Inside inspi.re
Official blog by the makers of inspi.re. Feature announcements and more.

Jan
20

(En français plus bas)

Hi everybody,

I, new captain of the inspi.re ship, am posting my first message to this blog. I’m intimidated. Whoo, it’s like to see Lucy Liu in person.

So here are the news :

GET PREPARED…

THE SNAKE IS MOULTING

You’re right. Huge changes are coming. When I say coming, understand it as a hollywood way : 3-6 months.

And besides the new kick-ass new features, I’m requesting your ideas. Important note : I’m not saying I will implement ALL of your ideas, I can’t even guaranty that I will implement even one of them, but if there are interesting thoughts, I will think about them in the new site.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

THE WISHLIST IS NOW OPENED

Have fun,

Gux


Version française. Youhou.

Bonjour à tous,

Nouvelle année, nouvelle santé.

Le commandement du site change de tête. Pour vous c’est rien, mais pour moi (le nouveau) c’est intimidant.
Allez, pour bien commencer les choses, voici les news :

LE SERPENT PREPARE SA MUE

JE REPETE !

LE SERPENT PREPARE SA MUE

Vous avez raison. Des gros changements sont à venir. Quand je dis à venir, entendez-le à la sauce hollywoodienne : 3 à 6 mois. En plus des nouvelles fonctionnalités qui défoncent, j’aimerais recueillir vos idées. Je ne dis pas que  je vais toutes les implémenter, à vrai dire je ne peux même pas garantir que je vais en implémenter ne serait-ce qu’une, mais s’il y en a qui m’intéressent et que je trouve vraiment bonnes, elles seront sûrement présentes dans la prochaine version du site.

ALORS A VOS CLAVIERS

LA LISTE DE SOUHAITS EST OUVERTE

Amusez-vous bien,

Gux

Dec
04

We’ve just restored Paypal as the payment processor for premium membership. If you’ve been waiting on purchasing your premium membership account because we had to switch to the less-than-ideal moneybookers for a couple of weeks, everything is back to normal now.

We’ve received a bank transfer from someone called  Paavo Hauru for a 6 month premium membership. The transfer information didn’t contain any other information, and we can’t find any user on inspi.re with that name. If you are that person or if you know who it is, please get in touch with us (support@inspi.re) ASAP.

Nous venons tout juste de rétablier Paypal comme notre plateforme de paiement pour les comptes premium. Si vous avez attendu pour acheter votre compte car nous avions dû passer temporairement à moneybookers pour 2 semaines, tout est maintenant redevenu normal.

Nous avons reçu un virement bancaire provenant de quelqu’un s’appelant Paavo Hauru pour 6 mois de compte premium. Le virement ne contenait aucune autre information et nous n’arrivons pas à trouver le ou la membre d’inspi.re dont c’est le nom. Si vous êtes cette personne ou si vous savez de qui il s’agit, merci de nous contacter (support@inspi.re) le plus rapidement possible.

Nov
23

(En français plus bas)

Gordon Scott has stepped in to propose a replacement for the defunct general discussion board, which didn’t transition to the new announcements paradigm. He has created a group on Facebook where inspi.re members who used to be active on the general discussion board can keep the conversations going: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=app_2373072738&gid=183656470717

This new forum is Gordon’s initiative and property. Inspi.re doesn’t have any official relationship with that forum, but we do encourage members who miss the general discussion board to use it.

Speaking of Facebook, remember that you can become a fan of our official page, which helps spread the word about the website to your friends in one click.

Gordon Scott nous a contacté pour proposer un remplacement au forum de dicussion général d’inspi.re, qui n’a pas transitioné vers le nouveau système d’annonces. Il a créé un groupe sur Facebook où les membres d’inspi.re qui étaient actifs sur le forum de discussion général peuvent continuer leurs conversations: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=app_2373072738&gid=183656470717

Ce nouveau forum est l’initiative et la propriété de Gordon. Inspi.re n’a pas de relation officielle avec ce forum, mais nous encourageons les membres à qui le forum de discussion général manque de l’utiliser.

