reason, so I will not be able to see any answers. But I have been asked 3 times to give my full feedback, so here it is.
Also where as this post will focus on all the things I have found wrong with EasySocial, there are thousands of things that I love about EasySocial that I am not listing here. You guys truly are doing amazing work. But that amazing work is crippled by some glaring bugs, and confusing limitations.
First, frequently when Joomla updates the 'remember me' check box stops working as it should. This probably has more to do with Joomla than it does with EasySocial, but it is anoying.
Somewhere between 1.1.4 and 1.2.10 the stream stopped displaying items in the correct order. In 1.2.15 this issue was fixed, however it created a new issue where 'load more stream items' started loading the same stream items in a perpetual loop. It even did this on the EasySocial demo page until recently. It now functions correctly on the demo.
Friend Requests. The accept and reject friend request buttons are backwards from what they are on every other website out there. This causes a lot of users to reject friends requests on accident. I have corrected this on my site by changing the color of the accept and reject buttons to make it more intuitive, but the placement is key and really should be fixed.
The non modular nature of EasySocial is very restrictive. Every one of the side bar items really should be taken out of EasySocial core and placed as modules so the site owners can change how and where they display. I.E. News Feed filters, Groups, Applications, Friends, Friend Suggestion, Mutual Friends, Albums, Photos, all of it. The ability to select a left or right sidebar, and the order that they display in would be a great start, but making them modules that could be placed anywhere would be much better.
The badges and achievement system is very cool, but it is lacking some fundamental functionality. First the ability for an admin to create manually assigned badges is paramount. We need to be able to upload an image, click 'create new badge' and give it a name and description and just have a series of badges that we can manually assign to users. Furthermore a way to manually assign badges to users in the front end is badly needed, and a permission setting to allow specific profile types access to manually assigning badges.
We also need to ability to have more than one badge for each trigger. Like, uploading photos. It is odd to have only one badge for photo uploads, when you could have one for 10 photos, then another for 50, and yet another for 100 and so on. But the system will not let you install more than one badge for the same trigger. The current functionality is fundamentally limiting, and really restricts the potential of the badge system.
On the fronted admin topic, we need some admin control in the front end. The ability to edit a users profile, avatar, cover, assign badges and profile types, etc, is completely lacking in EasySocial, These are all things that really need to exist on any social network of any decent size so that we can assign community moderators that can preform some admin actions without having full access to the sites back-end.
Profile Linking. There is no way (that I have found) for users to easily link to their profiles and accounts on other sites. We need a username/link custom field. For example Twitter. The user would enter their twitter username, this name would be displayed on their profile info page as a clickable link that would lead to http://www.twitter.com/[username] It would be great if this was a field that could be configured in the back end so that you could support linking to any site you choose as well as multiple sites.
News Feed Filters. The ability for an admin to setup custom filters is non-existent. Me & Friends, Everyone, Following are a good start, but we have the ability to collect a large amount of sorting data from users, We need the ability to set global filters based on profile fields, like Gender, Location, Profile Type, or any other profile field.
Profile Type indication. There is really no easy way to determine at a glance users with special profile types. There are a million ways to do this. You could add a watermark for avatars based on profile type (not the way I would go, but it would work). Custom frames around avatars based on profile type so that admins for example could have a gold border around their avatar while normal users have a white border or something. Text Color!!! The ability to change the text color in stream items based on profile type would be perfect, and is how most sites handle this. So that admins have blue or gold text, while moderator have another color (such as green) and normal users have typical white, grey, or black text. This makes it EXTREMELY easy to see at a glance when someone important says something. It would also give you another way to reward special members by giving them a different text color.
I have more but this post is already getting extremely long, and these are the major issues that WILL make EasySocial better and really need addressed before listing off all the things that could make EasySocial better.
Also where as this post will focus on all the things I have found wrong with EasySocial, there are thousands of things that I love about EasySocial that I am not listing here. You guys truly are doing amazing work. But that amazing work is crippled by some glaring bugs, and confusing limitations.
First, frequently when Joomla updates the 'remember me' check box stops working as it should. This probably has more to do with Joomla than it does with EasySocial, but it is anoying.
Somewhere between 1.1.4 and 1.2.10 the stream stopped displaying items in the correct order. In 1.2.15 this issue was fixed, however it created a new issue where 'load more stream items' started loading the same stream items in a perpetual loop. It even did this on the EasySocial demo page until recently. It now functions correctly on the demo.
Friend Requests. The accept and reject friend request buttons are backwards from what they are on every other website out there. This causes a lot of users to reject friends requests on accident. I have corrected this on my site by changing the color of the accept and reject buttons to make it more intuitive, but the placement is key and really should be fixed.
The non modular nature of EasySocial is very restrictive. Every one of the side bar items really should be taken out of EasySocial core and placed as modules so the site owners can change how and where they display. I.E. News Feed filters, Groups, Applications, Friends, Friend Suggestion, Mutual Friends, Albums, Photos, all of it. The ability to select a left or right sidebar, and the order that they display in would be a great start, but making them modules that could be placed anywhere would be much better.
The badges and achievement system is very cool, but it is lacking some fundamental functionality. First the ability for an admin to create manually assigned badges is paramount. We need to be able to upload an image, click 'create new badge' and give it a name and description and just have a series of badges that we can manually assign to users. Furthermore a way to manually assign badges to users in the front end is badly needed, and a permission setting to allow specific profile types access to manually assigning badges.
We also need to ability to have more than one badge for each trigger. Like, uploading photos. It is odd to have only one badge for photo uploads, when you could have one for 10 photos, then another for 50, and yet another for 100 and so on. But the system will not let you install more than one badge for the same trigger. The current functionality is fundamentally limiting, and really restricts the potential of the badge system.
On the fronted admin topic, we need some admin control in the front end. The ability to edit a users profile, avatar, cover, assign badges and profile types, etc, is completely lacking in EasySocial, These are all things that really need to exist on any social network of any decent size so that we can assign community moderators that can preform some admin actions without having full access to the sites back-end.
Profile Linking. There is no way (that I have found) for users to easily link to their profiles and accounts on other sites. We need a username/link custom field. For example Twitter. The user would enter their twitter username, this name would be displayed on their profile info page as a clickable link that would lead to http://www.twitter.com/[username] It would be great if this was a field that could be configured in the back end so that you could support linking to any site you choose as well as multiple sites.
News Feed Filters. The ability for an admin to setup custom filters is non-existent. Me & Friends, Everyone, Following are a good start, but we have the ability to collect a large amount of sorting data from users, We need the ability to set global filters based on profile fields, like Gender, Location, Profile Type, or any other profile field.
Profile Type indication. There is really no easy way to determine at a glance users with special profile types. There are a million ways to do this. You could add a watermark for avatars based on profile type (not the way I would go, but it would work). Custom frames around avatars based on profile type so that admins for example could have a gold border around their avatar while normal users have a white border or something. Text Color!!! The ability to change the text color in stream items based on profile type would be perfect, and is how most sites handle this. So that admins have blue or gold text, while moderator have another color (such as green) and normal users have typical white, grey, or black text. This makes it EXTREMELY easy to see at a glance when someone important says something. It would also give you another way to reward special members by giving them a different text color.
I have more but this post is already getting extremely long, and these are the major issues that WILL make EasySocial better and really need addressed before listing off all the things that could make EasySocial better.
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