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Are You Using These Features of BillWhittle.com?

Our new site has been up for about a year, and it’s time to renew the software for several features, but we want to get feedback on whether you find them valuable.

These extensions to our core Membership software do cost us, and because we’re conservatives, we want to make sure we’re not throwing money around for no reason.

Here are the features currently up for renewal and what they do. Let me know in the comments below whether you’re using them, how often, and how important they are to your Membership experience. Thank you. 

Private Messaging

  • Allows users to send private messages to other users
  • Adds a message button to user profiles which lets users send a private message to that user
  • Adds a messages tab to each user profile so users can view all conversations and read/send private messages from profile

Followers

  • Adds a follow/unfollow button to user profiles
  • Displays followers/following stats on their profile
  • Adds a follow/unfollow button to profile cards on member directories
  • Shows follower/following stats on profile card on member directories
  • Allow users to restrict their profile to their followers only
  • Allow users to restrict their profile to only people they follow
  • Users receive an email notification when someone follows them
  • Users can turn off receiving email notifications from their account page

Real-Time Notifications 

  • Notify user when user role is changed.
  • Notify user when someone comments on their post
  • Notify user when someone replies to one of their comments
  • Notify user when another member views their profile
  • Notify user when guests views their profile

11 replies on “Are You Using These Features of BillWhittle.com?”

Private messaging and notifications when someone’s commented on a post or replied to a comment. I’ve tried using the “follow” feature, but can’t figure out how to get it to tell me when someone’s posted–it seems to only track when they comment on other people’s posts, which isn’t really helpful.

Since I’m pretty anti-social, and don’t post very often, the only feature I’ve used is the notification bell in the bottom-left corner (and didn’t realize what it was at first). Hope this helps.

Forums might have worked if we could have had one of the long-standing bulletin board forums work on WordPress. See the first 3 mentioned HERE. phpBB is over 20 years old; Simple Machines Forum has been around since 2003, and myBB is also over 10 years old. These 3 are ubiquitous as the most reliable – and usable – forums out there. They obey almost exactly the same rules of threading, posting, replying, linking, and anything else forums can do, not least because forum software is amongst the oldest and most tried, trusted, and evolved that works online. New attempts to program forums, or discussion threads often fail miserably because they don’t follow these models. (See the horrible but widely used Disqus for example. Instapundit still uses it for their comments threads, and people complain about it all the time.) However, I doubt the awful WordPress affords the possibility of using these standard forums, and instead the only choice is something like that which already failed to gain enough member interest here. Shame. I think forums would be great if they worked like the standards.

Notifications are clunky. Whenever I have messaged back and forth with members I’d get an email every single time I got a message, which was fine if it was their initial one, but just annoying when we were chatting back and forth with dozens of messages in a short space of time. It’s obviously not “smart” notifications.

Short answer: No to all.

Longer answer: I would really hate to lose private messaging. Followers and Notifications never acted like I expected them to, and I don’t find them useful. For notifications, I do like and use the small bell on the lower left. The one on the lower right I don’t use.

I’ll be frank and say that I was really looking forward to having a forum to take user-to-user interaction to the next level. However, when we got a forum, it was first confusing, and then seemed redundant. I suppose that’s why you disabled or removed it. I’m not sure why the forums didn’t kick things up a notch except that (here speaketh the Luddite:) everyone does everything on their dang phones these days, which isn’t conducive to paragraph-level written interactions (mutter, mutter).

I always forget about the notification bell on the bottom right, Brave blocks it so I never see it.

I think the forums spread commenters too thin. There aren’t a lot of active commenters and they mostly stick to commenting on Bill & assoc. videos. Then, there were also problems with the forum plugin not reliably telling you that there were new posts or comments.

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