En parlant de Facebook, nous vous rappelons que vous pouvez devenir fan de notre page officielle, ce qui permet de faire passer le mot à propos du site à vos amis en un clic.

Nov
15

En français plus bas.

Today we’re releasing an overhaul of the way communities can communicate internally. The discussion boards were very much underused across the whole website and there was a long-lasting demand for a way to send a message to all members of a community directly.

Which is why the discussion boards have been heavily transformed into a new concept we call Announcements. Announcements can be created by community administrators or moderators. We’ve decided to include both roles because we know that in some communities moderators are running the show more than the administrator does.

The key part of this new feature is that when an announcement is posted, all members of the community receive an alert telling them about it. For administrators and moderators it’s the perfect way to announce a promotion, a change of rules or simply to keep all your members excited about what’s going on in your community. It’s a powerful internal communication tool that we hope should engage community members more than the discussion board used to.

Since we don’t want community members to be flooded with announcements from community officials, no more than one per community can be made over a 24-hour period.

Since the discussion boards were already used as announcements by some administrators and moderators, we’ve simply kept all the old discussion threads and they’re displayed as if they were previous announcements.

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Nous lançons aujourd’hui une nouvelle façon de communiquer en interne dans les communautés. Les forums de discussion étaient sous-utilisés sur l’ensemble du site et nous avions égalements des demandes multiples de membres qui souhaitaient pouvoir envoyer des messages directement à tous les membres d’une communauté.

C’est pourquoi nous avons effectué de lourdes transformations sur les forums de discussion pour créer un nouveau concept que nous appelons les Annonces. Les annonces sont créées par les administrateurs et les modérateurs des communautés. Nous avons décidé d’inclure ces deux rôles car nous savons que dans certaines communautés ce sont les modérateurs qui anîment plus que l’administrateur(trice).

La partie clef de cette nouvelle fonction est que lorsque qu’une annonce est envoyée, tous les membres de la communauté reçoivent une alerte pour les prévenir. Pour les administrateurs et les modérateurs, c’est le meilleur moyen d’annoncer une promotion, un changement de règles ou simplement pour continuer à captiver l’attention des membres de la communauté d’une façon plus efficace que les forums de discussion le permettaient.

Puisque nous voulons éviter que les membres des communautés soient submergés d’annonces provenant des gestionnaires de communautés, nous avons décidé qu’il ne peut pas y avoir plus d’une annonce toutes les 24 heures par communauté.

Étant donné que les forums de discussion étaient souvent déjà utilisés par certains administrateurs et modérateurs pour faire des annonces, nous avons simplement conservé les anciens sujets de discussions qui sont maintenant affichés comme si ils étaient d’anciennes annonces.

Nov
08

(En français plus bas)

The ability to reply to all commentators by default has created an increase of alerts that made it difficult for people who leave a lot of comments to read their alerts. So we’ve decided to make this feature more “quiet” by creating a feed of comments instead of sending alerts. The way it works is that ticking the box to follow comments on an entry now makes you subscribed to an entry’s comments. You won’t receive any alerts, but you will be able to follow in one place all new comments happening on all entries you’re interested in. Instead of having to go to every single entry you like, this will allow you to quickly read all the new comments in a less overwhelming way.

As for comments on your own entries, these will still show up in your alerts.

You’ll find the comment feed under “comments” in the new “messaging” menu, which also includes the existing private messaging.

The ability to translate comments and mark them as insightful directly in the comment feed will be available soon.

