Building to Beta

Another evening of burning the midnight oil as I attempt to bring this website to its beta launch. It's overawing, what there is to do and I generally find that I sit down for an evening's work with a plan, only for that plan to go awry when I realise that the immediate problem hinges on another issue.

This weekend I intended to solve the problems with the FAQ tags which don't work. Along the way I realised that it would be helpful if members could interact with the FAQs by commenting below them which would be very difficult on a standard dynamic page. This made me think that the FAQs should therefore be integrated into the Forum section of the site. So I had a go at setting this up. It was quite straightforward: moderators can create FAQs but members can comment. However Keith pointed out to me that these forum posts aren't linkable, which kills that idea: it would be really useful to link them together or send a link to a member who is looking for information. While I am writing this I am now wondering if an adapted blog isn't the way to go, since blog posts can be both tagged and commented upon. Maybe that's a direction to pursue next week.

Whilst working this weekend I am also conscious of the need to get feedback, so I encouraged members of the Facebook moderator team to join the website. This raised several other issues: there was no privacy statement and no Impressum. So temporary versions of these were written and published this evening. A cookies banner was also launched.

Another problem is reducing the number of forum categories that a member sees. I want them to be able to select their province(s) so that they will only see the forums which are relevant to them. I think the way to do this is with badges. These are all set up, and each province is only visible to people with the corresponding province badge but I need to find a way to enable members to choose their own badges. This needs to happen on signup but they also need to be able to change their choices later. A further idea that this supports is the opportunity for people to join parts of the website/forums depending on their interests (hiking, cycling, boardgames, sports, nationalities, LGBTIQA+...). So I started looking at the membership join request form, but this will have to be for another day.

Summary so far

What I achieved this weekend:

• Impressum (temporary)

• Privacy policy (temporary)

What is working well

• The Team page. I am particularly happy that I have managed to link the Team database to a Facebook groups database to list the groups that each team member moderates

Still on the "work in progress" list

• The FAQ section: where should it be? A dynamic page; a section of the forum; a blog?

• The site homepage. Needs to be clean and simple. At the moment it is simply what I there together in an hour on my first evening of creating the site

• The logo. Very grateful to Gabriele for helping me with this. (Should the name be "English Speakers" or "English Speakers in Austria"? Whilst the former is quicker to say and what people generally call the group, the latter "does what it says on the tin" much more.)

On the "to do" list

• The signup page - integrating badges for chosen provinces; collecting members' birth year data (which seems potentially useful); possibly collecting country of origin data for potential country of origin forums