La possibilité de répondre à tous ceux qui ont laissé des commentaires par défaut a créé une augmentation du nombre d’alertes qui en rendait la lecture difficile aux personnes qui laissent beaucoup de commentaires. Nous avons donc décidé de rendre cette fonctionnalité “plus calme” en créant un flux de commentaires plutôt que d’envoyer des alertes. Celà fonctionne en cochant une case pour suivre les commentaires sur une participation, ce qui vous fait souscrire aux commentaires de celle-ci. Vous ne recevrez pas d’alertes pour les commentaires laissés par d’autres, mais vous pourrez suivre sur une seule page tous les commentaires qui sont laissés sur les participations qui vous intéressent. Au lieu de devoir aller sur chaque participation, vous pourrez maintenant lire rapidement les nouveaux commentaires d’une façon moins fastidieuse.

En ce qui concerne les commentaires laissés sur vos propres participations, ceux-cis génèrent toujours des alertes.

Vous trouverez le nouveau flux de commentaires sur la page “commentaires” du nouveau menu “messagerie”, qui contient également la messagerie privée.

La possibilité de traduire les commentaires et de les marquer comme pertinents directement dans le nouveau flux sera bientôt disponible.

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Oct
31

4aec4ae1b49a0-1256999650

(Version française plus bas)

Tonight at midnight GMT will be the last random draw we do for the monthly 100 € cash prize. We’re excited to announce that a brand new special community has been created to replace it, for which everyone on inspi.re is automatically a member! It’s going to be very competitive, since there are over 10,000 members.

The Monthly Prize community is language and region-agnostic. All languages are welcome and all competition themes will be translated (since the translation is made by volunteers, there can be a little delay). All themes will be chosen so that it doesn’t make it more difficult to create an artwork for it depending on where you live.

For each competition in the Monthly Prize Community – quite logically – prizes will be given to artworks that reach the top 3 spots. 100 € to be shared among artworks that rank first, 6 months premium membership shared between artworks that rank second and 2 months premium membership shared between artworks that rank third.

The first competition, whose theme is Freedom, is open for entries.

———–

Ce soir à minuit GMT notre dernier tirage au sort pour le prix mensuel de 100€ aura lieu. Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer qu’une nouvelle communauté spéciale à été créée pour le remplacer, communauté dont tous les utilisateurs d’inspi.re sont automatiquement membres! Les choses vont être très compétitives, car il y a plus de 10,000 personnes.

La communauté du Prix Mensuel est indépendante de langue ou de lieu. Toutes les langues y sont les bienvenues et les thèmes de compétition seront traduits (la traduction étant faite par des volontaires, il peut y avoir un petit délai). Tous les thèmes choisis le sont de telle façon que participer ne soit pas plus ou moins difficile en fonction de l’endroit où vous vivez.

Pour chaque compétition dans la communauté du Prix Mensuel – très logiquement – des prix sont donnés aux œuvres qui atteignent les 3 meilleures places. 100 € à partager entre les œuvres classées premières, 6 mois de compte premium à partager pour les œuvres classées secondes et 2 mois de compte premium pour les œuvres classées troisièmes.

La première compétition, ayant pour thème Liberté, vient de démarrer.

Oct
28

We’ve updated yesterday’s new feature with a way to opt in and out of receiving alerts when others comment on a given entry. You’ll find the following checkbox above the comments section of each entry:

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It will be off by default and turns on automatically if you post a comment on that entry. Since it’s available on all entries, you can even decide to receive the comment alerts on entries you haven’t commented on.

If you comment on an entry and don’t want to receive alerts for new comments posted on it, just remember to tick the box off once your comment is posted. That option can be turned on and off at any time. For example if a given entry is generating too many alerts after you’ve “subscribed” to its new comments alerts, you can visit the entry’s page and turn the option off.

Oct
27

We’ve just rolled out a considerable change in the alerts sent when commenting on artworks.

Replying to comments is a thing of the past:

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becomes

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And that’s because from now on, for every new comment posted on an entry, the author and everyone who has commented on that entry previously will receive an alert. This solves the problem of authors who want to reply to everyone, which is in fact the new default. It should also keep people engaged in the discussion that can happen about a particular entry without having the memorize which entries they’ve commented on.

Sep
26

We’re following up on Mariano and other members’ concerns about the inactive communities problem by acting today and changing the rules in this respect on the website.

It’s not the first time we receive this request to intervene and close inactive communities. We always refused up until now because the people who ask us to do it don’t realize how upset the administrators whose communities will be closed are going to be, and don’t have to answer the angry emails that might generate. It’s not our philosophy to directly intervene and tell members what to do because we don’t want to turn into the “right way of using the website” police. However, despite increasing greatly the cost of creating communities, the quantity of communities keeps growing and growing faster than the global active member count does. As a result, the experience is diluted for everyone and only a handful of communities receive healthy activity. Sadly, that’s why we have to intervene.

Having many inactive communities is damaging to the experience on the website and part of the problem is that an administrator who is in charge of only one inactive community doesn’t feel responsible for the situation. Individually administrating an inactive community is not a cause of problems, it’s the fact that many people let their communities go inactive that results in the activity dilution crisis we’re seeing. Creating a community and then just waiting for people to magically flock to it isn’t the way to go, yet it seems to be the belief of many people who create one.

The new safeguards we’re putting in place today will act as a natural selection of communities. It’s a new challenge for community creators, now just opening one won’t be enough, taking care of it and making sure that enough people use it will be the responsibility that comes with it.

How does the new safeguard against inactive communities work?

If a community is under a particular threshold of active members count (see below), it will be required for the administrator to either merge the community with another active one or to spend 2000 points in order to “save” the community for another month. If none of those is done by the administrator, a month after the first warning is issued the community is automatically deleted. Having to pay 2000 points should be a wake-up call which tells the administrator that something should be done about the under-activity of the community. In the situation where the administrator manages to turn things around and find enough active members, it will be the only time the 2000 points have to be spent to save the community. If not, then maybe receiving that warning (and having to spend points) more than once is a sign that the concept of the community was just not good enough to survive on its own.

The thresholds for a community to be considered inactive are:

  • no threshold if the community is administrated by a premium member
  • no threshold if the community is less than a month old
  • 15 active members minimum if the community is between one and two months old
  • 30 active members minimum if the community is between two and three months old
  • 50 active members minimum if the community is more than three months old

Now, like any limit or cost we put there are going to be people arguing that it’s too high and others who believe it’s not high enough. We chose the limit of 50 active members because by looking at what’s happening currently, the great majority of communities with less than 50 active members were seeing 5 or less entries per competition. That’s doesn’t appear as a healthy amount of entries to us. Then we decided to ramp up that limit according to the community’s age, since it’s obvious that a community can’t instantly have active members. Surely, if most administrators don’t spend the points there are going to be many communities disappearing, but since there’s always the option to merge with an existing one, there doesn’t need to be any past competitions or entries lost in the process.

The definition of “active member” in the context of a community is someone who has voted, commented or entered a competition at least once in the last 30 days. The active member count for communities is recalculated every Sunday and that’s when the alerts regarding inactivity will be issued. You can see the active members count for your communities on the “Your communities” page.

Sep
15

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As everyone who connected to the website in the last hour would have noticed, we’ve just released a new version of the main website menu. There is no longer a bottom menu, everything is at the top and organized in different categories.

It was a necessity for two reasons. First, the learning curve is still too high for people to navigate the website when they register an account. The old menu seemed like it played a good part in that issue. Secondly, we were seriously running out of screen real estate when it came to adding new things. Some languages have very long translations and there simply was no space left for any new major feature/section to be added.

It’s going to take time getting used to, but you’ll see that the new menu makes more sense than the old. Things have been grouped together and ordered by chronological logic for competitions.

We hope that the logical grouping and the fact that it’s no longer needed to scroll down to access half of the menus will outweigh having to click twice instead of once to access some menus. For the most part the pages are the same or have simply been split into separate ones, so if you had bookmarks that you used as shortcuts to specific areas, they should still work.

It’s quite a major change, so if you notice anything not working as it should, please contact us via the bug reporting page.